MD’s Message

In line with our mission of “Continuing to be a reliable and dependable supplier of quality natural rubber”, we had extended our past efforts, as reported since our first Sustainability Report in 2017, to attain new sustainability performances to meet the challenges of present times.

Several global developments in 2022 had brought hardships and pains to businesses, communities and individuals. Disruptions of oil and gas supplies due to the Ukraine-Russian conflict had resulted in volatile energy costs. This had also accelerated the global inflationary trends on food and other materials. Central banks’ raising of interest rates had further added to financing costs. Rising costs are threatening demand for goods and services, expected to lead to economic slow-down. We had focused on implementing projects that would mitigate these impacts.

At this juncture, I wish to extend my deep appreciation to our Sustainability Working Group for the untiring efforts to make progress in our sustainability programs, despite the negative global factors we are facing.

Climate Change Mitigation:

Lessons from uncertain supplies and rising costs of oil and gas motivated us to expand usage of renewable energy. We introduced our plan for the first two factories—Southland Resources Co., Ltd. (BJ3 in Rayong province and BJ4 in Buengkan province)—in 2020 and could start generating solar energy at the end of 2022. The shift to renewable energy can result in carbon emission reductions and mitigate the risks of energy constraints that struck the world economy badly in 2022. As a result, we devised a strategy to continue the solar rooftop projects in the other four factories. Now that the contracts have been signed, the construction will proceed as planned. That means six of our factories will have used solar energy by 2025, and our use of solar energy will account for around 11 percent of total energy consumption. In addition to the renewable energy, we started collecting data on Scope 3 carbon emissions to get a more holistic picture of the organization’s carbon footprint. Additionally, we have started with using 4 electric forklifts to replace our traditional diesel powered forklifts.

Employee Care and Social Contribution:

As for the social aspect of our sustainability management, our people and local communities are at the heart of it. Due to the rising inflation that caused economic tensions this year, we carried out 2 financial assistance programs—the Extra Allowance Project and the Education Loan Project—to reduce the financial burden and increase the morale of employees.

Apart from sporadic engagement activities and social contribution efforts, we also paid attention to ongoing projects. We were able to successfully continue our ongoing engagement projects with Ban Klong Nokkratung School, focusing on sustainable lunches for local students. Continuously, we have made a plan to follow up on and expand the projects with the school and also carry out similar activities in our other factories’ neighboring areas.

We believe that a sustainable business is built on strong employees and communities. Therefore, we will always move forward together with our people and communities. It was very heartening for me to hand over on behalf of the Group a donation of 1,000,000 THB to the Hatyai Hospital Healthcare Foundation.

Making progress in sustainability had always been what we pursue. In 2022 we managed to achieve the lowest loss time injury frequency rate, injury frequency rate, and incidents in the last 5 years. With respect to continuous enhancement of employment skills, we attained the highest number of hours of training in the last 3 years. In these pages you will find examples of our factories’ innovating simple protective measures and yet had mitigated significant risks to work injuries.

Sustainable Natural Rubber and Supply Chain:

In observing that “sustainability begins at home”, in 2022 we initiated for the first time an annual online Q&A exercise to score understanding of our published policies on ethics, social, environmental, health, safety, and other issues. Our factory team leaders, supervisors and senior levels of employees individually took part and were made to pass the exercise.

The natural rubber industry heavily relies on nature. Recognizing our reliance on natural capital, we have taken steps to establish a sustainable natural rubber supply chain, both on our own and in collaboration with our business partners. We continued close engagement with our suppliers through the supplier capacity building program. Plus, we made an earnest attempt to evolve our traceability approach by engaging with our customers in identifying the sources of our natural rubber supplies.

In the months ahead, we shall focus on one program - our natural rubber agroforestry program: to coordinate and support agroforestry among our natural rubber suppliers who are rubber farmers interested in the program, working with the cooperation of agroforestry experts and other relevant parties.

We encourage readers to learn more about our sustainability efforts in this Report. We are open to positive changes and further improvement in our sustainability journey, motivated by our motto: “Think Good, Better will Follow”

* The content of this message was originally posted on Southland Rubber's Sustainability Report 2022.
* The English version of the message shall prevail over the Thai translation.