Narratives of change in Norsk Gjenvinning: A journey towards sustainable waste management

Abstract

According to Erik Osmundsen, the CEO of Norsk Gjenvinning (NG), the waste management business is intrinsically a very sustainable industry, but it is operating in a non-sustainable way. Sustainability has become the defining challenge of our time and organizations have taken steps to realize the many benefits that lie within this field. Since the introduction of Altor in 2011, NG has gone through a dramatic turnaround. Altor was aware of some challenges, however, they found that the organization had several unexpected challenges. Together with the new top management they started to focus on the opportunities and challenges within NG. In order for management to understand the needs of the organization, Osmundsen, the new CEO at that time, started a program to eliminate corruption and improve sustainability, i.e. compliance, circular economy, recycling, recovery, and re-use. His commitment, together with rest of the top management, contributed to the facilitation of sustainable implementation and the new identity of NG. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate NG’s journey towards a more sustainable waste management. In order to explore the challenges, changes and outcomes, we conducted a narrative analysis based on stories given about past, present and future events, to compare and investigate the perception of these events within the organization. We found throughout our research, that there were certain situations and obstacle components, i.e. absence of control and communication, ‘unsustainably sustainable’, uncertainty and misunderstanding connected to the concept of sustainability, culture conflict and poor managerial control, that may have reduced the effect of the implementations. However, one can find several positive effects due to Osmundsen’s proactive leadership, i.e. increased compliance, sustainability, HSSE, rewriting of governmental regulations and laws, cultural change. We argue that our findings may help NG and organizations in similar situations to reduce the complexities that surround ethical turnaround. This may in turn provide a better understanding of efforts to implement sustainable strategies.