Elkem - Sustainable Business

Elkem is an industrial manufacturer of refined metals and alloys of various types. The production method involves use of large quanta of electricity and produces a significant amount of waste. With plants in various parts of the world the company contributes to local pollution, as well as global pollution through its logistics scheme of shipping produce in different stages of completion across the world. These are examples of some of the negative externalities of Elkem’s business model, referred to in literature as the shadow side of business models, or how the business model casts shadow. The following paragraph will detail how Elkem has handled these externalities in the past, and how they seek to reduce the impact of negative externalities in their current situation.

Elkem has a history of providing benefits for their workers, and local society around the factories. These benefits arose from the fact that Elkem’s factories where situated in remote areas in Norway, which was necessitated by their demand for electric power. Power sources in Norway has historically been primarily hydro voltaic, and still is. The issue with a hydro-plant is that it has to be situated in proximity to water at high elevation, with a subsequent drop in altitude. In Norway, this meant that hydro-plants were situated in remote places along the western coast. With the technology at the time, power could not be transferred over large distances. As a result factories demanding power had to be located in the same remote areas. The purpose of this discussion is to exemplify that Elkem had to both attract workers, and keep them happy in fairly remote areas in Norway (at its peak, the local area around Elkem Bremanger had 1700 people in 1980). In practice Elkem supports workers by providing housing and general facilities for socializing. The decision to begin filtering the exhaust from the plants arose from a local outcry over the level of black soot staining the local village in Svelgen, Bremanger. The particles filtered in this way, were later turned into a sales product titled Microsilica, the demand for which exceeds Elkem’s production. Elkem now imports filtered micro-particles from around the world to produce a product discovered as a direct result of an implementation to reduce local pollution. We’ll discuss Microsilica further in a later paragraph.