Olli Ylä-Jarkko is the CTO of TreeToTextile, a Swedish company developing eco-friendly textile fiber. Founded in 2014, the startup is owned by H&M and Ikea, among others. StoraEnso joined in 2019, with the aim of starting to scale the technology to an industrial scale.
“When I started in 2020, I was the second employee in the company. Now there are 47 of us,” Ylä-Jarkko says.
The Master of Science in Chemical Engineering has worked in the paper industry his entire career, and the job offer gave him the opportunity to do something different.
“The first task was to build a factory for a completely new technology, and it seemed very difficult. But opportunities like this only come once in a lifetime, so I couldn’t refuse.”
Working in Skåne from Finland
However, going abroad was nothing new to Ylä-Jarko. He was an exchange student already in high school, and while studying at the Helsinki University of Technology he spent a year in the USA. For the first two years of his working career, he was part of a program that saw him work in Germany for a year and in the USA for a little over six months. From 2012 to 2017, he lived in Germany with his family while working on a paper machine construction project.
“We had a great time in Germany, but for family reasons we decided to return to Finland. The children are now in middle school and the first year of high school, so this time we decided that I would only go to Sweden to work, meaning I would live in Skåne for weeks, where our demo factory is located, but the family would live in Hyvinkää.”
A few days a week we work remotely, but at the factory we work with our fists in the mud and solve problems: we always make small changes and test again.
“We are currently working on the smallest possible industrial scale. So we have real factory-scale equipment, but the smallest possible. However, this is a big leap compared to laboratory or pilot scale, and of course the challenges we face and solve every day are also bigger.”
In TreeToTextile's technology, cellulose is dissolved and spun into textile fiber in an alkaline environment. Chemical consumption is minimal because the solution is not neutralized in between, making the method resource-efficient and inexpensive.
Develops patience
Although Ylä-Jarkko has been able to influence the work culture and hire people himself, the company is very Swedish in nature. However, the employees form a fairly international group, and the working language is English.
“We just calculated that the people working for us have a total of nine native languages. Everyone speaks English, and the conversation easily translates into English even with Swedes, even if the goal is to learn Swedish well.”
Swedish work culture emerges above all as a consensus-seeking culture.
"Swedes do everything they can to avoid conflicts, and they always try to find a common understanding through discussion. Finns may get frustrated with such bickering, and easily just rush into a decision. This has taught me patience, at least to listen to the discussion calmly before I start drawing conclusions about how to proceed."
