From Account Manager to Sustainability Manager

At the data center company Conapto, there was no sustainability manager when customers, legislation, and the market started asking about the company's sustainability work.

That's when Christoffer Linder started taking on projects, step by step, that nobody had asked him to do, driven by his passion for sustainability.

Before long he was able to show the value these efforts were bringing, and today he's the company's Sustainability Manager, responsible for things like heat recovery and carbon capture.

From Account Manager to Sustainability Manager

Christoffer joined Conapto as an Account Manager, focused on customer relationships and internal processes across sales, admin and cross-team collaboration. Sustainability wasn't part of his job description, but it was very much his personal interest, and that's what led him to start driving sustainability projects on the side of his regular work.

"The role has grown over a long time, largely thanks to my passion for sustainability and having run several sustainability projects. I pushed for a long time on the idea that Conapto needed someone who could actively work on long-term sustainability governance and strategy," says Christoffer Linder.

Changing your role from the inside

Turning a personal interest into a formal mandate took more than just enthusiasm — it took finding the right people to pitch the idea to, and the right arguments to be taken seriously.

"One key factor was managing to understand and navigate the unofficial power structures within the company, and pushing the case for long-term sustainability work with the people who actually had the power to change my role," he says.

The argument that ultimately landed wasn't the vision itself, but what it was worth in practice.

"The most important thing has always been translating it into 'what's the value here?' If you can't, as a sustainability expert, translate your work into what it earns or saves the company, a board, leadership team or manager is never going to take your proposals seriously," says Christoffer Linder.

From waste heat to captured carbon

Conapto has long worked with heat recovery to build more circular value creation. One project the company is now exploring for the longer term is carbon capture modules that run on waste heat while also functioning as chillers. The goal is to get around the bottlenecks that currently stop surplus heat from being put to use — whether that's due to a lack of district heating infrastructure or a lack of buyers — and move closer to 90–100% year-round heat recovery, while capturing carbon at the same time.

A growing customer requirement

Sustainability has long been part of Conapto's culture and brand. More recently, Christoffer has noticed it becoming a clearer customer requirement too.

"We're now seeing more and more customer requirements where a Nordic data center is simply expected to be sustainable," he says. "For international customers, price is still the top priority, but more and more of them are now setting higher sustainability standards too, which we're happy to see."

From scattered data to a working system

Working with GoClimate has mainly given Conapto a clearer structure for data collection and reporting.

"We used to have no clear framework for working proactively with our suppliers and internal stakeholders. Now we have a working system, which we're hoping to automate and scale soon," says Christoffer Linder.

Christoffer's experience shows that a sustainability role doesn't always need to exist before the work can begin — sometimes it's the work itself that creates the role.

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With GoClimate, companies get a clear structure for their climate data, making it possible to prioritize the right initiatives and show the actual value sustainability work creates.

Want to go from scattered initiatives to structured sustainability work, just like Conapto? Get in touch and we'll tell you more.