Achieving EcoVadis Gold Certificate

It’s easy to claim that a company is sustainable but much harder to prove, especially when the operations are spread across geography and various levels of industry standards are involved. Third-party evaluations are an excellent way to get an outside perspective.  EcoVadis – the world’s largest and most trusted provider of business sustainability ratings, has been helping companies benchmark their sustainability performance and drive improvements since 2007.  

We are thrilled to be awarded the gold rating for our continued sustainability efforts, which puts us among the top 5% of the more than 100,000 evaluated companies and the top 2% in our industry. A very prominent score for the environment theme – 90/100 is especially inspiring for future development.  

A holistic view of sustainability  

“Sustainability is a key value driver for our expanding global business. In the past year, we took decisive action to implement our sustainability strategy. Our top priority was building an integrated operative model to prove and substantially monitor a holistic set of sustainability key performance indicators. It is a matter of immense pride for our entire organisation that our ambitions and actions have been recognised and validated with a gold EcoVadis rating,” shares Inari Laveri, Manager, Quality and Compliance at Lindström Group. 

The EcoVadis methodology framework assesses businesses on their actions concerning four themes – ethics, environment, labour and human rights and sustainable procurement. Some of the concrete actions that contributed to our improved ratings were -  

• becoming a signatory member of the UN Global Compact Initiative 
• widening the scope of the Group’s management system certifications by adding ISO45001 last year to our existing set of certificates – ISO 9001, ISO 14001 & EN14065 
• improving documentation related to Ethics, Labor & Human rights 

Kirsi Wilenius-Isotalo, Senior key account manager, says, “Being awarded a Gold Certificate by EcoVadis helps immensely with procurement function and makes supplier relationship management easy for our customers and us. It helps us create a common understanding of the most critical aspects of sustainability with our customers and suppliers, eliminating the complexities of geography or industry-specific standards.” 

Kirsi further elaborates that the journey to strive for an EcoVadis rating started with a request by one of our valued customers. EcoVadis simplifies the vetting process when choosing a partner and also evaluating existing partners on sustainability efforts. It eliminates resource intensive, company specific processes and questionnaires and instantly builds a common ground with regards to sustainability.  

Orion Corporation has been our valued customer for the past twenty-two years. Jussi Lindholm, Sourcing Manager at Orion shares, “we have a vast network of suppliers in over 50 countries. Our supplier base supplies us with packaging and raw materials like active pharmaceutical ingredients and products. In addition, we rely on outside partners to supply services and materials to support our core businesses (indirect procurement). Orion’s own activities cover only part of the value chain of our products, and we recognise the importance of ensuring and developing sustainable supply chain management. It is also important to us that our suppliers show continued effort to improve their performance in the generally recognised areas of corporate responsibility. We are impressed by Lindström’s engagement and continuous improvement activities towards sustainable operations.” 

Inari adds, ”EcoVadis rating supports our sustainability ambition and overarching strategy, and we aim for the highest levels. The programme helps us systematically develop our practices and proactively address responsible sourcing, equal opportunities and well-being in the workplace, and positive contributions to our local communities and the environment. We plan to especially focus on labour & human rights reporting in the future.”