Three Companies Share Product Stewardship Successes

Product Stewardship 2018 was an opportunity to learn how organizations are achieving their sustainability goals. Three companies took the stage in Transparency, Innovation, Optimization: The Building Blocks of Sustainable Product Stewardship to detail their accomplishments.

Lisa Conway, Vice President of Sustainability, detailed how Interface, Inc. set aggressive goals to achieve zero impact in their operations by 2020. With the company on track to meet that objective, they have gone further by now looking at how to run their business in a way that contributes to reversing climate change. These goals dovetail with their customers’ demands for transparency in the composition of their product. Interface now uses simple labels on their products that help consumers factor the environmental impact of the product into their decision-making. Ms. Conway even shared exciting pilot efforts to produce carbon negative products that consume more CO2 than the emissions required to make them.

Christopher Senger is a Product Innovation Process Manager with ASSA ABLOY and focuses on optimizing products to reduce their health and environmental impacts. His company promotes sustainability in their operations as they see it as creating value for their customers. They empower all employees to contribute to that goal through their daily decisions. ASSA ABLOY created playbooks for staff in roles across the organization to help them understand how they can make sustainable decisions in their business operations.

Dennis Wilson rounded out the session by discussing how Saint-Gobain is working to create a sustainable and affordable society. In his role as Director of Sustainability & Product Stewardship, Mr. Wilson has served on the technical advisory committee for building materials as part of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification offered by the US Green Building Council. Saint-Gobain has incorporated sustainability into their operations through a self-imposed carbon tax that helps staff make decisions with environmental impact in mind. They also instituted a global product stewardship policy for all business units in 2016 and developed a scoring system to identify the areas for the biggest improvement in sustainability.

With robust questions from the audience, it was no surprise that several attendees reported that this session was one of their favorites of the conference thanks to the ability to see how other companies have addressed sustainability in their operations. Keep coming back to the Full Circle Blog for more reports from Product Stewardship 2018!