The Navarre-based cooperative joins the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative and aligns its strategy with the United Nations’ Ten Principles on human rights, labour, the environment and anti-corruption.
SAKANA Group has recently joined the United Nations Global Compact, which brings together more than 25,000 companies and organisations from over 160 countries. With this membership, the cooperative group commits to aligning its operations and strategy with the initiative’s Ten Principles and to actively contributing to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Rather than marking the beginning of a new stage, this membership gives public visibility to a way of understanding industry that the cooperative has practised since its inception. “Joining the United Nations Global Compact is a natural step in SAKANA Group’s journey and a decision that is fully consistent with who we have been since 1975,” says Jaime Urcola, Managing Director of the group.
The Ten Principles of the Global Compact are directly connected to the values that define the cooperative. Respect for human and labour rights is linked to a model based on cooperativism and quality employment; care for the environment, to the group’s sustained commitment to more responsible processes in a sector as demanding as foundry; and the rejection of corruption, to the transparency that SAKANA Group upholds before its customers, partners and community. “As an industrial cooperative, we have never understood business success as something separate from our commitment to people, to our environment and to the territory where we were born,” Urcola notes.
This membership, promoted and supported by the Governing Council, also entails the commitment to report annually on its progress through the Communication on Progress, a transparency exercise that will allow its stakeholders to track, with data, the evolution of its contribution to a more sustainable industrial model.
“With this step, we formalise our way of doing industry, with our sights set on leaving behind a fairer and more sustainable sector for those who come after us,” Urcola concludes. SAKANA Group thus reaffirms its conviction that cooperation is the foundation of its success and takes a further step in its purpose of continuing to grow responsibly alongside its customers and its environment.
