L&T Brand Guidelines: A 1905 Vaasa Wholesaler, Waste Bags & the Lassila & Tikanoja Initials

A wholesale house with two founders.

L&T is short for Lassila & Tikanoja, the surnames of its founders, Josef Lassila and Frithjof Tikanoja, who started the business in the western Finnish town of Vaasa in 1905, the company says; Finnish Wikipedia gives the same year and town and spells the second founder’s first name Frithiof. It began as a wholesaler. The company lists fabrics and knick-knacks alongside heavier goods such as soap, Baltic herring, bagels and confectionery, and says the business spread across Finland to become the largest privately owned wholesaler in the Nordic countries.

In 1923 it added clothing manufacture, starting with a suit and shirt factory in Vaasa, Finnish Wikipedia says. For the Helsinki Olympic Games planned for 1940 the company was to make the clothing of the Finnish team and created a suit label, Stadion, for the purpose; the Games were cancelled because of the Second World War. After the war the Vaasa clothing factory became a subsidiary, Tiklas Oy, and production spread to Seinäjoki in 1952. The company says it was one of Finland’s largest clothing makers until the 1980s, with brands including Tiklas suits, shirts and tops and Topman shoes. At its height, the company says, it had industrial operations in almost 20 locations around Finland, and from the 1960s exports made up more than half of its net sales.

Lassila & Tikanoja listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange in 1961 and moved its head office from Vaasa to Helsinki in 1965, Finnish Wikipedia says. The Seinäjoki factory was enlarged in 1964 to begin exports to the Soviet Union, which soon took two-thirds of its output, and in 1969 the company received the export award of the President of the Republic.

From waste bags to waste management.

The turn towards environmental services came through acquisitions in the 1980s. Lassila & Tikanoja bought the non-woven fabric maker J.W. Suominen in 1982 and the flexible-packaging firm Amerplast in 1988. In 1989 it bought 74% of Säkkiväline Oy, a company formed in 1967 after Finnish paper-bag makers began promoting waste bags and waste-bag systems earlier in the decade, the company says. Säkkiväline had grown by acquisition into waste collection, cleaning, industrial cleaning and maintenance, and later property maintenance.

The older businesses fell away. Clothing, footwear and the wholesale trade were discontinued in the early 1990s, the company says; Finnish Wikipedia links this to Finland’s recession of the time and the end of bilateral trade with the Soviet Union, and says the company left clothing for good when Avardo, a clothing business in which it held a third, went bankrupt in 1995. That year Säkkiväline became a wholly owned subsidiary, and by the end of the decade it brought in almost half of the group’s net sales. Through the 1990s, the company says, Säkkiväline invested in waste recovery and recycling and added hazardous waste management to its services. In spring 2000 it bought WM Ympäristöpalvelut Oy, the Finnish subsidiary of the American group Waste Management (see the WM guide), which, the company says, made it the leading provider of environmental management services in Finland.

On 30 September 2001 the group split in two: the materials businesses became Suominen Corporation, a separately listed company, while Lassila & Tikanoja kept the services. On 31 March 2002 Säkkiväline merged into the parent, and at the same time, the company says, it launched the L&T brand name for all its divisions: environmental services, property and office support services, and industrial services.

How waste groups present themselves.

Waste and recycling companies rarely sell a product people choose off a shelf. Their identity is carried instead by the things the public sees every week: collection vehicles, bins, depots and, increasingly, large plants on the edge of town. Some of those marks have long histories. English Wikipedia records that the London firm Cory gave its colliers a black funnel with a white band and a black diamond, flew a red house flag with a cream diamond, and later painted its road haulage vehicles white with the same black lozenge.

On their own websites, the companies in this guide arrange themselves around services rather than products: collection, recycling and energy recovery, each with its own page. Viridor’s site leads with energy from waste, decarbonisation and what it calls Circular Solutions; Cory’s explains, step by step, how a black bag travels from a riverside transfer station by barge to its Riverside plant at Belvedere, and how ash from the process becomes aggregate. Those pages describe the work as the companies describe it, and this guide treats them that way.

Photography does much of the branding. Plants, barges, tugs, sorting halls and depots appear far more often than logos, and new facilities are announced with architects’ impressions long before they open; the trade weekly letsrecycle.com illustrated its 2022 report on Cory’s second Belvedere plant with one.

The other constant is the dated report. Viridor published its ESG report for the 2026 financial year in October 2026, and Cory published its 2025 annual and sustainability reports in June 2026, each with tonnages, electricity generated and progress on new plants. This guide uses such figures only as the companies or a dated source give them, and sets out what can be checked about each firm: who founded it, who owns it and how it presents its work.

A demerger into circular economy only.

For two decades L&T combined waste work with cleaning and property maintenance. Finnish Wikipedia records purchases such as the Hansalaiset cleaning and property group in 2011 and Veolia’s facility-management business in Sweden in 2017, and the sale of its Latvian operations in 2014. On the recycling side, it says L&T expanded its plastics recycling plant at Merikarvia, opening a new line there in September 2019 that doubled its capacity. Finland’s waste-law reform of 2021 moved household waste collection from private firms to municipal companies, Finnish Wikipedia notes, which raised the weight of business customers in L&T’s work.

In December 2024 the board said it would plan a separation of the circular-economy and facility-services businesses into two listed companies. The partial demerger was registered on 31 December 2025, according to the company’s stock-exchange release that day: the circular-economy business passed to a new Lassila & Tikanoja Plc, whose shares began trading on Nasdaq Helsinki on 2 January 2026, while the old company was renamed Luotea and kept the facility services.

The present L&T describes itself as a Nordic circular economy company working in Finland and Sweden, with about 2,300 employees and services in waste management and recycling, hazardous waste and remediation, and industrial and water treatment. In February 2026 Yle reported that it had opened a new waste unit and recycling plant at Hepomäki in Kuopio, with more than 80 staff and capacity for over 19,000 tonnes a year, taking recyclable materials from business customers in North Savo as well as small lots of household hazardous waste.

For a design guide, L&T shows how a two-founder name became a two-letter brand: the initials were adopted for every division in 2002 and kept by the circular-economy company after the 2025 demerger. Compare it with Ragn-Sells, another Nordic recycling company, and Veolia. For this guide we use spruce green, birch white and granite grey with a humanist sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep L&T’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.