Features
Survey: Better Sustainability Drives Growth and Cost Competitiveness
A new survey by CSC and Chemical Week magazine finds that leading companies are pursuing the financial and competitive advantages derived from sustainability initiatives such as energy management and environmental impact reduction programs.
CSC identifies the following as the key components of sustainability: energy management, governance, risk management, product stewardship, carbon and environmental reporting, worker safety and other regulatory mandates such as cybersecurity.
This year’s findings also highlight the broad growth initiatives underway to meet increasing global opportunities in harnessing clean energy, expanding food production and providing clean drinking water. Underlying these initiatives is a rapid adoption in the use of automation to address escalating product regulatory complexity and global expansion.
The annual survey, now in its third year, includes interviews of senior executives at more than 200 leading global process industry companies to identify key challenges, new opportunities and top initiatives. The 2011 survey results reinforce trends from last year’s findings, noting that while regulatory compliance is important, most companies are using sustainability as a top business initiative to drive growth and cost competitiveness.
“This year’s survey results highlight that companies are taking in — and preparing for — expanded and more complex product regulations and deriving more value from their sustainability programs through an emphasis on energy management, zero emissions products and resource efficiency,” said Chuck Deise, vice president, Process Industries, at CSC. “Unsurprisingly, government-mandated regulations continue to dominate sustainability expenditures, closely followed by energy management. The majority of companies are also investing in technologies to automate product regulatory compliance.”
Global leaders such as Dow Chemical are using sustainability to accelerate innovation in resource efficiency by making products with fewer resources such as water to aid the bottom line. Dow aims to develop at least three breakthrough technologies to meet world challenges by 2015, and to improve energy intensity across the company by 25 percent in 2015, up from 2 percent in 2010.
“In the past two years, in particular, we have seen dramatic improvements in resource efficiency,” says Neil Hawkins, a board member for Dow responsible for sustainability.
This year’s survey also provides evidence of a sharp increase in the number of companies reporting customer imperatives on sustainability performance in their buying decisions. Procter and Gamble (P&G), which has sales of $83 billion annually from the sale of chemicals such as detergents and shampoos direct to the consumer, views sustainability less as a business opportunity and more as a business imperative. The key message from P&G’s customers is that eco-friendly products have to provide equal performance and be available at equal cost to existing products.
“The mainstream consumer — about 70 to 80 percent of the population — will not pay more and will not tolerate trade-offs in performance or cost, and this is the consumer we target in our strategy,” says Len Sauers, vice president, Global Sustainability, at P&G.
Download the full survey.