Sustainability and responsible business

Our business is based on using renewable forest materials to create durable products while growing new forests where forests have been harvested as a way of contributing to increasing and prolonging carbon sequestration.

Awareness of our own business activities is more important than ever now that we can see climate challenges beginning to take hold. It is important for us to work sustainably. Beyond our financial goals, we need to be aware of our impact on society and the environment.

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

The UN’s Agenda-2030 initiative has set 17 sustainability goals for sustainable development. In our work to develop a sustainability strategy, we have chosen to prioritise and work with the following 8 UN Sustainable Development Goals:

Carbon sequestration

Growing forests absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via photosynthesis. In sustainable forestry, forests are harvested as raw materials and then new trees planted to provide the basis for additional carbon binding. The wood in our products binds significant amounts of carbon. For this reason, we believe that to use these raw materials responsibly, we have to create products that last a long time. Using wood fibre to create durable products is an important contribution to increasing carbon sequestration in forests and wood-based products. Carbon sequestration during production with a capacity of up to 300,000 m3 will result in the sequestration of 246,000 tonnes CO2eq.

Certified wood

We use large quantities of wood to produce our panels. We procure this as by-products from sawmills. We purchase from sustainable sources and most of this is certified in accordance with PEFC. PEFC Traceability Certification provides independent third-party verification that the wood is from sustainable forests. Each stage of manufacturing and distribution must carry traceability certification. If any stage is not certified, the traceability chain is broken and the product cannot be sold as PEFC certified.

Future opportunities – returned wood – reusing wood waste

The Norwegian forest and timber industry provides important job opportunities in the local districts. We also make construction products that sequester significant amounts of carbon and keep that carbon sequestered for the entire service life of the building.

Approximately 1 million tonnes of timber from demolitions is sent to Norwegian landfills every year. This is equivalent to about 2 million m³ of wood, which in turn is equivalent to 15% of Norwegian trees harvested. This is a resource that can be recycled into new construction products. We have national targets for material recycling that can only be met by setting up new circular systems in Norway that also include wood. It will take a significant amount of processing to clean timber from demolitions and turn it into new, clean, industrial wood chips. Over the past several years, Forestia has been working on a project where, by investing in new cleaning technologies, we can use wood from demolitions as an input for chipboard production. This will, however, require a major investment of approximately MNOK 250.

As previously described, at Forestia we have developed a project to clean up timber from demolition projects and turn it into industrial-quality wood chips, to make new products from the waste wood. As the project relies on a certain amount of public funding to make it profitable, it is particularly pleasing to see that we have finally seen some success from the apparatus for our project of making wood circular! For further information about Forestia’s sustainability work, please see our sustainability report.