Our sustainability approach is about making meaningful and realistic progress to reduce our environmental impact.
As a polymers-based business, we recognise that we have an important role to play in creating a fairer, more sustainable future and respond to the climate emergency.
With this in mind, we’re working hard to embed sustainability into everything we do, and enable it to guide every decision we make.
Our commitment to net zero
We made a public commitment in 2020 to reach net zero by 2050, in line with the Paris Agreement. To achieve this, we’ve already:
- Ended coal use at our operations
- Defined new science-based targets
- Developed sustainability scorecards to assess our innovation programmes and capital expenditure
We strive to continue establishing collaborative partnerships with our suppliers and customers to drive down emissions across our supply chain.
Supply chain
We can’t shy away from the fact that the ingredients for many of our products come from oil and natural gas. As a result, more than 90% of all our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from our upstream supply chain.
But we’re looking for ways to use more sustainable raw materials with a lower carbon footprint. That could mean they’re made from renewable sources such as wood waste, contain recycled content, are manufactured in a more energy-efficient way, or are sourced closer to our factories. To this end, we are currently in the process to become ISCC+ certified, thus allowing us to use lower carbon-intensive raw materials from bio or circular sources.
We’ve invested in a sustainability rating platform to help us identify sustainability risk in our supply chain, and we’ve started to track and report how much of our procurement spend is covered by a sustainability rating. We’ve also revised our supplier risk assessment processes, and the rating platform means we can assess potential new suppliers against independent sustainability criteria.
Climate risk management and reporting
Climate change is now an integral risk in our risk management framework, based on the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) requirements, and we’ll be monitoring these risks closely and developing our approach to reporting on them. We’ve also started using a sustainability risk-scanning tool that helps us identify existing supply chain risks using criteria such as geography and industry type. This tool helps us spot broader sustainability risks in our supply chain, such as exposure to bribery and corruption, and human rights risk.