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Earthwards 2.0: Johnson & Johnson Seeks to Evolve Sustainable Product Innovation

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by Aman Singh in CSRwire, ESG

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andrew winston, Brand Management, CSR, CSRwire, earthwards, environment, Environment, ESG, health care, healthcare, hunter lovins, Innovation, lifecycle analysis, marks and spencer, Sustainability, sustainability, sustainability strategy, unilever, waste


In recent posts, I explored the genesis of Johnson & Johnson’s proprietary Earthwards® process and how it has been used to help develop greener products to meet customer needs. For Johnson & Johnson, the process of instilling a sustainability mindset began with introspection and questioning: How does an organization with multiple product lines and a global workforce develop and define greener products? And the process began with a tool called GAIA, or Global Aquatic Ingredient Assessment.

In the beginning, GAIA was operating almost exclusively with R&D because it was a science-based tool with specific emphasis on measuring downstream ecosystem impacts.  Implementation of the Earthwards process accelerated broader adoption and has helped spur greener product innovation based on lifecycle thinking that is, in part, quantified by tools like GAIA. But Earthwards, despite its rigor and initial success, is still in its infancy.

In 2012, Senior Director for Worldwide Environment Health and Safety Al Iannuzzi enlisted a team of experts that volunteered to examine the Earthwards process and recommend areas for improvement. What’s next? I explore the future of the program through the eyes of two well-respected sustainability experts who recently weighed in as part of that expert team: Andrew Winston and L. Hunter Lovins.

_____________________________

By now, you’ve probably caught a glimpse of that new inspiring Honda Civic 2013 commercial, framing innovation as believing that ‘things can always be better.’  For Winston, making things better begins by asking questions. “As we pursue sustainability in the future, asking the right questions will be as important as the answers we get,” he said.

For the people at Johnson & Johnson, the concept of continuous improvement is a driving force. So it makes sense that their efforts to evolve the current Earthwards methodology into a better process  began with some Earthwardshonest introspection and engagement with a few external experts, including Winston and Lovins.

In a recent phone call with Winston, I asked him his impressions of the Earthwards process.

He believes that the Earthwards process is a solid program with appropriate categories and logical steps that “empowers product developers with information and helps them understand the choices. It’s a well-designed system, but does have its pros and cons.”

I asked him to elaborate.

“They have the right categories, seven in all, but the concern is that a product could be improving in three distinct areas, but these may not be the most important areas to focus on in order to address the products’ greatest material impacts.  There’s a fine line between simplicity and enabling efficient assessments.”

Of course there are trade-offs. But the biggest challenge internally is giving employees the time and information they need to become comfortable with the Earthwards process and appreciate the impacts of improvements across the lifecycle.

“It is a fair point,” said Iannuzzi. “Our Review Board, including three external experts, also helps to keep the process objective, making sure that the brands focus their improvements on meaningful areas. To make this even more robust, we will require each application to address the lifecycle screen hot spot areas identified in step two of the Earthwards process, the lifecycle screen.”

Sufficiently Ambitious or Room for Improvement?

There is broad agreement among the experts that Johnson & Johnson has a long history of – and
interest in – environmental protection and sustainability. “The company has cared about its impact on the environment and on people, and taken a position of responsibility,” Lovins noted.

While both Lovins and Winston said that the Earthwards  process is one of the most comprehensive sustainable product tools in the industry, and in Lovins’ view, “a strong and rigorous process.” She also feels there is opportunity for the company to become even more aggressive in making this a companywide initiative.

“They need to examine the inadequacies of the Earthwards process, align it with tougher science-based goals and then make a commitment to hold every product to those goals.”

Winston had similar sentiments, specifically around the 10 percent benchmark Johnson & Johnson has set for improvements against Earthwards’ sustainability criteria. “The problem with a goal like 10 percent is that it’s kind of an internal-looking, corporate improvement. These goals at the product level need to be shooting for more dramatic increases.”

Some of J&J’s leading products are doing more than the required 10 percent anyway, so why stop there?

According to Iannuzzi, Johnson & Johnson sees the potential to raise the bar, perhaps substantially on some dimensions, but also recognizes the need to balance meaningful improvements within the original intent of Earthwards.

“J&J is always up for a challenge, but we want to make sure we don’t raise the bar so high that it becomes detrimental to Earthwards’ intended purpose of widespread adoption,” said Iannuzzi. “If we make the bar so high that almost no product can get there, no one would pursue it.”

 New Blueprint Needed?

According to a recent study commissioned by Johnson & Johnson titled The Growing Importance of Sustainable Products in the Global Health Care Industry, 54 percent of health care organizations globally say green attributes are very important in their purchasing decisions of health care products medical wasteand supplies. And this trend appears to be gaining traction, as 40 percent of global hospitals expect their future request for proposals to include sustainability criteria for the products they purchase. Among the greatest concerns hospitals share are the amount of energy they use and the volume of waste they generate.

With data like these indicating that the strongest push for sustainability is coming from within the healthcare sector, how will this influence the evolution of the Earthwards process?

To get at the heart of this question, Winston suggests that Johnson & Johnson ask itself whether doing better than 95 percent of its competitors is good enough.

In fact, Winston said Johnson & Johnson should go further than others and has challenged the company to raise the requirements for Earthwards recognition. For example, the baseline could be higher than the current 10 percent improvement needed to achieve recognition in the different categories, especially in the energy efficiency category, in light of the general scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by 85 percent by 2050.

Iannuzzi responded: “We plan to better understand the greenhouse gas emissions impacts of the improvements we make this year with the Earthwards process and consider ways to further encourage them in our products.”

Lovins suggests the company be more transparent with customers about where it is in the process of sustainable product development and where it is going. Iannuzzi’s team is already responding by sharing more content on www.earthwards.com including more information about the 36 products that have received recognition so far and other external-facing efforts like a six-part series with CSRwire.

Internal Certification Process, Not a Sustainability Strategy

Coleman Bigelow, Johnson & Johnson Global Sustainability Marketing Director, sees the Earthwards program as an internal product stewardship and green marketing process rather than a long-term sustainability strategy like that of Marks & Spencer’s Plan A or Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan.

The Earthwards process ensures “every product we produce has undergone a lifecycle screening and is as sustainable as possible. For the first time, we have a process that offers something to the developers, the R&D folks, as well as the marketers and sales associates,” Bigelow explained.

Iannuzzi, a Johnson & Johnson veteran of 28 years who has spearheaded the Earthwards program internally from the start and is a popular sustainability champion among the team, doesn’t foresee the company taking an approach akin to GE’s Ecomagination with a separate structure, either.

“Our philosophy is to embed sustainability into every product, not create something special or separate,” Iannuzzi explained. That said, the company does plan to track how much of its revenue stems from Earthwards recognized products. So while it is not its own revenue generating business unit, per se, it certainly could prove to save the company money over the long haul as well as drive innovation internally.

When I asked Iannuzzi about Earthwards’ ten-year plan, he reflected.

“Ideally, I envision it as a way of showing customers how we are coming up with more innovative products using sustainability as the driver. This means moving Earthwards process away from being an add-on and moving it toward full integration.  External communication will also be key.”

“But right now, it’s not as well integrated as we would like,” Iannuzzi admits.

Regardless, Winston seems convinced that Johnson & Johnson’s efforts have been both aggressive and innovative as a whole. The next tricky move for the company, say the experts, is to be mindful of how quickly the Earthwards program grows in scope without losing sight of the program’s quality.

As the team at Johnson & Johnson prepares for Earthwards round two, the experts’ advice should help the healthcare company scale its journey from green to greener without losing sight of the ultimate goal: A sustainable planet for future generations.

For now, it’s back to the white boards.

About Andrew Winston and L. Hunter Lovins

A globally recognized expert in green business strategies, Winston is the author of Green Recovery and co-author of Green to Gold, the international best-selling guide to what works – and what doesn’t – when companies go green. Winston is also founder of Winston Eco-Strategies, a sustainability consultancy dedicated to helping companies use environmental strategy to grow, create enduring value, and build stronger relationships with their stakeholders. He writes extensively on green business strategy, including a weekly column for Harvard Business Online and guest byline articles on Huffington Post.

Lovins is an award-winning sustainability consultant, featured speaker at conferences across the globe and author of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. Lovins is also president and founder of Natural Capitalism Solutions (NCS), which creates innovative, practical tools and strategies to enable companies, communities and countries to become more sustainable. Lovins is also a professor of sustainable business management at Bard College and Denver University, and consults for large and small companies, and governmental clients.

Originally written for and published on CSRwire’s Commentary section Talkback on March 13, 2013.

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Greener Products: Johnson & Johnson’s Blended Formula

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by Aman Singh in CSR, CSRwire

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al iannuzzi, Brand Management, change managemet, consumer products, CSR, CSRwire, earthwards, ehs, environment, gaia, green, green products, johnson and jonhson, lifecycle analysis, marketing, ray sharples, Sustainability, sustainability


A “fully sustainable company” remains an aspirational goal for many organizations – yet the road to this ambitious endpoint is filled with challenges waiting for innovative solutions.

To get started, a company must assess its environmental impacts and consistently work to minimize them. But can a company ever become a “fully sustainable company” and, if so, what’s the right roadmap to getting there?

In last week’s post, Al Iannuzzi, Senior Director for Worldwide Environment Health and Safety at J&J wrote, “We believe in greener products.” He was instrumental in mapping out Johnson & Johnson’s EARTHWARDS process to improve product sustainability and its successful adoption across the business units.

Earthwards is a proprietary process that guides Johnson & Johnson teams to holistically identify, address and improve their products’ biggest environmental impacts across a broad range of areas. For Johnson & Johnson, this accounts for a major leap in its journey to becoming a more sustainable enterprise.

Earthwards & GAIA: The Need For Tools

While Earthwards is now the criteria used to assess the sustainability of Johnson & Johnson products, it also requires business specific tools to help make products greener. A key tool for the Consumer Products division is the Global Aquatic Ingredient Assessment, or GAIA for short.

Sharples_1v_copyI sat down with Ray Sharples, Manager of EHS & Product Stewardship for Johnson & Johnson’s  Consumer Division, to discuss the impetus for GAIA.

According to Sharples, there was a need to develop a tool to measure the environmental impacts of the products Johnson & Johnson puts into the marketplace. To address this need, in 2010, the Johnson & Johnson Consumer Product Stewardship team set out to create a new tool to quantify the impacts of various formulas.

“We needed a way to assess which materials were “better” among our ingredients so we could make improvements in the environmental attributes of our products,” Sharples said.

Interestingly, this technical and scientific process at Johnson & Johnson spurred opportunities for innovation and got employees engaged in the development of greener products. As part of the Earthwards lifecycle thinking, GAIA now plays a role in helping products achieve Earthwards recognition.

Johnson & Johnson started the GAIA scoring system in 2010.  GAIA rates the ingredients in a Johnson & Johnson product. GAIA scores are primarily based on scientific issues such as persistence, bioaccumulation and toxicity along with other factors, which, in some cases, can reduce the score of an ingredient.

“The intent behind GAIA was to guide product developers around the world to choose environmentally preferred ingredients,” Sharples said.

“The use of ingredients that are readily biodegradable and have minimal environmental impact to the ecosystem allows us to reduce our global environmental footprint. By making this process more streamlined and quantifiable, we’re not only increasing our environmental successes, we’re making it a part of everyday life,” he explained.

Getting a Lift From Earthwards

GAIA was operating almost exclusively with R&D because it was a science-based tool with specific emphasis on measuring downstream ecosystem impacts, but Earthwards changed that.

“Incorporating GAIA as one of the tools within the lifecycle thinking of Earthwards has been really important in mainstreaming GAIA across Johnson & Johnson Consumer group,” Sharples said, pointing to the much broader implementation of Earthwards across the company’s various business units and divisions.

“GAIA soon took off in the Consumer group, as brand teams tried to obtain Earthwards recognition.  We’re now using GAIA as a way of educating and engaging our employees on key considerations for
sustainable product development,” he added.

Under the GAIA tool, a product with a score between 80 and 100 is considered environmentally preferred, which means the product consists primarily of biodegradable ingredients that minimize its impact on the ecosystem. “Sixty-five percent of our new formulations today achieve a GAIA score of 80 or higher. Our goal is to ensure that 80 percent of all new Johnson & Johnson consumer products score between 80 and 100 by 2017,” said Sharples.

Why stop at 80 percent?

“One-hundred percent is just very, very difficult to reach. Even reaching 80 percent will be challenging because of the complexity involved in our formulations,” Sharples explained.

GAIA: Hidden Opportunity?

GAIA offers obvious benefits and some less obvious ones. The tool, for example, has often led formulators and R&D teams to find opportunities that they would have previously missed. And making product improvements first through GAIA can help a product development team uncover other lifecycle improvements towards an Earthwards recognition.

Examples of products that first went through the GAIA process and then advanced to achieve Earthwards recognition include Johnson & Johnson’s Baby First Touch Zinksalva (Nappy Cream) and Baby First Touch Shampoo, both marketed under the Natusan brand in Europe.

Creating Change

Sharples’ comments reminded me of a keynote speech by Jeff Swartz, Timberland’s former CEO:

“Sometimes you have to stop wanting the consumer to dictate market trends, innovations and movements. Sometimes you have to take a stand and lead the market.”

But not all issues are as easy to remedy.

For example, zinc oxide is a “red” ingredient under GAIA and therefore, one that Johnson & Johnson  aims to
avoid. But when it comes to sunscreen, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration [FDA] has approved zinc oxide as an active ingredient in these products and alternative sunscreen active ingredients have other potential environmental concerns.

So how does the company choose its next step?

Challenge the FDA? Continue with the status quo? Change its product formulation? And who takes on the cost burden of changing the formulation of a successfully tested product? The company? The government? The hospitals and health care institutions? Consumers?

These questions are complicated and require equally complicated solutions.

Like Johnson & Johnson, there are numerous companies aspiring to produce sustainable products, using renewable energy, pursuing zero waste and achieving other targets to ensure their impact on the planet and society is a net positive.

So far, their responses have been piecemeal with Johnson & Johnson’s Earthwards serving as an excellent example of the holistic approach needed in the marketplace. But is there a truly “fully sustainable company” that has figured it all out? If you know one, drop me an email.

Originally written for and published on CSRwire’s Commentary section Talkback on February 27, 2013 and part of a series on Earthwards, a Johnson & Johnson program. 

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Earthwards: A Front Row Seat to Sustainability in Action at Johnson & Johnson

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by Aman Singh in ESG

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Bill McDonough, biomimicry, Brand Management, clean technology, coleman bigelow, consumer products, cradle to cradle, earthwards, environment, Environment, ESG, green, Innovation, johnson and johnson, keith sutter, organizational development, product design, Supply chain management, sustainability, Work culture, zero waste, zytiga


While hosting a panel last year on responsible business, a discussion ensued on the need for creating change and influencing millions to shift their habits. I was intrigued by a question from the audience:

“Would companies ever be receptive to the idea of ‘embedding journalists’ in their organizations to test the theory of transparency and therefore influence change?”

While many companies might bristle at this idea, it’s something I’ve thought about a lot. I wondered which company would be the first to invite a journalist inside for a closer look at how its commitment to responsible and sustainable business is put into practice. To my surprise, I didn’t have to wait too long before Johnson & Johnson reached out to me with an invitation. They wanted to discuss the possibility of going inside the organization to conduct an objective review of its sustainable product development process, aptly titled Earthwards®. As Keith Sutter, Senior Product Director of Sustainable Brand Marketing at Johnson & Johnson explained, the Earthwards process was developed as an internal tool in 2009 to assess the environmental impacts of various products and help drive improvements around specific sustainability criteria. The invitation meant I would get an unvarnished view inside a company that has traditionally shied away from the publicity spotlight. So I dived in.

Diving In: The Challenges of Meeting Sustainability Goals

My first exposure to the inner workings at Johnson & Johnson was a recent Earthwards quarterly board meeting. “Early on some of our external reviewers advised us to establish an Earthwards board of directors and appoint people from our legal, marketing and R&D groups, along with several subject matter  experts from the Earthwardsoutside,” explained Coleman Bigelow, a board member and Global Sustainability Marketing Director in the Consumer division at Johnson & Johnson. “Assembling a diverse group of stakeholders has been an important piece of the puzzle.” As the presentations started, I realized how challenging it could be to change the design, ingredients and packaging of existing products, built on years and years of research and testing. And for a healthcare company, its products must also meet the highest standards for consumer safety, patient usability and efficacy. So, layering on sustainability considerations to the product development process added even more complexity.

Diving Deeper: How High Should We Set the Bar?

One product reviewed by the board that day was Zytiga®, a drug made by Janssen (the pharmaceuticals group within Johnson & Johnson), used in the treatment of metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer. Through a recent acquisition, Janssen had received the rights to manufacture and distribute Zytiga and the team saw an opportunity to improve the way the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) was produced to decrease its environmental impact and use the Earthwards process to guide the improvements. Zytiga After the chief scientist for Zytiga walked the group through a formal presentation, the questions began. Now picture a room full of people representing different disciplines across the company – from Product Development to Environment, Health and Safety – and several from outside. The range of questions was broad and impressive: Was the product in competition with another product? Why change the process that was previously used to make the API? Does the product have FDA approval yet? How does making the proposed changes to the design and production of the drug make it safer for the environment? What about the impact on plant workers? And does this change the packaging? More importantly, the group wanted to understand what innovations had led to the proposed changes for Zytiga, and whether these changes could be replicated for other products within the company’s portfolio. Following the Zytiga presentation and discussion, the board took up the next item on its agenda: Should the company move ahead with adding its internally developed Global Aquatic Ingredient Assessment [GAIA] to the Earthwards’ framework? This would allow products in the consumer sector – think Aveeno, for example – to receive one point for their improved GAIA score in the Materials  category of the Earthwards criteria. The company developed GAIA to evaluate the impact its product ingredients have on water, and determine if a potential for toxicity, persistence and bioaccumulation exists. Now the group questioned whether adding GAIA as an additional layer to the pre-qualifiers for Earthwards would raise the bar for other products competing forNatusan_shampoo the recognition. As with Zytiga, the questions were far-ranging and complex: Does GAIA only consider the environmental impact of product ingredients, or does the assessment also consider the impact of these ingredients on human health? How do we weigh the toxicity? How does the consumer sector look at human health? With suppliers changing, how do we streamline the process? Does this then become a “hazard assessment rather than a risk assessment?” One example the board used to flesh out the pros and cons of GAIA was Natusan shampoo, which recently earned Earthwards recognition after overcoming a significant hurdle: Scientists had to figure out how to reduce the number of ingredients from 13 to eight to be eligible for recognition. The team explained that while the 13 ingredients used in the initial product were thoroughly reviewed for toxicology to insure that the finished product was safe for human use, the GAIA tool focuses on reducing ecosystem impacts. The board questioned whether the bar set by GAIA would be too high for some products. “We’re pushing for continual improvement while watching for signs of backsliding, and so far 60 percent of our products have continued to make further improvements,” was one sentiment. Another was, “We need to set the bar high but not so high that it discourages product developers from going for it.” Another board member – this time an external reviewer – commented that the allowable limits of “red” ingredients (those that Johnson & Johnson tries to avoid, where possible, due to environmental impacts) seemed reasonable, but cautioned that it might not be reasonable to others.

Complexities Arise: Is Zero the Right Sustainability Target?

As the day wrapped up one thought stuck with me: how high should the bar be when it comes to meeting the sustainability criteria of the Earthwards process? Context is of course key in these discussions. For some products and their ingredients, it’s a fine line between raising the bar and raising it too high.  And since most of these products have been tested and retested for years for their impacts, toxicity and formulations, room for improvement is limited and, in some cases, tough to achieve. So how high should the bar be set? That’s the chicken or the egg question for companies today, isn’t it? While Bill McDonough, co-author of Cradle-to-Cradle and chief architect of this concept, promotes zero as the target – as in zero waste or zero negative impact – the reality is that everything we consume is made up of materials that we get from our environment, and therefore has an impact. The question is whether we can replenish the resources as quickly as we take them. And if not, how do we find alternatives? For believers of biomimicry, the answers may lie with nature. And how can a program like Earthwards, which the Johnson & Johnson team insists is not a certification or eco-label – indeed no product carries any indication of its Earthwards recognition on its label – help to push the bar consistently higher while acting as a purposeful motivator for the R&D team, the scientists, the product developers and the marketers, toward more sustainable products?

A Front Row Seat

For someone who doesn’t quite understand chemical equations and bioaccumulation, but does understand cancer, deforestation and the quest for sustainability, the board meeting was a revelation and a front row seat to an often-guarded corporate zone. For a company that earmarks a significant portion of its revenue to R&D, it is encouraging to see the commitment to sustainable product development in action. The board meeting ended on a high note. Zytiga was approved by the Earthwards board for recognition. There was excitement in the air and a belief that Earthwards is moving the company in the right direction. And the coffee pots were empty. All in a day’s work. Originally written for and published on CSRwire’s Commentary section Talkback on February 13, 2013 as part of a series about EARTHWARDS®, a Johnson & Johnson program designed to promote greener product development throughout the enterprise.

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