Finnish Mint’s Approach to Social Responsibility

The Mint of Finland (MOF) has issued its 2022 Corporate Social Responsibility report. In business terms 2022 was a difficult year because over capacity in the market led to a low level of orders and this, combined with higher electricity prices, led to reduced profitability (see CMN March 2023). The outlook for 2023 is better.

Despite the difficult business environment, MOF continued with a wide range of initiatives across all areas of operations.

It started the report arguing that coins complete the diversity of the payment landscape and are good for society. They are an important element in a nation’s identity.

This article is a summary of that report, along with the presentation that the Mint made in the coin session at the recent Silk Road Conference in Kazakhstan.

Digitisation

In January 2021 a digital coin collectors app was set up, ‘Coiniverse’, and this now has eight mints as members, including MOF. 80,000 collectors have downloaded the app and there are 100,000 coins in the database. This is an example of how digitisation is an opportunity as well as a challenge.

Within its business, MOF sees digitisation as contributing to the automation of operations, as a tool to implement collaborative robot technology and as the basis for upgrading the Enterprise Resource Planning system.

Environment

MOF produces coin blanks in Germany and mints coins in Finland. It exports 90% of its production to some 40 countries.

The ISO standards for environmental management (14001), social responsibility (26000) and energy management (50001 – the blank manufacturing site is accredited) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the European Initiative for Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence set the rules and goals for continuous development for MOF.

Investment has been made to reduce CO2 emissions. Money has been spent on new cooling systems for process water, new cooling systems for the rectifiers used in the plating process, an improved plating process to reduce electricity consumption during idle time and using lower temperatures in the annealing process.

Electricity, district heating and natural gas usage has seen a fall from 747.1 tonnes of CO2 to 503.9 tonnes. The blank manufacturing facility in Germany has increased its renewable energy usage from 70.4% in 2021 to 74.1% in 2022 by increased use of hydro-electric power in the annealing process. Electricity and district heating has fallen from 6.5 to 5.4 tonnes.

Transporting product between factories has led to a fall from 147.3 to 38.67 tonnes.

In 2019, travel accounted for 107.28 tonnes of CO2. In 2022 this was 15.8 tonnes. This has been achieved by working within the business, with suppliers and customers to use virtual meeting tools rather than travelling.

The overall result has been a 39% reduction in CO2 emissions resulting from operations and internal logistics.

MOF has looked at its final product, material cycle, energy and disposal of waste to landfill to see what it is doing with metals, chemicals, packaging materials and other consumables. It is focusing on reducing energy and landfill waste and increasing recycling.

Waste recycling in both minting and blank production reached 38.4% through careful consideration and optimisation of what is recyclable and less use of waste intensive bronze and brass plating processes.

Given that improving sustainability is a long term effort, MOF is now working on identifying further energy efficiency actions, opportunities to reduce CO2 emissions, improving data transparency on the consumption of resources, substituting process materials with more environmentally friendly options and analysing the full supply chain to define improvement areas.

People

Due to the low level of work, the Mint’s headcount fell from 140 to 114 people. Finland uses temporary layoffs and Germany short time working. The staff structure has been made leaner and flatter.

There has been a focus on staff wellbeing with new employee benefits, targeted staff surveys and additional supervisor training. Quarterly staff information sessions have been used to inform staff about the company and a new Human Resources management system has been introduced.

MOF follows a training model based on 10% of learning being in formal education, 20% learning from other people and 70% being learning from work itself, when tackling challenges and problem solving.

The company is working to achieve ISO 45001, occupational health and safety.

Ethics

In each of three categories of responsible business, responsible partner and sourcing, MOF achieved 100% compliance.

Putting Sustainability Criteria into Tenders

The Mint of Finland (MOF) argues that government buyers can lead the way when it comes to driving sustainability. By adopting concrete sustainability requirements in government tenders, suppliers will need to respond. To have the most impact, the environmental requirements should cover the whole supply chain, not just the minting process.

‘Lowest bidder win’ rules, which are widely followed in public tenders, often conflict with achieving the best environmental outcome. MOF wants, therefore, for tender evaluation criteria to work on a points system which accepts higher prices in return for better environmental outcomes.

MOF gives some examples of criteria that buyers could use in their evaluation: 

• ISO 14001, ISO50001

• Energy 1 certificate on the share of renewable energy used annually

• Indication of relative energy consumption for each production step from blanking to minting

• Description of environmental policy, actions taken to improve environmental impact, KPIs and their development

• Transportation CO2 footprint from coils to coins

• Allow alternative offers, eg. re-cyclable/re-usable packing materials vs non-recyclable, delivery schedule and packing dimensions for more efficient logistics and reduced CO2.