Höganäs is the world leader on the market for metal powders with a yearly capacity of 500,000 tons. Höganäs vision is to inspire the industry to make more with less and we aim to pioneer the industry by becoming the first producer of green metal powder. In close cooperation with customers, Höganäs is at the forefront of innovations and develops tomorrow’s sustainable solutions for automotive components, electrical motors, brazing, surface coating and additive manufacturing. Höganäs operates 17 production centers across the globe and has a workforce of 2,300 of 2,400 employees. The turnover for 2021 was 10,527 MSEK. The company, which was founded in 1797, is owned by Lindéngruppen and Wallenberg owned FAM.

By entering a partnership with the Swedish Life Cycle Center, Höganäs wants to enhance the benefits of life cycle thinking in the Swedish industry in their on-going sustainability transformation and to set the benchmark within the industry.

We are very happy to support Höganäs in these aims and to welcome them as our new partner! To get to know their life cycle work better we asked three questions to Babak Kianian, LCA Specialist at Höganäs.

What role has the life cycle perspective in your organization?

“We have recently acquired more resources to integrate life cycle thinking into Höganäs culture. Our plan is to perform LCA on all our products, hence we are conducting a couple of pilot projects, which build our LCA foundation.

As a large-scale production technique, powder metallurgy is known to provide resource efficient ways to e.g., produce steel components. Life cycle thinking has however only recently been applied in this area, and in 2017 the first LCA was made on one of the major iron powder products made by Höganäs in Sweden. Now Höganäs has raised its ambition considerably, LCA’s will now be made on all major products and production sites in the Höganäs group, and a LCA specialist has been recruited to lead this task. As a start, a pilot project has recently been commenced focusing on 3 of our 17 production sites. Furthermore, cooperation has also been initiated with several customers with the aim to better understand the life cycle aspects in the value chain of powder metallurgy.”

What makes Swedish Life Cycle Center an interesting organization for Höganäs?

“We are currently putting the LCA foundation of Höganäs products, therefore we believe it is crucial to have a partnership with the Center to support us to advance our activities in this field. Looking at the Center’s stage 10 vision and some of its organized activities, they are truly in-line with what we would like to achieve (e.g., develop ways of working to gather data from our suppliers, LCA business toolkit, cross-functional integration of life cycle perspective and LCA in our organization).”

What are you looking forward to as partner to the center? What do you want to achieve?

“We believe that by partnering with Swedish Life Cycle Center, and utilizing the knowledge and experience of other parties, we will achieve these goals faster and in a successful way. This is made possible by applying a holistic perspective, since it demands much more resources for an organization to achieve these goals by itself. Furthermore, as our products are used in various applications, many different fields, and diverse industries, we also believe that other partners can benefit from the knowledge and insights we would bring to the Center.”

“We are currently putting the LCA foundation of our products, therefore we believe it is crucial to have a partnership with Swedish Life Cycle Center to support us to advance our activities in this field.”

Says Babak Kianian, LCA Specialist Höganäs