This week was Sustainability Industry LIVE and it was a day crammed full of debate, discussion, questions and answers on how to tackle the critical role of sustainability in manufacturing.
From across the day and our own roundtable ‘Sustainability in Manufacturing – a challenge or opportunity’ we gathered lots of insights from cross-sector sustainability leaders.
Here are our key take-aways:
What is Sustainability? It was clear that it means different things to different people, so clarifying your businesses goals and priorities is key for a successful sustainability strategy. If what you want and what you need are different, spend the time aligning your strategy to the latter. Those running successful initiatives said, not surprisingly, that a roadmap to drive initiatives and regular and transparent progress updates to employees, customers and investors is essential.
Who should you get involved? Another critical success factor is pulling in the right people from across the business and wider stakeholder group. Identifying who is going to help craft the strategy and ensure it is delivered successfully from product development, operations, sales and marketing, IT and HR is key. And crucially, who from the senior leadership or C-suite is sponsoring the strategy and initiatives? Without top-level support, success is going to be tricky.
Where do you start? Either kickstarting a new sustainability programme or reinventing an existing one means knowing where to start. Sometimes working backwards from a clear end goal is the best way to work this out. Plot the steps backwards and you’ll get a clearer picture of the starting point. Doing that will also allow you to factor in how you monitor initiatives, track performance and allow space for feedback and discussion.
Why are we doing this? Culture and the ‘people-factor’ was cited as a frequent blocker to success, with resistance to change but also fear of the unknown being key concerns. So bake this into your strategy and engage people from across the business in creating your sustainability strategy but also throughout the deployment. Deliver some ‘quick wins’ from within a longer term plan so the whole business can see the impact of success right from the start. Make sustainability part of the company DNA, not a bolt on.
When to start? Well as they say, there’s no time like the present. The need to deliver against Scope 1 and 2 emissions isn’t going away and most of the people we spoke to, felt comfortable delivering on those. Grasping Scope 3 emissions was another matter, with businesses in heavily regulated industries and/or with complex supply chains having the hardest time evaluating and reporting supplier emissions.
Finally, a key talking point was how to optimise people, plant, processes and products whilst ensuring companies remain profitable. Many people felt that products need to be future proofed and designed with end of life as a main focus. Definitely something to consider.
And as it transpired, the challenges businesses are facing become opportunities when they are aligned to product development and evaluating the best route to manufacture while reducing waste.
We’d love to carry on the discussions from SIL with you and your business and share how we can help deliver those opportunities, as we have for so many others.
