Lifelong product stewardship

We focus on offering recyclable products that are made from renewable and/or recyclable raw materials. This  creates a solid basis for responsible product stewardship. Our products are well suited for recycling thanks to their main raw material – renewable wood. As part of our sustainable product design approach, we actively look for innovative ways to recycle our products at the end of their life. 

Our products help to mitigate climate change by replacing fossil-based products with bio-based renewable alternatives. The products store carbon for the entire duration of their lifecycle, especially when recycled multiple times. We actively develop solutions based on the circular economy model. Our target is also to provide solutions that improve our customers’ business processes and performance — creating mutual benefit and societal value. Our innovative and sustainable pharmaceutical and healthcare labelling solutions are a good example of our direct societal value creation. Many of our products are made from our side streams and residues or from materials recovered after product use, thus supporting circular bioeconomy.

UPM Product Stewardship Standard guides our actions 

We have a dedicated UPM Product Stewardship Standard. It governs our actions across the entire company and ensures the safety and sustainability of our products. The Standard assigns responsibilities for implementation and compliance to various UPM businesses and functions.

Below you can find a summary of the official internal Product Stewardship Standard applied across the company.

Tools to communicate about sustainable products 

In 2020, we developed the way we communicate our product safety requirements to our pulp and  paper chemical and raw material suppliers as well as to our customers. As a result of collaborating with a number of paper and chemical companies to increase transparency in the supply chain and to accelerate the exchange of information, a new “Pulp & Paper Harmonized Questionnaire” was introduced. The questionnaire enables us to pre-assess the chemicals used in the products and materials and, thus, to ensure the compliance of our products with legal requirements and additional commitments, such as ecolabel criteria.

We offer product declarations and environmental data for all our products, thus providing our customers with easy access to information they might need related to the sustainability of our products and supply chain. Our products have been granted several ecolabels, including the EU Ecolabel and The German Blue Angel. UPM’s production sites, as well as wood-sourcing and forestry operations, have a verified environmental management system in place, and all mills using wood raw material apply PEFC (PEFC/02-44-41) and/or FSC™ (FSC N003385) -certified chain-of-custody systems, or both.