Essity Annual and Sustainability Report: Improved Well-Being
Hygiene and health are fundamental to people’s well-being in all phases of life, in all parts of the world. We increase access to hygiene and health solutions, develop products and services that enhance quality of life, use our expertise to drive dialogue, educate and contribute to a more inclusive society.
Hygiene and health
In pace with the growth of the world’s population and rise in average life expectancy, the need and demand for hygiene and health products and services are increasing. As we expand and broaden our product range, we offer more customers and consumers knowledge about and access to hygiene and health solutions, which is important to stop the spread of disease and to help improve public health. Our products and services play an important role in improving well-being and quality of life among people at various stages of life. Many people worldwide avoid going to school or work due to menstruation or incontinence. Our solutions for incontinence, menstruation, wound care and lymphedema create the preconditions for people to participate more in everyday life and to live more actively. We constantly strive to develop our solutions, including the use of digitalization. More connected solutions enable, for example, better incontinence care, custom-fitting of compression garments, diagnosis of wound care and improved public hygiene solutions.
Transparency and safe products
Our highest priority is the well-being of our customers and consumers. This is why we never compromise on the safety or quality of our products. To ensure this throughout a product’s entire life cycle, we have extensive requirements and procedures in place, which our internal experts continuously improve in accordance with a certified quality system. Essity collaborates with external experts in toxicology and life science to guarantee independent reviews. Every product or product component Essity receives from third parties must also comply with Essity’s product safety and chemicals criteria according to the specifications in the company’s Global Supplier Standard. Internal business practices ensure that information that may be relevant for product safety, including complaints and feedback from consumers and customers as well as quality incidents, are part of the product safety concept. Essity also actively participates in public debate on product safety.
Answers to frequently asked questions are published on www.essity.com and each brand’s local website, together with detailed information about product contents. To further strengthen the availability of product information, we launched the “Product Safety, For Us it’s Personal” and “Our 5 Pillars of Protection” campaigns in 2021.
More inclusive society
Essity promotes awareness to break the social stigma that is often linked to incontinence, menstruation and chronic conditions, such as endometriosis and lymphedema. The aim is to increase understanding of different conditions and help everyone participate more in everyday life and live as active a life as possible. In this way, we contribute toward, and create conditions for, a more inclusive society. Essity is helping to enable positive societal change through collaborations, partnerships, marketing, engagement on social media, reports, education and innovations. For many years, our brands have campaigned and driven initiatives to promote awareness and break social stigmas. Many of these have received attention for their creative content and engaging message. For example, in 2021 TENA’s “TENA ageless” campaign challenged age stereotypes and “Despair no more” counteracted negative perceptions of incontinence and menopause. In the “Taboo tracker” campaign, brands including Libresse and Body-form highlighted taboo issues regarding women’s V-Zone, while “Pain Stories” increased awareness of the issue of endometriosis.
Partnerships and collaboration
Greater impact can be achieved by collaborating with organizations that share Essity’s ambition to improve global hygiene and health. For a number of years now, Essity has been a strategic partner in the “Global Handwashing Partnership” and supported the “Hand hygiene for all” initiative together with the WHO and UNICEF, the aim of which is to guarantee access to products and services for hand hygiene in vulnerable countries and areas. As a means of contributing to global dialogue and driving forward societal solutions, we have over the past seven years regularly published “The Hygiene and Health Report” in cooperation with the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), now the Sanitation and Hygiene Fund (SHF). The latest report was launched in conjunction with the United Nations Foundation’s (UNF) annual Global Dialogue in 2020, where Essity was convening partner for the fifth year in a row. The Global Dialogue brings together leaders and experts from the private and public sectors to inspire and encourage accelerated action in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Through our cooperation with UNICEF in Mexico, we have so far educated more than seven million young people in hand hygiene and menstruation. We have launched a virtual initiative to educate girls, boys, teachers and parents. We are involved in a range of different projects around the world. For instance, through our collaboration with the Red Cross in several countries, we have reached out to people in particularly vulnerable situations during the COVID-19 pandemic. We engage in initiatives where we can make the greatest contribution and these must be politically and religiously independent, as set out in Essity’s Community Relations Instruction. In 2021, Essity invested approximately SEK 38m in more than 400 projects.
A selection of our partnerships
For a number of years, Essity has been collaborating with UNICEF in Mexico to increase awareness of the importance of good hand hygiene, to break the taboos surrounding menstruation and strengthen standards and guidelines to encourage good hygiene and health.
Essity has collaborated with the United Nations Foundation since 2017. This included the role of convening partner for the UNF’s annual Global Leadership Dialogue, when we held discussions with our customers on how we could work together to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In 2021, Essity enhanced this collaboration by joining an expert group in the fight against antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Download the Essity Annual and Sustainability Report 2021 here
