The inaugural Sustainable Companies 2018 survey compared 109 Stockholm Stock Exchange-listed companies in the categories of Capital Goods, Consumer Goods and Materials.
Conducted by three leading Swedish organizations – Lund University’s School of Economics, financial newspaper Dagens Industri (Today’s Industry) and Aktuell Hållbarhet (Current Sustainability) magazine, the survey evaluated the efficiency of companies’ work advancing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and other efforts with climate, human rights, anti-corruption and employee issues.
Among the 57 engineering, construction, property and similar companies that formed the Capital Goods category, Skanska is honored to have achieved the highest score, achieving 59 out of 88 possible points. An aim of the survey is push companies to do even more with sustainability.
Right for society and for business
"We take responsibility. We believe this is right for society but we can also see that there are business opportunities in it," Skanska CEO Anders Danielsson says about sustainability in an accompanying article in Dagens Industri.
Sustainability is integrated into Skanska’s values and our Profit with Purpose Business Plan. Through this, we strive to leverage our core business activities in Construction and Residential and Commercial Development to achieve our purpose of building for a better society.
For example, within the environmental aspect of sustainability, Green projects, as defined by the Skanska Color Palette™, accounted for 43.4 percent of construction revenue in 2017, up from 38.6 percent in 2016.
"We take responsibility. We believe this is right for society but we can also see that there are business opportunities in it," Skanska CEO Anders Danielsson says about sustainability. Shown is Slussen, a major transportation, water protection and place-making project in central Stockholm.
Influencing the industry
We are using our scale to positively influence the industry. In 2018, Skanska in Sweden led the development of a fossil-free road map for the Swedish construction and civil engineering sector to guide the industry to achieving climate neutrality by 2045 while improving competitiveness.
This road map has been endorsed by some 70 organizations, spanning the entire value chain.
Social sustainability opportunities
In the article, Anders Danielsson also speaks of Skanska’s work with social sustainability, such as providing internships to those outside of the labor market to help them achieve permanent employment.
"We have 40 projects in Sweden where we committed ourselves to work with social responsibility, but we have around 2,000 projects in total in Sweden. There is an untapped potential,” he says.
Serving customers and society
Anders Danielsson sees Skanska’s financial goals as being aligned with helping advance a sustainable society through the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
"We do not see a contradiction but rather that sustainability is an important part of being competitive. The goal of sustainable cities and communities is close to us, both with social focus and environmental focus."
Within the survey’s other categories, appliance manufacturer Electrolux was tops within Consumer Goods, while forest products manufacturer Stora Enso led the Materials ranking.