Link to main pages for Sustainability at SKF

Sustainability is one of SKF's key business drivers together with Profitability, Quality, Innovation and Speed. SKF's approach to sustaining growth while meeting environmental and social challenges is to work determinedly to integrate the long-term sustainable development approach into its business practices, processes as well as product and solution offerings to the market and industry.
Sustainability at SKF centres on the SKF Care approach to business, the environment, employees and the community.

Business Care

• SKF endorses the Global Compact Ten Principles. The SKF Code of Conduct is applicable to all employees worldwide and compliance audit is carried out biennially at all units.
• The SKF Code of Conduct for Suppliers and Sub-Contractors as well as the SKF Code of Conduct for Authorized Distributors have been released with the aim to enforce an ethical demand chain.
• In continuing its launch of new bearing families offering energy-efficient solutions, SKF released the energy-efficient (E2) spherical and cylindrical roller bearings. The SKF E2 bearing family outperforms standard ISO products, providing a minimum 30% energy saving for customers, and is intended for a wide range of applications, such as industrial and wind energy transmissions.

Environmental Care

• The SKF Group-wide ISO 14001 Environmental Management certificate comprised 90 sites in 28 countries at the end of 2008.
• As a result of SKF's drive in reducing energy intensity at manufacturing operations and the carbon intensity of the energy used, an absolute reduction of Scope 1 and 2 carbon dioxide emissions (according to the GHG Protocol) of 50,000 tonnes was achieved. This is equivalent to a 9.1% reduction compared to the 2007 total, surpassing the Group's target by some 4 percentage points.
• A new target for solvent reduction was defined, to achieve an absolute 50% reduction by 2012, compared to 2007. A total of 10% reduction was achieved in 2008.
• SKF also aims for a minimum 80% recycling rate for grinding swarf by 2012. The current 2008 recycling percentage of grinding swarf Group-wide was at 64%.

Employee Care

• 105 out of 206 SKF units worldwide achieved zero recordable accidents for four quarters or more in 2008 and the accident rate has fallen by 74% since the Zero Accidents target was established in 2000. Apart from that, health and fitness, HIV/Aids programmes, skills and competence training continued to be a focus area under Employee Care.
• SKF employees provide their feedback on SKF's performance in relation to company values and key focus areas annually through the global Working Climate Analysis. The analysis also measures the working climate in different departments and individual teams in terms of trust, co-operation, personal development and continuous improvement. Follow-up discussions are subsequently conducted by managers with their teams to identify and implement improvement plans.

Community Care

• SKF encourages its local management to be actively involved in communities not only by providing financial means but also commitment through viable voluntary work and sports activities, education, training, and helping under-privileged society. This is demonstrated through for instance SKF's engagement in the Philippines to provide education for the indigenous residents, as well as supporting and helping local communities through paid voluntary schemes offered to the employees.

Sustainability indexes

In September 2009, SKF was selected for the third time to be the sector leader for the IEQ Industrial Engineering sector in the 2009 Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (DJSI). SKF has been included in the index since it started in 2000. SKF was also included in the FTSE4Good Index Series for the ninth year in succession.