Sustainability
Healthcare professionals need gloves that enable their hands to perform at their best. Mölnlycke works with clinical teams to create gloves that offer the right fit and optimised comfort, while ensuring protection and safety for surgical staff and their patients. Hand performance is critical for nurses and surgeons to perform and excel in their work. The performance of caregivers´ hands depends on a number of various distinct needs – protection, good fit, high tactility grip and hand health. This is why our mission is to deliver innovative and sustainable solutions to enable hands to perform at their best, because Hands Deserve BetterTM.
Sustainability is a strategic priority at Mölnlycke and WeCare is our Sustainability roadmap for 2030. It means creating shared value for all our stakeholders. It is a driver for growth, innovation and productivity and an essential part of our employee value proposition.
Our three focus areas are:
- Green mindset
- Responsible relationships
- Ethical business
Green mindset
We transform our business to decouple it from resource constraints. We constantly innovate with the aim to offer our customers the most sustainable solutions1 while not compromising on safety and quality of our products.
We only source natural rubber latex and synthetic latex from ISO 14001 certified suppliers. Moreover, in line with the circular economy principles, raw materials, such as natural and synthetic latex, are recovered and collected at the end of production for reuse in new production processes, contributing to a 97% waste diverted from landfill across all sites
Our inner wrap, dispenser boxes, and shipping boxes of Biogel® surgical gloves are all recyclable. Biogel® Indicator® System packs reduce customers’ plastic packaging waste by 50%, compared to Biogel® single gloving packs. We have also replaced solvent-based ink with a water-based alternative for the printing on our packaging.
Mölnlycke has invested in a new surgical gloves factory in Kulim, Malaysia, to meet future demand on supply and sustainability. Powered by 100% renewable electricity, the new facility is designed with a focus on sustainable production. The plant will also focus on energy saving through digitalised operations and energy-saving management which can help contribute to reducing CO2.
Altogether, this contributes to our 2050 Net Zero Greenhouse gas emissions goal in line with the objectives of the UN’s Paris Agreement on climate change.
Responsible relationships
At Mölnlycke we think about the long-term effects of our actions – whether we’re helping people heal or giving back to the communities we serve.
We give back to society by investing in communities where we operate – and by supporting charities that share our goals.
We feel a strong sense of commitment to both the medical profession and patients receiving treatment and have chosen to support Operation Smile as our global charity partner, as well as at a local level.
Operation Smile is a charity that provides safe and free cleft lip and cleft palate repair surgery for children with facial deformities.
- Supporting the founding of the Cebu Cleft Centre
- Gifts in kind: 1.4 million pairs of Biogel® surgical gloves
- Infection prevention training
- Logistics expertise
We share common ambitions and areas of expertise with them and collaborate together to improve sustainability of healthcare systems in underserved regions.
Ethical Business
In line with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP) and the International Labor Organisation (ILO) Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, we are committed to respecting internationally recognised human rights in all our operations (see our guiding framework here).
We strive to prevent the violation of human rights and to remediate the possible impact on human rights resulting from the activities in our value chain. This includes issues such as forced labour, the workplace and working conditions, gender and race discrimination, unfair competition, and corruption.
We are a UN Global Compact Participant and have a zero-tolerance approach to modern slavery of any kind. We define modern slavery to include child labor, debt bondage, forced labor, human trafficking, servitude, slavery and slavery-like practices.
Consider your patients. Consider the planet. Choose Biogel®.
'References'
1. Sustainable solutions are solutions providing clear sustainability benefits to our customers. Solutions are assessed across their lifecycle and benchmarked against current market mainstream applications, which makes the result of the assessment a moving target. These solutions match the standard offerings in all respects and either exceed or are comparable to them in at least one of the following sustainability parameters: GHG emissions and energy efficiency, use of natural resources, waste, packaging, inclusivity, health and wellbeing.
