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‘Next stop: Green business’ is a podcast miniseries by State of Green, where we ask Danish companies why they continue to believe, despite growing pressures and uncertainties, that green business is good business. The series will be published bi-weekly on your favourite podcast streaming platform.
Discover the podcast episodesAround the world, industries are under growing pressure to reduce emissions, cut resource consumption and take responsibility for the environmental impact of their entire value chains. At the same time, companies must navigate evolving regulations, meet customer demands for transparency and stay competitive. For many Danish companies, this challenge has become an opportunity: they are proving that turning value chains green is not only possible, but also good for business.
To highlight these experiences, State of Green has launched a new podcast miniseries: Next stop: Green business. In each episode, we talk to a Danish company that has worked to make its value chains more sustainable while maintaining competitiveness – demonstrating that green business is good business.
In the first episode, we visit ROCKWOOL, a legacy business whose product is as enduring as the volcanic processes it imitates. As Senior Vice President of Marketing, Communication and Public Affairs, Mirella Vitale explains, “our melting technology actually reproduces a volcano. Our oven is like a little volcano that takes this rock, heats it up and makes it into lava.” From this process comes stone wool: a material with an infinite life cycle that can insulate buildings, resist fire, support crop growth – and be recycled again and again.
Founded in 1909 and still headquartered in Hedehusene, Denmark, ROCKWOOL has made sustainability a global priority by aligning its goals with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. For a company whose production is energy-intensive by nature, the central challenge is clear: how do you reduce your footprint while melting rocks at more than 1500 degrees?
Tough challenges require innovative solutions, and for ROCKWOOL, the answer has been to develop its own electrical melting technology, which has been successfully implemented in Switzerland. The plan is to scale this technology globally. And for ROCKWOOL, this is not a vague sustainability goal. As Vitale puts it:
“We don’t make pledges. We make plans.”
Innovation also plays a key role in extending the life cycle of ROCKWOOL’s product, whether through dedicated spaces like the “Seventh Heaven” lab, where new ideas and applications are tested, or through smart circularity efforts like the Rockcycle program, which takes back stone wool from construction and demolition sites for recycling into new products.
In the first episode of the ‘Next stop: Green business’ podcast miniseries, we visit ROCKWOOL to hear the tale of how the organisation utilises stone wool innovation to drive both sustainability and long-term business growth.
Explore the episodeNext stop: Green business is part of State of Green’s podcast universe and offers short, accessible episodes of no more than 15 minutes. Each episode focuses on one company’s green transition journey, recorded on-site to capture both atmosphere and authentic voices.
The podcast blends interviews, real-time conversations and on-site impressions, all shaped around a recurring set of questions that invite honest reflection and personal insights. Besides ROCKWOOL, the podcast series includes episodes with companies such as Danfoss, Grundfos, NKT, PensionDanmark, Hempel, FLS, Schneider Electric and VELUX. New episodes will drop throughout the remainder of 2025.
The miniseries is available on Spotify, Apple Podcast and stateofgreen.com.
