Articles, Other news
New appeal for sustainable speeds aims to save lives on the road
October 15, 2019 17:36 CEST 6 min read
SSAB is working together with the Swedish Transport Administration and some of Sweden’s biggest buyers of transport services to launch an appeal to transport buyers to use procurement as a tool to make demands for sustainable speeds. The aim is to reduce the number of accidents and to save lives,
- “No one should need to die on the road because we as buyers of transport services have made unreasonable demands that result in speeding being a solution in order to deliver a product on time. SSAB always puts safety at the top of the agenda, and it must be just as important for our business partners,” says Rickard Backlund, Senior Manager Logistics at SSAB.
Together with Axfood, Clas Ohlson, COOP, ICA, IKEA, PostNord, Södra skogsägarna and the Swedish Transport Administration, SSAB is encouraging both private and public actors who buy or perform transport services in their business activities to assume their share of the responsibility. This would save lives, the environment and costs. It would also contribute to a safer, more secure work environment for those who have the highway as their workplace.
- “Transport activities that are safe on the road are an important issue of quality and sustainability for society. This is explained in the global sustainable development goals in Agenda 2030, in which many of the goals relate to transport activities and road safety,” says Christina Friborg, EVP and Head of Sustainability at SSAB.
- “We intend to boost our follow-up on the demands we make of our business partners when it comes to compliance with regulations on the road. We have extensive traffic to and from our plants, around 500 trucks a day in our Nordic operation, and we believe that through this initiative we can contribute to greater road safety,” says Per Bondemark, Head of Procurement at SSAB.
Through this appeal, SSAB is now extending its work on sustainability by making clearer demands for sustainable speeds in its procurement of transport services. This means that in due course the company will place even greater emphasis on the supplier following up and reporting on its actual compliance with speed limits in the transport services it performs on behalf of SSAB.
There must be a gradual increase in the focus on follow-up, involving more purchasers and providers. In the short term, methods and solutions used for follow-up may need to be different and to be more or less comprehensive. As the technical systems that register actual speed driven in relation to permitted speed are developed, follow-up can be refined and streamlined. It is therefore important that we try to encourage the market to offer the technical systems that are needed for effective follow-up, says Rickard Backlund.