Sustainability, customers and employees

Sustainability shift

The mining and infrastructure industries are heavy consumers of energy and a growing part of our offering is electrified and designed to make their technologies and processes more energy efficient. This will contribute to the industry’s sustainability targets while reducing operational costs for customers. Our solutions also reduce the water consumption in the mining comminution process. Our Reborn™ concept addresses circularity targets by reducing material usage, waste generation and total cost of ownership. We exchange the customer’s worn-out Sandvik stationary cone crusher for a new one, reutilizing the crusher’s auxiliaries and infrastructure. To date, more than 130 Reborn solutions have been sold to mining and construction customers globally. We also use genuine OEM parts to restore customers’ old equipment, such as crushers, to their original condition – or even improve them with the latest upgrades.

Our Svedala, Sweden plant, where we produce premium parts for Sandvik crushers, is one of the world’s most sustainable manganese foundries. This is due to an innovative process to produce manganese wear parts that uses more than 90 percent recycled steel as raw material and no chemical binders in the sand mold. Substantially reducing the use of virgin material, along with internal process improvements, has reduced our CO₂ emissions by over 16,000 tons per year. The team behind this initiative was awarded with The Sandvik Sustainability Award in Memory of Sigrid Göransson 2021.

In 2021, we introduced the first-ever certified Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) in the industry for manganese crusher wear parts.

Customer’s first choice

Our focus is on developing high-performing solutions that bring value to our customers by increasing their productivity, safety and sustainability, while also reducing costs. One example of this is the new Sandvik® QI353 mobile impact crusher, which has been designed and tested to deliver increased productivity and more uptime, whilst reducing fuel and energy consumption. Our energy-efficient products and solutions for crushing, screening, feeding, breaking, demolition and recycling applications, together with larger data sets will help customers meet sustainability requirements today and into the future. Australian Enviro Sand, for example, collects glass that was previously sent to landfill. Supported by our VSI crusher, the glass is now crushed and reused as construction material.

Agile through cycle

Collaboration between the back and front ends of the organization, continuous discussions with customers and prioritizing inventories according to need, kept us agile throughout another challenging year. We shifted supplies as needed and maintained multiple suppliers in different countries. This has helped us stay resilient despite the delivery and supply challenges that affected the world at large in 2021. We will continue to maintain several supply chains in different parts of the world to support flexibility and reliability of supply.

We have also been working steadily to remain agile from a cost perspective by having a flexible workforce at our manufacturing sites and continuously reviewing our footprint. The 2020 cost-cutting programs resulted in annualized run-rate savings of SEK 25 million.

Employer of choice

Our traditional industry is undergoing rapid transformation, especially due to automation and digitalization. To stay ahead of the curve, we are recruiting people with digital skills within, for example, user experience design and software engineering. Along with recruiting, we continue to train and develop our existing workforce and maintain the core skills and expertise that make us a strong industrial company. During the year we invested in leadership training with a focus on the skills necessary to manage an organization with such a diverse group of people and expertise.

To encourage gender diversity among leaders we not only aim to hire more female women, but also develop existing talent within our organization. Our diversity efforts go hand in hand with inclusion and creating equal opportunities. The business area has launched a two-way mentorship program and “lunch and learn” talks with external speakers that focus on ways to improve diversity and inclusion.