UPM’s Product Stewardship standard ensures a proven sustainability value proposition

Päivi Vistala-Palonen

Manager, Sustainability Communications, UPM

Sustainable and transparent product management is essential for building trust and delivering value to our customers. Our global Product Stewardship standard helps us advance our sustainability targets and guides our daily actions.

The standard ensures that every product we offer meets the highest safety, sustainability, and compliance expectations. It also enables us to make proven, reliable, and transparent product claims to support our sales, as well as the communications, marketing, and reporting of our customers.

As Kaisa Herranen, head of Product Stewardship at UPM summarizes:

“Product stewardship enables business excellence, manages our reputation, and safeguards our brand promise: We renew the everyday.”

Key elements of the standard highlight transparency

The standard strengthens our internal guidance and aligns with global regulatory developments. Key elements include:

Product safety and compliance: Risk assessments, mitigation strategies, and clear documentation for safe use and handling.
Incident reporting: Structured reporting of possible compliance deviations and near misses, e.g., in safety.
Sustainable product design: Integrating sustainability principles and marketing into product development, supporting UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Credible sustainability claims: All claims are evidence-based, accurate, and compliant.

UPM Adhesive Materials’ Carbon Action label portfolio

Our sustainable product design concept is tested and proven to work

Even though the global UPM Product Stewardship standard was launched in January of this year, high product management standards are nothing new at UPM. Our sustainable product design concept, which is now part of the standard, was developed several years ago.

“The concept ensures that products are developed with full life cycle impacts in mind, from raw materials to disposal and potential reuse. As part of this concept, we also evaluate our products’ relevance to UN Sustainable Development Goals,” Kaisa explains.

Our businesses have been testing the concept in various product development projects. Products such as UPM Adhesive Materials’ Carbon Action label portfolio and UPM Specialty Papers’ barrier paper development are great examples of putting the concept into practice.

UPM Specialty Papers’ barrier paper development

Robust governance model supports compliance

UPM is a global material solutions company operating across diverse businesses with varying product-specific requirements. As a result, the regulatory landscape varies significantly, whether it’s global packaging regulations or national Circular Economy Acts.

Managing this complex and evolving regulatory environment is a major task. Cross-functional collaboration between our business units ensures consistency. Our internal standard brings together experts from the legal, product development, and sustainability teams to align efforts and share insights.

Strong collaboration also directly supports how we market our products, materials, and solutions. In addition to our full integration with ISO standards, such as ISO 9001 and ISO 22000, which guarantee high-quality manufacturing and product consistency, our customers benefit from reliable, evidence-based sustainability data. This helps them confidently meet their own sustainability targets and reporting requirements.

Collaboration and consistency across UPM

“Internal training and communication are key to implementing the standard. Proper training improves customer support and technical service. This is essential for business continuity and future success,” Kaisa concludes.

Interested in learning more?

Explore our public Product Stewardship standard on our website. It’s available in six languages and provides a summary of our internal standard.

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