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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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Marks & Spencer’s Plan A: Five Years Later

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by Aman Singh in CSR reporting

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Brand Management, BSR, business, consumers, corporate responsibility, CSR, CSR reporting, greater good, marc gunther, marks and spencer, plan b, Sustainability, sustainability, sustainability strategy


“We launched Plan A because there is no Plan B,” started Richard Gillies, Marks & Spencer’s Director of Plan A, CSR Sustainable Business during a panel on how to nudge consumers to buy more sustainable products at the recently concluded BSR Conference.

Marks & Spencer’s sustainability strategy, more popularly called Plan A, has been the topic of several discussions and numerous awards since it was launched in 2007, mostly for its innovative and expansive approach (over 180 commitments) but also for its honest declaration of a business’ shortcomings.

And Gillies attested to that: “We made some very public and very defined goals back in 2007.” As the retailer approaches the five-year anniversary of Plan A, what are some of the results we can expect?

For starters, Gillies offered the following:

  • Carbon footprint reduction of 26 percent
  • Reduction in energy use by 25 percent
  • All packaging now sourced from sustainable sources
  • Waste to landfill cut from 80 percent to zero

Where does the consumer fall into place with these achievements – and the ultimate goal of a zero environmental footprint? And what will it take for consumers to make decisions based on sustainability performance – or as someone in the audience put it: “How do we make sustainability sexy?”

“Consumers are not prepared to pay more or compromise in the name of sustainability. We have to learn to market goods that work well and are sustainable, instead of naively believing that they will sell simply because they are sustainable,” Gillies emphasized. The market isn’t there yet, he indicated.

Gillies also admitted Marks & Spencer, the UK’s largest clothing retailer and a significant marketer of food in Europe, was “only just beginning on our sustainability journey.” “We are only now exploring our business in the mainstream. We’re trying to get our own house in order before venturing outside,” he said alluding to the initial intent of Plan A to set a sustainability strategy internally that would impact every single product line of the business.

The outspoken yet charming CSR director, who has been with the food and clothing retailer since 1984, did not mince words when moderator Virginia Terry from BSR asked him how M&S was approaching the huge task of consumer education.

Indicating that businesses must understand the potential for consumer education and their role in it, he said, “For us, consumers have to be educated behind the scenes by only being offered sustainable choices. If the array of choices on a supermarket’s shelves are all sustainable, then we don’t have an option any more.” It is because we are competing with varying levels of products – and brands – in the market that have historically put a premium price on sustainability, that consumers invariably pick the cheaper product, he added.

The next step for Marks & Spencer?

“Consumer engagement,” offered Gillies. “For example, we have been incentivizing customers to give back to Oxfam. Every time they donate used clothing, etc. to Oxfam, they receive a voucher to be used at our stores. In three years, we have helped Oxfam generate an additional $7 million in revenue because of this program.”

This, in turn, promotes customer loyalty and brings M&S’s recycling commitment to the forefront of consumer action.

As for employee participation in sustainability, there is no question in Gillies’ mind that for Plan A to be successfully integrated, a company’s internal audience must be deeply commitment and passionate about the work. “Plan A has taken a life of its own and employee engagement has been an integral aspect of this. Our employees see the benefit of what Plan A offers for themselves and their families’ lifestyles and sustenance,” he said.

Because employee participation has been incredibly high, sustainability at Marks & Spencer continues to be a journey with several discoveries along the way. For example, the carbon-free bra launched earlier this year or their re-spun coats. Gillies explained: “We take waste wool and re-spin it into coat fabric. Turns out, this can be produced in Europe for a lower cost and much lesser environmental footprint than in one of our factories in Asia.”

As for the bra, it was part of a well-strategized plan to showcase an energy-efficient factory in Sri Lanka, which is powered partially by solar and hydro energy, and one of the first sites to test its eco-factory concept. As Marc Gunther wrote earlier this year, “To offset the CO2 generated by the bra’s manufacturing and shipping, M&S is planting 6,000 trees in Sri Lanka, some of which are lime and mango trees intended to generate income for farmers.”

Gillies offered some context: “The workers in Sri Lanka weren’t doing a drive to benefit the company. They were doing it because they saw the benefits of the program for their community, their families.”

A well thought out sustainability strategy ensures the business is doing more good instead of less bad. For Gillies, this means “inspiring consumers to get to a new place without telling them that they have to sacrifice along the way.”

“Business has to reset the values of what is quality, premium and sustainable. We have to look at our products and systems and rethink how consumers evaluate value,” he added.

It’s a tough task and enough to keep the best of intentions under cover for fear of failure or the immensity of scale required. But even for those, Gillies had a word of advice: “Business cannot be paralyzed by the scale of what needs to be done. This is very much a journey. We just need to stay focused on the greater good for our planet.”

Originally written for and published on CSRwire’s Commentary section Talkback on November 8, 2011.

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