Companies are motivated to innovate by a number of factors. A 2013 survey from MIT Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group shows the top reasons for making sustainability a part of business plans were related to competitiveness, risk reduction, getting and retaining good employees, and increased business.
“Usually this is driven from the top, with execution pushed to the operations of the company – the engineers – who try to figure out how to do this… Once they see the opportunities, from enterprise down to process and tooling, they begin to address the problem,” Dornfeld says. Metrics are critical to understand the current operating state, how the proposal will move to a better state, and the economic and environmental rewards.
When P&G began targeting the group of consumers they call “sustainable mainstream,” the company looked for ways to meet their needs and reduce environmental impact.
They started with a lifecycle assessment, which allowed the company to quantify the impact of a product from creation, distribution, and delivery to the use phase on the consumer end.
P&G learned that, in the developed world, its main environmental footprint in the consumer-use phase comes from the energy needed to heat water for laundry. This led to the development of Tide Coldwater, designed to allow users to wash in cold water without a performance tradeoff.
But that single innovation around a particular product line wasn’t enough. While energy to heat hot water is the main factor in the developed world, that isn’t the case in developing countries, where water is scarce.
In countries like the Philippines, households may draw as many as four basins of water for laundry: one to wash and three to rinse. P&G developed Downy Single Rinse, which contains technologies that help sequester suds, Sauers says; the new product needs only a single basin of water for rinsing.
Similarly, an automobile’s use phase is the biggest contributor to its lifecycle impact, so innovation in auto manufacturing must focus on reducing the impact of that phase, says Dornfeld. With that in mind, his department looked at leveraging manufacturing to examine the payback on improving the surface finish of gears in an automobile’s gear train. “The payback was huge in the reduction of losses in the gear train and concurrent improvement in fuel economy of the auto,” Dornfeld says.
Anheuser-Busch InBev also focuses on a “relentless move toward sustainability innovation,” says AB InBev’s Hugh Share, senior global director of Beer and a Better World. Because water is essential to the business, the company looked at the issue of the increasing stress on watersheds around the world. “This was an opportunity for our facilities to work with local stakeholders on creative solutions to complex issues.”
