At St1, we believe that transparency through developing robust due diligence processes, and supplier screening is crucial for ensuring sustainable practices throughout our supply chain. As a provider of energy products, we recognize that our operations have a significant impact on the environment and the communities where we operate. As such, we are committed to ensuring that our suppliers share our values and commitment to our ethical principles and sustainable business practices.
The invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 highlighted the importance of ethical business principles and transparency, especially in the commodities business. 2022 was a turbulent year which also challenged our sustainability roadmap and its further development. During the year, we further emphasized our commitment to developing more transparent supply chains and raised the level and the urgency of streamlining our current partner management practices to cover the whole St1 Group. Working towards sharing mutual practices in screening our suppliers and integrating sustainability risk management practices into daily decision-making processes within our entire value chain is not yet complete, but the process leaped forward drastically during the year.
We recognize that sustainability is a journey, and we are committed to the continuous improvement of our sustainability practices. In 2022, we placed a strong emphasis on our Group’s due diligence process development as well as integrating sustainability aspects into corporate risk management practices. As we have a vast and complex value chain, we acknowledged that building functioning processes while simultaneously increasing the competence level of our people operating in key roles, it is essential to prioritize our efforts. Our approach in 2022 placed a strong urgency on regulatations-driven sustainability governance. The first half of the year demanded the greatest efforts from our Norwegian organization during the implementation of the Norwegian Transparency Act. Our regulatory responsiveness will continue in 2023, when we will start implementing the UK Modern Slavery Act into our Group policies and risk management. As a part of this work, we also conducted a thorough gap analysis of our operations against the UN Guiding Principles and OECD Due Diligence guidelines to ensure that we are managing our social and environmental risks effectively. This has resulted in, for example, our updating of the St1 Code of Conduct package and related training materials, which will be launched in 2023.
As a company operating within biofuels and fossil fuels, our critical impacts are in the supply chains of our feedstocks and products. The first quarter of the year began with our sustainability team increasing the availability of resources for supply chain compliance. Meanwhile, the first ISCC (International Sustainability & Carbon Certification) certification in St1’s history was attained in July, for St1 Sverige Ab. Since then, we have certified many other Group companies and locations, and will continue this work in the following years.
Our supply chain compliance team now spans across the entire Group, and operates in the matrix organization, ensuring that our competence and capabilities for developing more sustainable business operations in one of our riskiest areas continue efficiently. The ISCC system, together with our other commitments and regulatory frameworks, enables us to track our biofuel feedstocks through the supply chain, providing greater transparency and accountability.
Overall, despite the challenging and in many ways unstable environment, 2022 brought our sustainability work even closer to our daily business. A year that focused on the alignment of St1’s sustainability targets with our impacts and risk management, and the integration of our ethical business principles into our partner selection processes. The world around us is in constant flux, and we as a company want to be an integral part of that transition. Our industry needs active frontrunners, who are leading the change. From a sustainability perspective our approach remains humble; we are constantly evaluating our impacts, and trying to adjust our efforts in the areas that are most crucial. Despite a turbulent 2022, our sustainability framework development continued within our Group’s management, whose strong commitment and ownership can also be seen in our updated materiality assessment results. This report outlines our efforts towards putting sustainability into action, and how we as a company promote the transition towards a more sustainable value chain.
