Green-Forward Manufacturing: Aligning with the EU Green Deal through Smart Factory Strategies, with Anniina Virta-Toikka, VP, Sustainability at Konecranes [Speaker Spotlight]

At this year’s European Manufacturing Summit, Anniina Virta-Toikka, VP of Sustainability at Konecranes, will share how the company is embedding sustainability into every aspect of its operations—from product design and modernization to compliance with evolving EU regulations. Her session will explore the challenges of aligning with the EU Green Deal, measuring ROI on sustainability initiatives, and driving value through electrification, predictive maintenance, and lifecycle thinking.

As VP of Sustainability, Anniina leads Konecranes’ climate, circular economy, and social responsibility agenda, ensuring ESG principles are integrated into core processes and innovation. With a background spanning industries from logistics to food, and even the NGO sector, she brings a unique perspective on how cross-functional collaboration and persistent leadership are critical to accelerating sustainable transformation in manufacturing.

Don’t miss the opportunity to hear Anniina’s perspective on shaping a resilient, future-focused sustainability agenda.

Could you begin with a brief introduction about yourself, and an overview of your responsibilities as the VP of Sustainability at Konecranes?

Currently, I am working as a Vice President, Sustainability at Konecranes, steering our climate, circular economy, and social responsibility work. I am focused on building a sustainability agenda where future ambition is reached by innovating new opportunities and by integrating ESG into processes. 

The best part of my job is that sustainability is a cross-functional topic that is relevant for everything we do. I am privileged to collaborate with all functions and business teams with my professional team. Sustainability work is about driving innovation and pushing the status quo.

In recent years, the work has been focusing a lot on building compliance over mainly EU driven ESG regulations. This has included significant extension of sustainability reporting due to the EU CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive). CSDDD (Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive) made us review our purchasing processes to ensure future compliance, to name a few. 

Before Konecranes, I have worked with environmental management in different industries, including logistics and food, and I have also seen the NGO world while working in the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

What’s one of the biggest misconceptions manufacturers still have about aligning with the EU Green Deal, and how do you address it within your leadership team?

In the current situation, I believe the biggest challenge is the unpredictability of the EU regulatory environment. A year ago, my answer would have been very different. Now the unfortunate back-and-forth game with many regulations is creating uncertainty: Are the regulations supporting with the transition needed to reach the 1,5C pathway? The simplification of regulations is welcome but when companies started to fully implement the first wave of the regulations and then in between EU informed that these will be changed it is challenging to convince the leadership team that the investments are needed.

In the current environment, the values of companies matter even more. I believe that the companies—with leaders who continue with their ambitious sustainability agendas—will win eventually.

How do you measure the ROI of sustainability initiatives, particularly those tied to workforce training or predictive maintenance?

Measuring the ROI of sustainability is not always straightforward. This is rather easy when we talk about eco portfolio product sales, in other words, the sales of e.g. electrified equipment, modernization and other service concepts like predictive maintenance – here we have clear monetary values.

Similarly to us, most of our big customers have also set ambitious ESG targets and have embedded requirements too, for example, their supplier codes, and this creates value, but the calculation of the ROI for these kinds of activities is much more difficult. One consideration being – if we are not doing the work, how much would it then cost? This is money that cannot be similarly quantified.

Photo: Konecranes

What are some of the most impactful sustainability initiatives Konecranes has launched recently?

At Konecranes, as much as 99% of the emissions are generated in our value chain, the biggest source of emissions being the use of sold products. Switching from diesel-powered equipment to electric is the biggest needle mover. The new electrified product offering launches will enable emission reductions during the upcoming years. 

On top of that, the second most impactful part of our offering is modernization competence. We can modernize diesel-powered port cranes when they reach their end of life by fully switching to the latest, modern technology and power with electricity while still saving the huge steel bars to continue their life in use.

As I am so excited about our offering, one more example I would like to mention is a remote monitoring system that enables us to follow how certain components are wearing down. We have collected a lot of data, and we can predict the wear down of components. By predictive maintenance, we can secure no sudden stops happen at the customer operations, causing unplanned down-time, and that the service technician has all the needed parts in his truck when servicing the customer equipment to avoid extra driving.

As a global leader in lifting equipment, how does Konecranes embed sustainability into product design and lifecycle thinking?

Design process is key in ensuring that our offering is developed in a way that aims to minimize the product environmental impact throughout its lifecycle and acknowledges the product serviceability.

We are strongly guiding our product design as well as our R&D towards low-carbon innovations. We have created a tool called Konecranes Design for Environment (DfE) with the purpose of improving the product’s environmental performance with tangible design actions taken by our experts, from material selection to energy efficiency, durability, and maintainability of the product. We have hard targets and softer targets measuring our activities. Hard target being our climate targets, that basically measure the impact of our sales, and softer targets to follow if all the new solutions are more sustainable than the previous generation, through e.g., the utilization of the DfE.

Photo: Konecranes

How do you prioritize sustainability initiatives at the corporate level, especially when navigating trade-offs between innovation, cost, and regulatory compliance?

Regulatory compliance is always important, acknowledging that there might be different levels of how to build this capability. In these cases, we are assessing the potential impact of the needed activities and how much it improves our sustainability impact, and if the end result is limited, then the leanest approach should be utilized. 

Whatever we do, we should create value for customers. The cost of compliance should not exceed the benefit. And as an example, in my opinion, in the case of CSRD, this might not be the case, as the 1^st launched European Sustainability Reporting Standards are too extensive to provide the benefit they were supposed to provide.

Customer centricity is a relevant topic for us, and when considering the future needs of our customers, we need to carefully ask the right questions from our customers. With new solutions, the main challenge is often that they are more expensive, and that is a reason why we need support from regulations and public funding also in the years to come.

What leadership skills have been most critical for guiding cross-functional teams toward shared sustainability goals?

As a leader in sustainability, you need to be persistent, knowledgeable about business and sustainability, as well as remember the power of co-operation. For me, the most critical skill to guide our cross-functional teams has been collaboration and influencing. I need to be the one who sees the whole big picture and have the long-term vision in my head to be able to engage people to do the transformation or the continuous improvement.

Sustainability change and every change require continuous work, continuous training, and systematic communication. Most people are really interested in being part of the change, but making it happen requires that the sustainability professionals are there to support, are there to guide, so that the actual work is easy for everybody else. The group driving the sustainability work needs to be persistent and agile. We need to lead the change of mind as new things require new competencies and new considerations.

"As a leader in sustainability, you need to be persistent, knowledgeable about business and sustainability, as well as remember the power of co-operation. For me, the most critical skill to guide our cross-functional teams has been collaboration and influencing. I need to be the one who sees the whole big picture and have the long-term vision in my head to be able to engage people to do the transformation or the continuous improvement."

How do you mentor or develop the next generation of leaders to think strategically about both business performance and environmental responsibility?

In my role, I have the unique opportunity to collaborate with basically everyone. With that said, I will never meet all of the ~17,000 colleagues of mine. But, I have both the privilege but also a big responsibility to convince and engage our leaders to include environmental and also social responsibility considerations to their decision-making toolbox.

One of my responsibilities is to ensure that the extended sustainability network at Konecranes is valued and that we are holistically informed on what is ongoing. My basic tools for this are to host team meetings where business and sustainability teams come together.

One last thing is communication and training. Sustainability as such is nothing new, but, e.g., climate data is a much newer thing. It is not yet understood by all, that the accuracy is still evolving a lot, e.g., if we move from spend based emission calculation to supplier specific, the results will be very different. Not all leaders can yet be fully professionals with this kind of new data and new thinking, and therefore we need continuous communication and training.

Photo: Konecranes

What are you most looking forward to about the European Manufacturing Summit?

I am eagerly expecting the European Manufacturing Summit to hear the great speakers and to be inspired. The most interesting discussions usually take place in-between. I appreciated last year, the roundtable lunch sessions, where we ended up having engaging change of minds over many topics.

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to Anniina Virta-Toikka for sharing her expertise and perspectives in this blog. We are thrilled to welcome her to the European Manufacturing Summit, where she will discuss how Konecranes is embedding sustainability into innovation, compliance, and product design.

Don’t miss the chance to gain insights from Anniina and many other distinguished speakers. Reserve your spot today and be part of the conversations shaping the future of manufacturing in Europe.