Skip to content

Responsibility

Responsibility towards our stakeholders is a solid part of our company values, operations, leadership and everyday business.

Our new sustainability program with its targets guides our day-to-day sustainability development work. We are committed to a constant development of our sustainability and an open dialogue with our stakeholders.

Note: We are currently in the process of updating our sustainability section according to our new sustainability program.

We started building our first sustainability program last year. Responsible operating methods have been part of Berner’s approach to business for a long time, but our new sustainability program 2020–2022 brings all of the areas of our sustainability and the relevant targets under one program. One important aspect of the development of our new sustainability program was a sustainability survey and interviews with our internal and external stakeholders regarding our sustainability focus areas in the summer of 2019.

We will develop and update our sustainability program annually and expand it to cover the entire Berner Group even more comprehensively. We published our first GRI-based sustainability report in 2020.

The principles guiding our sustainability

Our sustainability efforts in our day-to-day work are guided by a number of policies and principles, such as our environmental policy, quality policy and HR principles. The development of our sustainability efforts is guided by our sustainability steering group, which meets approximately once a month. The activities of the steering group are coordinated by the Communications and Corporate Responsibility Manager.

All of our operations are based on our Code of Conduct for employees and suppliers. Our Code of Conduct represents Berner’s values – work, integrity and humanity – as well as the generally accepted guidelines of conduct as documented in the UN Global Compact’s ten principles.

Our operations are certified pursuant to the ISO 9001 quality management certificate, the ISO 14001 environmental management certificate, the ISO 22716 certificate regarding the manufacture and storage of cosmetics and hygiene products (GMP, Good Manufacturing Practices), and a third-party assured ISO 13485 quality system required for the manufacture of healthcare equipment.

Our laboratories in Herttoniemi and Heinävesi are GLP certified by the Finnish Medicines Agency. Defined by the OECD, GLP (Good Laboratory Practice) is intended to produce reliable and sufficiently high-quality laboratory testing for purposes such as use by the public authorities.

We are a member in the UN Global Compact and Responsible Care

We are a member of the UN Global Compact sustainability initiative. We are also committed to the chemical industry’s international Responsible Care sustainability program. Responsible Care is an international sustainability program coordinated in Finland by the Chemical Industry Federation of Finland.

UN Sustainable development goals (SDG)
As part of the creation of our new sustainability program, we estimated the impacts of our operations on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the 169 targets they comprise. While our operations have impacts on all 17 SDGs, we have identified five that we can particularly influence through our operations.

Whistleblowing channel

At Berner, we are committed to maintaining transparency and a high level of business ethics. Our whistleblowing service lets users report anonymously suspected misconduct, i.e. any behaviour that is not in line with legislation, our values and code of conducts.

We encourage our employees to contact a supervisor, the senior management team or the HR department if they have something to report. However, if you wish to report your concerns or suspicions anonymously, you can do so via the whistleblowing service.

You do not need to provide proof to back up your suspicions, but all reports should be made in good faith. In order to ensure anonymity, the whistleblowing service is provided by an external partner called WhistleB, Whistleblowing Centre. The reporting process is encrypted and password-protected.

The service is available at https://report.whistleb.com/berner in six languages.

Read more.

Search results