HELSINKI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apr 29, 2024--
Sustera Group, a leading property wellbeing expert in Finland and Sweden, specialises in supporting clients throughout the lifecycle of their properties. The company aims to accelerate the change towards more sustainable construction and more responsible building management, driven strongly by EU regulations. With the new strategy launched, Sustera will pursue strategic acquisitions to establish a foothold in the UK, DACH, and Benelux. The Group’s new strategy also contains a significant carbon footprint reduction target: reduce customers’ CO 2 emissions by 1 million tonnes by 2028 through the company’s services.
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To support the growth strategy, the company, formerly Raksystems, announces its rebranding as Sustera Group. The new name and tagline “Sustera – Buildings are for life” reflect the need to bring buildings to a new, more sustainable era.
“As a part of the new strategy, our goal is to create a stronger, more unified group with sustainability at the core to support our international growth. This also benefits our customers when they receive all building lifecycle services from a single provider,” says Tuomas Qvick, CEO of Sustera Group.
Sustainability at the core of operations
Buildings are a major challenge for the climate. Buildings are responsible for 40% of all energy consumption and 36% of greenhouse gas emissions. According to the European Commission, there are over 220 million buildings in Europe, of which over a third are more than 50 years old and 75% of them energy inefficient. Sustera aims to help building owners in this challenge throughout the lifecycle of their buildings.
EU is committed to become climate neutral by 2050. Sustainability is an increasingly important aspect in the building industry, as both EU regulations and local legislations are tightening. Property owners will need to consider how energy efficiency and zero emissions apply to their businesses. Agreements such as the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) and the Fit for 55 require buildings to significantly reduce emissions while making buildings healthier for people.
“Sustainable operations are no longer an additional luxury that concerns select buildings in the EU. Instead, all buildings will need to adapt to the EU’s new regulations and taxonomy. Lifecycle thinking is needed for profitable business and to ensure a greener, better future. And most importantly, buildings have a huge impact on the health and wellbeing of their occupants,” Qvick says.
Growth from new European markets
The group’s new strategy for 2024–2028 includes ambitious plans for expansion into new markets. In addition to further strengthening its presence in the Nordic region, Sustera will pursue strategic acquisitions to establish a foothold in the UK, DACH, and Benelux.
The impact-focused investment company Trill Impact acquired a majority stake of Raksystems in 2022. The shared goal is to make Sustera a leading player in supporting healthy and efficient buildings not only in the Nordics but also beyond.
“We are excited to work closely with Sustera to create a pan-European property lifecycle expert. We identified the group as a thought leader within property wellbeing and green building services and see significant potential to drive positive change within energy efficiency and indoor air conditions in buildings. The plan is to leverage our experience to help Sustera expand internationally and become a leading player in its field in Europe,” says Johan Lundén, Partner at Trill Impact Advisory.
About Sustera:Sustera is a leading property lifecycle management company, with roots in the Nordic region dating back as far as 1989. With over 700 dedicated professionals, we ensure that buildings increase their value and become more sustainable. Our vision is to accelerate the change towards more sustainable construction and building management.
We offer expert services for the entire lifecycle of a building; we assess, investigate, and carry out surveys. We give advice that prevents problems and reduces lifecycle costs for both new and existing buildings. We ensure that ever-tightening sustainability and energy efficiency requirements are met. We professionally design, manage, and supervise both renovation and new construction projects.
Sustera – Buildings are for life. www.sustera.com
About Trill Impact:Trill Impact is a pioneering Impact House with around EUR 1.2 billion in assets under management across its investment strategies, Impact Private Equity, Impact Ventures and Microfinance, with a team of around 55 experienced professionals based in the Nordics, Germany, Luxembourg and USA. Trill Impact aims to become a force for positive change through impact private investments, delivering Real Returns and Lasting Impact for the benefit of investors, businesses and society at large - encouraging others to follow. For more information, please visit:www.trillimpact.com
“Sustainable operations are no longer an additional luxury that concerns select buildings in the EU. Instead, all buildings will need to adapt to the EU’s new regulations and taxonomy,” says Tuomas Qvick, CEO of Sustera Group. Sustera is a leading property lifecycle management company. Photo: Sustera
CANNES, France (AP) — Only recently has George Miller realized just how influential his medical education was to the world of “Mad Max.”
Miller was briefly a doctor before finding filmmaking and his twin brother, whom he attended university with, remained one. As a resident at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, Miller saw people in birth and in death, in moments of, he says, “extremis.”
Extremis — a Latin word that literally translates as “at the point of death” — would be a fairly apt way to describe the post-apocalypse wasteland of “Mad Max.” It could apply to, well, all of the characters, or to the Earth, itself. The more you think about it, the more Miller’s desert dystopia begins looking like a fantastical ER. The human blood bags of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Furiosa’s prosthetic arm. Immortan Joe’s respirator mask.
“I don’t think I’d still be making films if I didn’t have that part of myself,” Miller said of his medical background in a recent interview.
“You’re looking at a human being from every point of view. As organs. As individuals,” Miller says. “Sometimes looking through a microscope and seeing their cells. Or an autopsy. Psychologically. In every way, you’re looking at the human being. That’s what you do as a storyteller.”
Miller’s holistic eye could apply to the sprawling saga of “Mad Max,” too. It’s a world that has lived in his head for nearly half a century. Unlike most other long-running film franchises, it’s exclusively Miller’s. The 79-year-old filmmaker has written and directed every film, from 1979’s “Mad Max” to the new “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” which opens in theaters May 24.
Also unlike most franchises, Miller’s vision has grown only more kinetic with time. “Fury Road,” considered among the greatest action films ever made, moved like Buster Keaton on steroids, with madcap stunts and continual forward movement, all agonizingly spliced together from the briefest of shots amid an infamously troubled production. “Furiosa,” a prequel to the events of that film starring Anya Taylor-Joy as a young Furiosa, enlarges the saga, and, particularly in a few breathless sequences, maintains the same headlong momentum.
“I don’t do anything with my hands anymore,” Miller says. “There’s always someone who can type faster than me. There’s always someone who can cut faster than me. There’s always someone who can operate a camera much better than me. So it’s all in the head.”
“I can quote some of the lines from the movie but I know virtually every cut of virtually every movie I’ve made — and in many cases, the cuts of some of my favorite movies,” adds Miller. “That’s my neurology.”
But it took time to restart “Mad Max.” As sensational as the response was to “Fury Road,” which won six Oscars, its making was marred by production troubles and discord among its cast. Friction continued in the years after, too, as Miller and Warner Bros. sued each other in a pay dispute.
Those issues eventually got ironed out and attention turned to a pair of scripts Miller had ready. While “Fury Road” was stuck in delay, Miller had written treatments for both “Furiosa” and “The Wasteland,” a “Mad Max” film taking place a year before “Fury Road.” He hopes to make that soon. First came “Furiosa,” which Miller first intended to be an anime.
“I had no thoughts of making it into a feature film,” he says. “But when ‘Fury Road’ was delayed yet again by rains, there was no point in making an anime before we made ‘Fury Road.’ By the time we made ‘Fury Road,’ all the history of that, we decided to make it as a feature.”
Miller reassembled much of the same team from “Fury Road”: editor Margaret Sixel (Miller’s wife), co-writer Nico Lathouris, producer Doug Mitchell, production designer Colin Gibson, stunt coordinator Guy Norris. But his cast would be largely new. For a younger Furiosa, he turned to Taylor-Joy. As they discussed her casting, Miller asked Taylor-Joy to film herself doing the “Mad as Hell” monologue from “Network.”
How was her Peter Finch? “I got the part,” Taylor-Joy says, smiling. Then came the hard part: shooting “Furiosa.”
“It’s what I wanted. I knew I wanted something that was going to test me in every way, shape and form,” says Taylor-Joy. “And I got that experience. Anybody that’s attracted to making a ‘Mad Max’ movie, if it’s not arduous in some way, I personally would feel cheated. That’s not what you go to the wasteland for.”
That included only some three dozen lines in the whole movie for Taylor-Joy. On the other hand, a staggering action sequence principally on the War Rig took 78 days to shoot. Taylor-Joy says it was an exercise of piece-by-piece filmmaking.
“I could kind of count myself down,” says Taylor-Joy. “I was like, ‘OK, I’m below the vehicle. And now I’m on the side of the vehicle. And I’ve finally made it into the cow catcher. And, oh my God, I’m standing. This is better.’"
Chris Hemsworth, in one of the most colorful and transformative performances of his career, plays the villain Dementus with the flair of a deranged Roman conqueror. A key to unlocking the character, Hemsworth says, was a tip from Miller to try journaling in the voice of Dementus, a maniac with his own painful history who wears his Rosebud — a teddy bear — strapped to his back.
“It was the most satisfying experience that I’ve had," Hemsworth says of the role. “The script gave me so many more options and directions that I could take a character than I had previously been given. It was a big departure from everything else I’d done."
Lengthy as the making of “Furiosa” was, both stars went into the process determined to have a more positive environment than on “Fury Road.”
“We all went in to make this — not excusing any kind of behavior — wanting to be extra kind to each other,” says Taylor-Joy. “Especially for me, I’m a big George Miller fan. I wanted to make sure he felt respected and heard and cared on set.”
“Mad Max” has by now morphed into a kind of archetype — a near-future Western with amped-up modern anxieties. As before in “Mad Max,” water is short and natural resources are brutally battled over in “Furiosa.”
“You could argue that depending on where you are in history, where you are in time and space, there is always a sense of potential chaos and a fallen world,” Miller says. “It’s always there in the zeitgeist.”
But, Miller points out, these movies are largely shot outdoors, and the conditions he’s made them in has markedly changed with time. Miller remembers visiting an area of the Great Barrier Reef in the early ’70s. When he returned decades later to the same beach, “the difference was shocking to me.”
“All of that stuff is there," Millers says. “And it has to be expressed in any story you tell about the world.”
Miller’s brother recently retired as a doctor. But for years, they’d speak on the phone about his patients, discussing observations and diagnoses.
“That was a way, I realize, of us both processing the chaos of the world,” says Miller. “I like to think that that’s what I’m still doing.”
Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Anya Taylor-Joy in a scene from "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga." The film will world premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)
Director George Miller poses for a portrait to promote "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" in Los Angeles, Friday, May 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Director George Miller poses for a portrait to promote "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" in Los Angeles, Friday, May 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Director George Miller poses for a portrait to promote "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" in Los Angeles, Friday, May 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Director George Miller poses for a portrait to promote "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" in Los Angeles, Friday, May 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
