Our Environmental Efforts

Our environmental work

At our wall mural factory we strive to minimise our environmental impact, and our environmental approach permeates everything we do. All production is to order, which means we only produce the quantity of products required, none are held in stock or discarded unnecessarily. The printing ink we use for our wallpapers contains no solvents or hazardous chemicals, and is biodegradable. Waste material from our processes is recycled by environmental entrepreneur Hans Andersson Recycling AB. Read more about our material in our environmental policy

Working with Vi Agroforestry

Every purchase at Photowall supports our work with Vi Agroforestry, a Swedish development cooperation organization. Together with Vi Agroforestry, Photowall plants around 5000 trees every year in the area surrounding Lake Victoria in East Africa.

Vi Agroforestry

Vi Agroforestry plants trees and crops at the same time, which returns the natural fertility to ravaged fields and puts nutritional food on tables. The trees also improve the local climate and access to water.

Planting trees improves farmer yields and family incomes. The trees provide firewood, lumber, animal fodder and fruit.

Visit the Vi Agroforestry website, where you can read more about Vi Agroforestry’s environmental efforts and also help plant more trees.

Responsibility in our supply chain

At Photowall we work with partners that share our values. We are proud of our supply chain partners and have worked with several of them since we started business 16 years ago. The social risks in our supply chain are low and our partners take their environmental responsibility serious.

It is part of our sustainability strategy to continuously improve the social conditions and minimize our environmental impact throughout our supply chain. We want human rights to be respected, labour standards to be high and the environment to be protected.

We seek to live up to this commitment by

• Producing and sourcing the majority of our products and materials locally
• Working with few suppliers based on long term relationships
• Having detailed transparency on social and environmental conditions
• Conducting systematic Due Diligence in our supply chain
• Working with our suppliers on improvements

In 2021 we had 10 direct suppliers of wallpaper, posters and frames. 7 suppliers were based in Northern Europe. 3 suppliers were based in China and Taiwan. 87% of our total volume was bought from European suppliers.

In 2022 we extended our work with responsibility in the Supply Chain by developing a Photowall guideline for conducting Due Diligence in our Supply Chain according to the OECD due diligence guidance for responsible business conduct. We made a detailed social and environmental risk screening based on country of production, product type and production type for all parts of our supply chain, mapped our assessments against the risk screening and identified potential gaps. Based on the risk categorization and our assessments we defined focus initiatives with suppliers.

One initiative is that we will start collection of an updated set of sustainability measures from our suppliers for example on conversion to renewable energy. This will help us and our suppliers to reduce CO2 emissions even more targeted.

The environmental standards in our supply chain are high. Our largest supplier of paper has an Ecovadis gold rating for sustainability management and performance and are among the pulp and paper industry’s most sustainable manufacturers. The supplier has set CO2 emissions and water reduction targets and are already using 30% renewable energy. All our wood and paper are living up to the EU Timber Regulation preventing trade of illegally harvested timber with 100% of our paper being FSC certified and thereby documenting that it is sourced from sustainable managed forests with good social conditions.

The social standards in our supply chain are also high and driven by production in countries where standards are high and overseen. We have just finalised a new Supplier Code of Conduct that we will distribute to all suppliers over the coming months and will form the basis of our future social and environmental meetings with our suppliers. Our Due Diligence Guideline also includes updated guidelines for onboarding of new suppliers.