Welcome to the homepage of the Alcoa and Landsvirkjun Sustainability Initiative.
This initiative was launched in 2004, in the early stages of the construction of the Kárahnjukar dam and the Fjardaál smelter in Reydarfjordur, East-Iceland. These were probably the largest projects ever entered into in Iceland, and naturally people worried which effect they would have on Icelandic society, the environment and the economy of the country.
Alcoa and Landsirkjun acted with responsibility: representatives of both companies got together and discussed what they could do to prevent or counteract negative effects that could be directly or indirectly traced to the construction and/or operation of the power station and the smelter.
Neither one of the companies had a model how to conduct a project of this kind. It soon became clear that the initiative was a pilot project, not only in Iceland, but globally. Icelandic and foreign consultants were hired to help the companies with the design and outline of the project.
Now that Fljótsdalur Power Station and the Alcoa Fjardaál smelter are in full operation, the initiative is still ongoing (2012) and this page is constantly being updated as new data becomes available.
On this page, you can view the history of the initiative, read about the concept of sustainability, or catch up with the development of our social, environmental or economical indicators.
The 2014 annual meeting of the Eastern Sustainability Initiative was held at the Icelandair Hotel Hérað in Egilsstaðir on Tuesday, April 29th. This is the largest annual meeting of the project so far, but participants were almost 60.