Tuija Pohjolainen-Hiltunen

Tuija Pohjolainen-Hiltunen did not stumble into water, she chose it early and never left. By her own account she started about 30 years ago, "really driven by these environmental topics already that time," long before clean tech was a hot ticket, and that conviction has run through a career that took her from an engineering degree at the Helsinki University of Technology into one water role after another. She has been the equipment supplier and she has been the chemicals supplier, which is a useful thing to have done both of, because it means she has sold the tanks and the dosing pumps as well as the molecules that go in them. She joined Kemira in 2008, climbed through its pulp-and-paper and water businesses on both sides of the Atlantic, and since January 2025 has led Water Solutions for the whole group from Atlanta.

Tuija Pohjolainen-Hiltunen runs the water arm of a company most people outside the industry have never heard of and probably depend on anyway. Kemira is a roughly 3.5-billion-euro Finnish group, listed in Helsinki and a bit over a hundred years old, that makes the coagulants and polymers used to treat drinking water, municipal wastewater, and the process water of heavy industries like pulp, paper, and oil and gas. Her framing for all of it is "chemistry with purpose", by which she means chemistry that earns its place by helping an industry hit a target it could not hit otherwise, whether that is recovering a resource, saving energy, or meeting a discharge limit. It is a deliberately unglamorous pitch, and that is rather the point.

Tuija Pohjolainen-Hiltunen is also willing to say the quiet part out loud, which is that the popular "chemical-free is always good" story is, in her words, "too simplified". Chemicals, she points out, are how the world actually meets its wastewater standards today, and a coagulant dosed before an anaerobic digester is the reason that digester produces more biogas rather than less. So her argument is not that more chemistry is better, it is that the honest goal is chemistry applied "sustainably, optimally," without overdosing and without overspending. She backs the philosophy with concrete examples: ViviMag, a patented partnership with Veolia that precipitates phosphorus out of wastewater and then pulls it back with magnets so it can be reused instead of polluting a lake, and the fact that around 40 percent of the raw materials Kemira uses are already byproducts, like iron recovered from the steel industry's waste stream and recycled into the coagulant that cleans your drinking water.

Tuija Pohjolainen-Hiltunen came on (don't) Waste Water in 2023 to put a number on where she thinks this all goes, and the number is 500 million euros. That is the revenue Kemira wants its bio-based products to generate by 2030, roughly doubling what it does today, with a dedicated Growth Accelerator unit as the vehicle. The hard technical version of the bet sits in the polymers: the polyacrylamides that nearly every wastewater plant on earth uses to dewater its sludge are made from fossil-derived carbon, and Kemira wants to replace that carbon, as much of it as possible, with carbon from organic sources. In 2023 she described PFAS removal as trials they were "running" and hoping to commercialise, and by 2026 that work had become a real strategy built on granular activated carbon and the reactivation of spent carbon, with new reactivation plants in Spain and Sweden and a UK acquisition to match. Alongside the day job she sits on the board of Cargotec, the Finnish cargo-handling group, which tells you roughly how the wider Finnish industrial world rates her judgement.

“When I started 30 years ago, I was really driven by these environmental topics already that time. I know nowadays it's a very hot topic and young people do love it. I loved it already that time, and that led me to this path of being in clean technology and working with the water.”

Tuija Pohjolainen-Hiltunen is, in short, the rare big-company executive who can defend chemistry to a chemical-wary audience without flinching, because she has spent three decades watching it actually clean the water, and she would rather you understood the trade-off than believed the slogan.