Meyer Turku Ltd, the Finnish cruise ship builder, and the University of Turku have launched a research project which aims to increase the transparency regarding responsibility and sustainability in shipbuilding.
“The purpose is to strengthen the competitiveness of the Finnish shipbuilding sector and clear the way for sustainability-related business innovations,” the shipbuilder said in a statement.
In addition to Meyer Turku and the University of Turku, the SUSTIS project (Sustainability Transparency in Shipbuilding Networks) involves some of the key companies in the shipbuilding network and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland LTD.
The aim of this two-phased project is to create new ways for the Finnish shipbuilding industry to take a leading role in sustainable shipbuilding. Instead of focusing on the sustainability in ship’s operation, SUSTIS widens the scope to the whole process of ship’s lifecycle development . In addition to ship’s materials, SUSTIS targets also economical and social issues.
In essence, this project collects vast amount of sustainability information of materials and manufacturing processes from the supply chain. The idea is to explore the usability of sustainability arguments in shipbuilding and to generate new business based on the sustainability data. This all targets in securing the competitiveness of the Finnish shipbuilding industry.
"We are looking for ways to create sustainability-based added value for our customers. This will strengthen our competitiveness and creates more jobs within the industry," said Jaana Hänninen, Environmental Manager of Meyer Turku. The aim is to examine the whole lifecycle of the ship and to locate the most important factors from every phase to diminish the ship’s sustainability effect.
"Shipowners, consumers and environmental organisations all alike are more and more interested in the sustainability and environmental responsibility and effects to the environment of the cruise travel," Hänninen continued.
With the data gathered, the cruise ship builders can be compared according to the responsibility of their actions. The project goal is also to increase transparency by identifying the important sustainability indicators relevant to marine industry and by researching how this meticulously and systematically gathered information can be transferred between the actors in the shipbuilding value chain
"It is not only about the relevant information and its gathering from different sources but also presenting it for the customer in a comprehensible format. This kind of information can be for example the origins of the raw materials, level of recycling and the energy consumption of the process. Many of these things are already known by an individual company, but the information is not delivered to the end-customers because it is rarely requested," said Project Manager Kaapo Seppälä from the Technology Research Center of the University of Turku.
The project, funded by the FinnishFunding Agency for Innovation (Tekes) is two-phased. The first phase will continue to the end of year 2016. It aims to identify the customers’ key indicators of responsibility in shipyards’ and subcontractors’ activity and to pilot the transferability of this kind of data. If the results are encouraging, the second phase of the project will commence. Thereafter there are more companies joining the project and the aim is to systematise the data gathering and to open responsibility data to an open platform.
SUSTIS (Sustainability Transparency in Shipbuilding Networks) project partners are Meyer Turku Oy, and Technology Research Center, Centre for Collaborative Research and Finland Futures Research Centre from the University of Turku,. Also participating are SSAB Europe Oy, Naval Interior Team Oy, Piikkiö Works Oy and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd.