Self Assessment Workshop:  UN Sustainable Development Goals

Sustainability is somewhat of a buzzword these days, so before we started talking about it, we wanted to take some time to understand what it meant to Airthings. The past year has been spent working on this, and now we are ready to present our plan to all of you! 

As leaders in indoor air quality space, with a focus on the health and wellbeing of homes and businesses alike, it is only natural to assume that sustainability is close to our hearts. In fact, in the last year, Airthings has been working on an ambitious project; creating a holistic sustainability strategy for its value chain.

In order to commit to a real plan of action, Airthings decided to join the UN Global Compact. This voluntary initiative aims to implement universal sustainability principles and align our operations and strategies. These include human rights, labor, environment, anti-corruption and advancing societal goals. In June 2020, Airthings was accepted into the prestigious UN Global Compact.

Our team of 12 sustainability ambassadors comprised of employees across departments, took the first step of starting an internal sustainability assessment.

Internal assessment

The purpose of our workshop was to create a holistic sustainability analysis for Airthings to embed the UN Sustainable Development Goals into Airthings' core business values.

During a three-day workshop, we analyzed the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) based on risk, impacts and opportunities.

We followed a participatory methodology process where we embedded the SDG as a framework to map the different impacts within the Airthings supply chain. We looked deep into our business model and found where our impacts would make the most difference. Then we were able to create direct actions and solutions using these impacts, opportunities and sustainability challenges.

Main outcomes

• 3 assessment areas
• 11 sustainability priorities
• 53 challenges and opportunities

This is only the beginning of our sustainability journey. We were happy to see that we have been driven towards sustainable actions already. But this workshop helped us prioritize our efforts and push forward our values to dare to innovate, to love our planet and people, and focus on a sustainable future. We understand that our actions throughout our supply chain have an important impact on the health of our planet, but especially that our products and services can help achieve the UN Global Impact Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.