COMMITTED TO SUSTAINABILITY ENVIRONMENTAL RESPECT 2O15
By Linda Fisher Vice President — DuPont Safety, Health & Environment and Chief Sustainability Officer
USTAINABILITY HAS MADE A TRANSITION from being focused on mitigating risk to solving the world’s biggest challenges. That transition has helped move sustainability from a tactical issue for manufacturing operations to a strategic issue that CEOs and
other senior leaders are now engaged in around the world. Early on, the focus of sustainability was on reducing an organization’s environmental foot-
print — and that made sense because we needed to clean up our air and waterways. DuPont recognized the expanded focus and decided to implement programs both within DuPont and with our customers to address sustainability. As an example, in 1991, DuPont launched the Environmental Respect Award (ERA) program aimed at improving the sustainability practices of downstream customers, including distributors, retailers and, through them, farmers and their communities. We’ve seen a lot of progress since the creation of the program. We aren’t done yet, concerted action is still needed, but it no longer has to be the sole focus on our sustain- ability commitments and actions. Programs like the ERA create a unique opportunity for DuPont to create impacts throughout
the life cycle of our products and allow us to engage customers to innovate, educate, and improve stewardship standards globally. DuPont is also able to reach the broader agriculture industry and our communities to promote sustainability efforts that can help make the world a cleaner, safer place to live. There is significant concern: How we are going to be able to feed more than 9 billion people;
how we are going to provide safe water and sanitation to the billions that don’t have access now, and how we are going to provide reliable energy to all? These are massive challenges. For business, these challenges create huge opportunities to bring innovative solutions to the
marketplace. The work won’t be easy because no one entity can solve every challenge. We need companies working across value chains in ways that we have not traditionally worked, we need governments’ engagement with policy that will support different approaches, and we need civil society to work with business and governments to support on the ground imple- mentation and then scale up of the best solutions. One key area that organizations need to focus on is how to embed sustainability consider-
ations early in the process. It has long been recognized that if decisions that support more sus- tainable choices are included early in the development process — be that product or business model development — then the final solution will likely be much more sustainable. If reducing water use is considered early, it is much more likely that the end-product will have a lower overall water footprint. One way to support that is by utilizing lifecycle thinking — taking into account the impact of the raw materials, manufacturing, use and final disposition of a product — to help consider alternative approaches and impacts that might not be immediately obvious. Stakeholder engagement is also critical to overall success. Getting broader input can help
assure ultimate success of a development since stakeholders can provide important input on how the solution will be used, possible issues that need to be addressed early and opportuni- ties to add enhancements that will make the development even more successful. Sustainability is a journey and reflects the dynamic nature of both an enterprise like ours and the larger soci- etal and environmental context in which we operate. We are proud of our longstanding commitment to sustainability and the important achieve-
ments we have made in this area. We are proud to be a part of unique programs like the ERA that showcase our sustainability efforts around the world.
30 ENVIRONMENTAL RESPECT July 2015
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