Billerud Appoints New President for North America

Three Domtar facilities were among a group of nearly 150 South Carolina-based companies recognized for outstanding workplace safety at the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce’s annual safety awards ceremony. The Marlboro Mill, Tatum Converting Center and Rock Hill Converting Center received the award based on their lost workday case rate during the calendar year. “When you talk to businesses throughout the state, one of the biggest issues you hear about is the importance of keeping workplaces and employees safe,” says South Carolina Chamber Interim CEO Swati Patel. “We are proud to recognize the companies on this list for taking steps in 2020 to make safety a top priority.” While 2020 brought many challenges to our operations, we established new processes and guidelines to ensure we were doing everything we could to protect employees’ health and safety. Throughout the year, we adapted our work to keep employees and our communities safe.

The book you ordered online has arrived and now you want to recycle the cardboard box. You take it to local recycling point, but who is actually responsible for organising the recycling facilities and operations? Many people assume that the local municipals are responsible, but in most cases it is actually the company which produced the product. This is called producer responsibility. “It is common to see producer responsibility for tyres, batteries, consumer electronics and packages,” says Teemu Virtanen, Senior Advisor at Pirkanmaa ELY-Centre. “The companies that produce or import the items are responsible for financing and organising waste management. In practice, companies can’t do it alone, so they use producer organisations.” UPM is committed to supporting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and has identified the goals and respective targets where it can have the biggest positive impact through its operations, products, and solutions, or where it aims to minimise any negative impact. The company considers producer responsibility to be part of the SDG 12, with Responsible consumption and production, that being one of the six chosen UPM´s focus goals. The practicalities of producer responsibility can vary from country to country, so UPM is active in each local system. For example, in Finland UPM is a customer of the Finnish Packaging Recycling organisation RINKI.

The decrease in consumption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has triggered strong pressure on prices. In combination with cost increases in paper production and transport this has led to unsustainable profitability levels, especially felt in our overseas markets. Sappi has therefore been forced to review its pricing per market and product segment, adjusting them accordingly. The increases will be applied as of shipments from January 2021 at the latest and will vary between 5 and 8%.