We have been leading the industry for almost 40 years with our product brands LoFric® and Navina™. We create reliable and user-friendly products for bladder and bowel management with as little environmental impact as possible.
We passionately strive to become climate neutral and work closely together with users and healthcare professionals who constantly inspire us to improve our products and services in a sustainable way, now and for the future.
At Wellspect, we embrace sustainability and want to lead the way within our industry towards true sustainability.
We are dedicated to providing products to enable the user to have an independent and dignified life, with a minimum environmental impact, respecting human rights and social needs. Our focus areas and the main ambitions of the sustainability strategy:
As responsible citizens and as a company with visions and ambitions, we constantly need to adapt to new situations, find new tools, and – above all, never lose faith in our ability to come up with new solutions. With the Corona pandemic in the rear-view mirror, our attention is turning towards incorporating sustainability as an integral part of how we work – we call this “The New Normal”. One such example manifested itself during 2021: The conversion of our coating process in Mölndal for our LoFric range of catheters, resulting in a dramatic reduction of chemical and water usage. It was a massive undertaking, but our proprietary technology now sets a new standard in our industry.
New solutions like this clearly illustrate how sustainability is more than words at Wellspect. In fact, just like the safety and well-being of our users, sustainability is on our daily agenda – it is part of our top-level strategy and should permeate everything we do, at all levels. Which is why, in 2021 we rolled out training of all employees in sustainability and what it means in our daily work.
During 2021, we also designed our ambitious roadmap towards becoming truly sustainable, defining Wellspect’s goals in alignment with the Science Based Target initiative, to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement. I am proud of what we have accomplished so far and look forward to the even more sustainable solutions we will develop for the future.
Read more about our progress towards becoming climate neutral in our Sustainability Report for 2021.
Svenn Poulsen,
Group Vice President
Wellspect HealthCare
Empowering more people suffering from bladder and bowel dysfunction to gain independence and enjoy a full life through access to innovative continence care solutions. Providing easy to learn and teach products, committed support and education to healthcare professionals.
Good health and well-being
Community engagement
Contributes to the UN Sustainable Development Goals:
Our goal is to make a real difference, every single day. With the help of our products, our users can have a freer, more independent life. Our products contribute to good health and well-being in themselves, while also having high standards for quality and patient safety.
Good health and well-being
The people who need our services are often affected by neurogenic conditions, such as Spinal Cord Injury, Parkinsons disease, Multipel Scelerosis or Spina Bifida. In addition, we also offer solutions and help for people with functional disorders, such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome, prostate issues or women who have sustained injury following childbirth. Many of those who are affected feel that their symptoms limit their everyday lives and the stigma surrounding the topic makes it hard to ask for help.
Wellspect’s goal is for more people around the world to get access to our solutions. We are continuously expanding into new markets and use several global communication channels to spread awareness and inform people about our products and services. We initiated ACCT, Advancing Continence Care Together, a global forum which gathers science, industry and healthcare professionals with the aim to share, interact and discuss how to best advance bladder and bowel continence care for the benefit of users around the world.
As part of our goal to contribute to good health and well-being, we regularly partake in a variety of activities in order to spread our message. We run three blogs in which we share scientific information and user stories , we carry out education through our sales organization and we partake in interviews and newspaper articles with the goal of informing the public about bladder and bowel issues, the solutions, and thereby breaking the stigma to speak about them.
Another aspect of our work towards better health and well-being is our sponsorships and partnerships. Across our many markets we sponsor different sport events such as wheelchair rugby and wheelchair basketball. We also support by watching their games, sharing experiences and demonstrating our products. Furthermore, we welcome members from the teams to participate in our development projects when user feedback is needed.
Wellspect supports:
Ensuring Wellspect is a desirable workplace and attractive business partner. We want to be an inspiring and challenging partner – together. Being an inspiring and challenging partner, leading to improved workplace conditions throughout the value chain.
Safe and sustainable workplace
Sustainable procurement
Contributes to the UN Sustainable Development Goals:
We are convinced that an atmosphere that motivates and inspires, and where we can challenge each other and explore new ideas, is crucial for developing innovations. As a company, we take responsibility and we invest in safety, training and well-being for our employees. We care about each other and face our challenges with joy and mutual respect.
Safety in the workplace is our highest priority and a key focus point daily. We regularly evaluate data from risk analysis, EHS Rounds (environment, health and safety) and accident and incident reporting, to name a few, to ensure that our workplace is as safe as it possibly can be for our employees. In addition to this, all new managers undergo training in sustainability and work environment, security rounds are carried out on a regular basis and risk assessments are performed in the events of changes to our activities (operations, premises, equipment or working methods).
We believe an attractive and sustainable workplace is a prerequisite for financial growth. Physical safety is a priority to us, as well as the social work environment and thus one’s individual well-being. As a company, we have a range of activities in place to promote this, such as step count competitions, subsidized massages and healthcare allowances.
An important part of our sustainability work is to ensure that we have complete control over our supply chains. We demand that our suppliers share our values and requirements as described in our Business Partner Code of Conduct, which includes demands on human rights, social conditions, work environment, sustainability and anti-corruption, in addition to the applicable legislation.
We believe that working together with our suppliers and having an open dialogue is important. Only then can we make a real difference and be credible and transparent throughout our value chain.
We actively work to reduce our environmental impact – both for our operations and products. This includes our carbon footprint, chemical use, water consumption, energy consumption, paper use and waste to landfill.
Carbon footprint
Chemicals
Natural resources
Contributes to the UN Sustainable Development Goals:
We strive to reduce the climate footprint as much as possible and recognize the UN Climate Panel’s leading role in understanding the science and evaluating the effect of climate change. We want our customers, who depend on our products, to know that we are doing everything possible to reduce the climate footprint these products create. We are however still humble to the fact that this task is highly challenging.
Our goal is to become climate neutral. We map all sources of carbon dioxide emissions, both from direct and indirect sources, and through planned practical measures we aim to gradually reduce our climate impact. The manufacturing and handling of our products are the largest contributors to our climate impact today, and by carrying out detailed life cycle analysis we can find where the greatest issues lie and work on how to improve those.
Chemicals
We are highly focused on reducing the amount of solvents used in our production and work actively on replacing chemicals with more environmentally friendly alternatives. We have strict policies for chemical management in place at our production sites.
Natural resources
We are constantly focused on how to use less materials, more recyclable materials and in the future, completely new materials, to minimize our environmental footprint. We strive to run a resource efficient operation by minimizing consumption of natural resources, reducing energy use and recycling any remaining materials. Wherever possible, we try to avoid creating waste.
We use life cycle analyzes for our products in order to prioritize the right activities and reduce the environmental impact. Through targeted efforts, with the help of digital technologies, we have been able to decrease the amount of waste in our production significantly.
An important part of our continuous work to reduce the environmental impact from our products and processes has been to implement a new coating process for LoFric.
If you are interested in the life cycle assessment study of LoFric, please contact your local representative.
At Wellspect we use Life Cycle Analysis as a tool to identify which factors within the manufacturing of our products have the highest environmental impact and through that we can identify potential product improvements and “hotspots”.
The LCA process looks at all areas of the production process, from the sourcing of raw materials and manufacturing to distribution and eventually end of life.
It was a Life Cycle Assessment made in 1990 which started the journey to a PVC-free assortment. Since 2009 the material in the LoFric catheter tubes is POBE, a Polyolefin Based Elastomer.
The POBE material in the tube contains no PVC or plasticizers and combines very good physical characteristics with an exceptionally good environmental performance.
POBE consists of carbon and hydrogen and the material has a low environmental impact, for example 33% lower environmental load for catheters in POBE compared to polyurethane*.”
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