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2025.04.15
”"We want to bring together all issues related to sustainability that the industry is working on"”
TK Sustainability is a technical committee within Swetic that collects sustainability issues from member companies and works to strengthen the industry's sustainability perspective. Herman Fahlström, convener, talks about the committee's purpose, current issues and how Swetic members can contribute to upcoming EU regulations on sustainability, such as the EU's Omnibus proposal which aims to simplify sustainability reporting and strengthen the competitiveness of companies within the EU.
Can you tell us about TK Sustainability's purpose and goals?
– TK Sustainability is a collaboration group in Swetic where we want to gather all issues related to sustainability that the industry is working on. Sustainability is a broad concept and with this technical committee we want to find the current issues that concern our industry where we can be involved and influence. The technical committee started in the spring of 2024 after a smaller, more loosely united group carried out work regarding CSRD where we within SWETIC ran an advocacy campaign in the fall of 2023 to get certification companies to have the opportunity to verify sustainability reports. Right now we are gathering members from Bureau Veritas, DNV, Intertek, Kiwa, RISE, Qvalify, A3Cert, DEKRA Industrial and HS Certifiering.
What issues are relevant for TK Sustainability right now?
– Continued monitoring of CSRD is understood, of course, especially now with the changes in this and other legislation. But we also follow the development in the standardization work linked to sustainability to see if we need to implement joint marketing or interpretations. For example, we had the addition of "consideration of climate change" linked to several management system standards, and we have discussed the progress of the standard for the UN's sustainability goals, ISO 53001, which is underway.
Now the EU's Omnibus proposal on sustainability reporting has arrived. What does it mean and how does it affect companies and the industry?
– The European Commission has put forward a proposal to reduce administrative burdens for businesses. This is called the Omnibus package and reporting is at the heart of these proposals. The proposals have not yet been adopted, but the direction has been set so that this can happen within 6–9 months.
Omnibus proposes that CSRD-based reporting be changed as follows:
- Companies reporting in wave 1 (2024) must continue reporting for the next 2 years
- Reporting thresholds for companies in waves 2 (2025) and 3 (2026) have been raised to 1,000 employees and reporting will be postponed by 2 years
- Information requests that are disseminated up or down the value chain must now be made in a more controlled manner, and limited to the information required by the reporting standard for voluntary small and medium-sized enterprises (VSME)
- The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) will be revised and simplified
- Sector-specific standards will not be required in the future.
- Only limited security is required, there will be no transition to reasonable security later.
This will significantly change the picture of how many companies will actually be affected and, in turn, how great the need will be in the near future for support in verifications.
