The Holmen Group, which includes Iggesund Paperboard, the manufacturer of the famous Invercote - a bleached high quality board designed to pack consumer goods requiring high graphic performances - has been awarded the FAR’s prize for Best Swedish Sustainability Reporting for its report of the 2010 financial year. Holmen won the prize in the “large enterprise” category. The Holmen Group has issued separate sustainability reports since the early 1990s. With the 2010 report, the Group for the first time integrated the sustainability report into the annual report and subjected it to external audit.
“The international trend is that more and more companies are moving from having extensive and detailed sustainability reports to having integrated ones,” comments Åse Bäckström, who chairs the Swedish accounting industry association FAR’s working group for sustainable development. “Holmen has done so without losing its educational approach to key goals, strategies and results.”
FAR is a Swedish association gathering authorized public accountants, approved public accountants, authorized consulting accountants, tax consultants, advisers and other specialists, such as in sustainability accounting, and has almost 7,000 corporate members.
“We can see a clear trend that the longer a company has been doing sustainability accounting, the better and more forward looking it is,” Bäckström adds.
The jury justified its awarding of the prize to Holmen and Iggesund as follows: “Holmen has succeeded with its transition from having an extensive sustainability report to having a more focused one within its annual report. We regard Holmen’s sustainability report for 2010 as an excellent first step towards integrated accounting.”
