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Life Technologies: When the Search for Sustainability Becomes a Radical Overhaul

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

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For Cristina Amorim, sustainability has been an evolutionary journey.

Having spent almost a decade with Life Technologies – a life sciences company that produces a wide range of medical and research science products – which quadrupled in size through a series of mergers and acquisitions in that time, the company’s chief sustainability officer has seen multiple renditions of sustainability evolving to the next level.

“I’ve spent a decade looking at opportunities and getting sustainability initiatives off the ground that engage every employee, from the copy room to the board room,” she says. On the heels of the announcement that Thermo Fisher Scientific, a giant in life sciences research, is acquiring Life Technologies, I caught up with Amorim on what the past decade has taught her – and her employer – about setting a sustainability strategy that is evolutionary—moving from being good to being smart business.

Evaluating Sustainability: Asking the Right Question

From 2008 to 2012, the company cut energy use by 22 percent, water use by 52 percent, hazardous waste by 13 percent and CO2 emissions by 21 percent, according to its latest sustainability report. With greater growth on the horizon, can Life Technologies continue its sustainability march?

According to Amorim, that’s the wrong question.

“We’re well positioned to harvest the smart business prophecies of sustainability. There is a lot to do to reach a closed loop system and position ourselves in the circular economy. The question is: when do you know you’ve gotten there?”

“I think this is a continuous spiral with no particular end point, but constantly looking for the new frontier that the sustainability lens brings. This is not about creeping incrementalism; it’s about radical change. It’s about turning a moment into a movement, and fostering multiple movements to effect real change”

“Five years ago, no one was talking about zero waste. The economy has changed, allowing zero waste to be a financially viable undertaking. We now have five certified zero waste sites, and the movement goes on. And what would come next?” she continued. “After zero waste, we would envision a zero emissions site—one that has no emissions to air, water, or landfill.”

Now in her fifth year of sustainability reporting, Amorim has spent the better part of the last decade in an environment, health and safety role and understands the complex dynamics of Life Technologies’ Cristina Amorimmainstream products. Acknowledging that her journey has been more about challenging the status quo, she explains:

“We constantly ask questions to challenge what we have been doing. For example, can we source raw materials that are less toxic? That would create a less permitted and safer operational environment with less waste to dispose of. This in turn leads to products that are simpler and cheaper to ship, as they require less packaging, less regulated storage and fewer transportation fees. As a result, our customers will have less packaging and hazardous waste to deal with, reducing their total cost of ownership.”

When Complex Challenges of the 21st Century Meet Genetic Sequencing

So how did Amorim, who was recognized by Ethical Corporation in 2012 as Sustainability Executive of the Year and is Life Technologies’ first CSO, initiate a sustainability strategy that leverages the company’s technology in the markets it serves?

“As I see it, the entire company is the epitome of sustainability. Our genetic sequencing technology has the potential to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Just like in the 20th century, computing science turned a mainframe computer into an iPhone, in this century, life sciences is increasingly putting more DNA sequencing power into smaller devices at a lower cost – making it accessible to every scientist in the world. As sequencing is becoming democratized, scientists increasingly have the tools to transform life as we know it.”

In a world where 70 percent of available freshwater is used for agricultural irrigation, Life Technologies products have the potential to transform food economics. By re-engineering seeds, scientists can create higher-yield and drought-resistant crops.

Amorim continues, “As scientists leverage DNA sequencing technology to harvest oil from algae, biofuels will free us from extracting petroleum from the earth and tackle climate change
simultaneously. The significantly decreasing cost of sequencing the genome hastens theLifeTech_2012 development of more effective medicines, vaccines and clinical solutions that alleviate the health and economic burdens on society.”

Embedding a Cultural Shift: A Decade in the Making

As a biotechnology company, Life Technologies manufactures temperature-sensitive products requiring storage and shipment conditions ranging from -80° Celsius to ambient. Cold shipping requires expanded polystyrene (EPS) coolers and refrigerants like dry ice and gel packs, to maintain specific conditions during transport.

As the U.S.’ largest shipper of dry ice with FedEx, each year we ship 800,000 EPS coolers (equivalent to 105 truckloads) and consume 4500 metric tons of dry ice, costing $15 million in packing, refrigerant and freight. Given the poor recyclability of EPS, energy intensity of refrigerants and package weight, this represents our largest environmental impact and opportunity.

How is Life Technologies turning this challenge into an opportunity? Amorim explains, “Our strategy includes eliminating the need for coolers by converting products from cold to ambient shipping, piloting cooler reuse options, and investigating alternative materials to expanded polystyrene.”

Through a robust stability testing program, we have proven that some of our products can safely withstand ambient transport conditions. Just like transporting ice cream from the supermarket to your home freezer– we don’t carry a cooler or dry ice in our trunk.

“So far we’ve converted genetic analysis, sequencing, cell culture and molecular biology reagents, top-selling capillary electrophoresis and transfection reagents. The impact has been significant—each year, we now ship 250,000 fewer EPS coolers (33 fewer truckloads), use 2400 fewer metric tons of refrigerant, and save $4 million in operational costs globally. Most importantly, we know our packaging becomes our customers’ waste. These product conversions help us leave less branded garbage in their hallways.

Of course, the effort requires engagement across multiple functions. “From R&D to distribution and sales & marketing, everyone has a part to play. We tapped into natural leaders across these functions to become ambassadors for these initiatives. It provided them with visibility and career growth opportunities. They are delivering cost savings, protecting the environment and feeling good about it,” she added.

The Externalities: Collaborating with Suppliers

While these examples prove a significant point about how sustainability thinking can shift mindsets on profit, purpose and business value across organizations, what about Life Technologies’ external supply chain? With over 50,000 products and complex transportation cycles, how is the company addressing sustainability in its supply chain?

“I have a hard time understanding the traditional concept of ‘greening the supply chain.’ Asking hundreds of suppliers to fill out forms and check boxes provides no tangible value. We could never understand how to take action on that supplier data,” Amorim explained. “Instead, we find more value in partnering with key suppliers.”

One example is Kimberly-Clark. On the path to zero waste, Amorim and her team went dumpster diving one morning to understand their waste streams. What they found was a sea of blue and
purple  latex gloves.

We approached the glove supplier, Kimberly-Clark, who partnered with us to implement a glove take-back program. It started in one location and has today expanded to five. We segregate the gloves at the point of use and Kimberly-Clark sends them to TerraCycle, who turn them into purple park benches. This partnership provides true value—glove take-back helped us achieve our zero waste goal and helped Kimberly-Clark increase their revenue by becoming our sole glove supplier globally.

Take Back: Turning Obligation into Opportunity

The circular economy has arrived. That is what excites Amorim, one of very few female CSOs in the private sector. “The regulatory environment is also helping us close the loop. The WEEE [Waste Electric Electronic Equipment] legislation in Europe is one example,” says Amorim.

WEEE institutionalizes the cradle-to-cradle concept as a means of keeping electronic equipment containing heavy metals out of landfills. “Wouldn’t you like it if Maytag removed your dishwasher at the end of its life? I can’t move it and it doesn’t fit in my trashcan. In Europe, we now have to set up a take-back scheme for all of our instruments. How can this be done profitably?”

“We realized that by taking instruments back only to recycle the parts was a cost burden. Instead we bring them back to refurbish certain product lines for resale, harvest high-value parts to be used on service calls, and responsibly recycle what’s left.”

For Life Technologies and other companies, refurbished instruments open up an entire new market. At a lower price point, instruments such as DNA sequencers are more accessible to more scientists. And with increased revenue, the WEEE obligation becomes an opportunity.

While issues like cold chain shipment, waste, and regulatory compliance present thorns on the way to the gilded goal of a closed-loop model for Life Technologies, triangular connections in its supply chain and their appetite for cutting-edge innovation leads one to believe the opportunities are endless for Amorim and her team.

As the exuberant sustainability chief concludes, “We’re aiming for radical.”

Originally written for and published on CSRwire’s Commentary section Talkback on July 22, 2013.

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

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

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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.

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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.

Greener Products: Johnson & Johnson’s Blended Formula

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

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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.