The Sustainability Council is an important platform for cooperation and advocacy

Andreas Rydell, Quality and Environmental Manager at Atea Sverige AB, but also Vice Chairman of the Sustainability Council, answers four questions about what the Sustainability Council and sustainability work means for Atea.

Andreas Rydell, Atea, you have recently been elected Vice Chair of the Sustainability Council. What does this position mean to you?

To begin with, I am of course honored to be elected Vice-Chair. The members of the Council are extremely competent and an important part of this assignment will therefore be to ensure, together with the chairman, that all the accumulated knowledge leads to jointly decided activities and concrete results.

What do you do on a daily basis (i.e. in your professional role), and what does your company's sustainability work look like?

I am the Quality and Environment Manager at Atea Sverige AB, a company that today has about 1900 employees in about thirty locations from Malmö in the south to Kiruna in the north. We have the industry's toughest climate targets, one of the market's most sophisticated recycling concepts for electronics and, a year ago, we launched the industry's first, and largest, appeal against conflict minerals. In other words, environmental and sustainability work is a major focus for us, and we naturally want to help our customers become sustainability-smart together with us.

How do you think the Sustainability Council is useful?

At Atea, we believe in collaboration between manufacturers, suppliers and customers to shape a better and more sustainable society together. The Sustainability Council is an important platform for such collaboration and where we can discuss and drive our core issues and create opinion, e.g. around political decisions and/or increase public knowledge and awareness of what is happening in the industry.

Which of the issues on the Sustainability Council's agenda do you personally feel most committed to?

Social and ethical conditions in the supply chain, a complex and important area where we need to work together to increase transparency to improve working and labor conditions