In May, IFS hosted a virtual roundtable on environment, social and governance (ESG) issues with manufacturer Nature’s Path Foods. The panel focused on many facets of sustainability, including the need for industry transparency around best practices, the demand for sustainable-minded workers, the importance of data, and measuring the carbon impact of important technologies like artificial intelligence (AI).
Giles Peddy, managing director/EVP at SourceCode UK & Europe, a PR agency for IFS, served as the panel's moderator, and to start, he outlined some of the challenges facing sustainability in industry, as an introduction to the panel’s discussion.
“For businesses in North America, the pressure is on to focus on sustainability, especially as the U.S. government has recently invested in $6 billion in funding, aimed at advancing technology to help reduce emissions across otherwise hard to decarbonize sectors, including food, steel, and chemicals,” Peddy said.
“But how does this actually happen? How do organizations make that shift and how do they ensure they have all the data they need? This is what our panel will look to dive into this morning, as well as embedding sustainability into business strategy needs for the priorities of companies in 2024,” he adds.
The following six key takeaways from the panel’s sustainability discussion and speaker highlights to help outline where industry stands with sustainability and where it’s going.
Many organizations also struggle to take the first steps toward being more environmentally friendly. Maybe you aren’t quite ready for action, but starting the conversations now will help reach those goals faster. How is your company thinking about sustainability? If you’re not sure where to start, use these sustainability highlights to think about your own company. (And we’ve provided some discussion questions inspired by the IFS panelists to get your plant started on the sustainability journey.)
1. Sustainability is a wholistic business strategy, not an add-on program.
“Everyone is embedding sustainability in their business strategy. There's no standalone sustainability on the side,” said Caitlin Keam, senior director of sustainability applications at IFS. “We know best practices in our industry, but that's changing, and we just want to learn from our peers. I really feel like that's how people are coming together and trying to bring more transparency around this.”
“It's not about having a huge team. It's about embedding it everywhere in your business. It's sustainability embedded,” she added.
Strategy discussion: How does our company think about sustainability wholistically? Do we have a sustainability program? How could we embed sustainability more into the overall business strategy?
2. Sustainability needs the right talent and a connection between the environmental mission to everyday work.
“If you're looking at retention, or even attracting top talent in North America, people are asking the right questions before. Actually, they want to know what else are you doing on top of certifications, on top of standards, on top of regulations?” said Manuel Gorrin, director of mission & justice, equity, diversity and inclusion at Nature's Path Foods. “Every single team member and the company is part of the sustainability team. We don't even have a committee or green committee because we want the message to be alive in every single conversation.”
“We also need to make it very clear, too: How is that connected to their day to day work?” Gorrin added. “It's not just about data, it's actually that whole piece of connecting what you're doing business strategy, and then you will need the data no matter what, but you also need to make it very easy. So it's part of the day to day any other job.”
Workforce discussion: What does the type of talent we attract say about our view of sustainability? How do we help workers connect sustainability to their daily tasks and could we do more?
3. Sustainability needs dedicated resource allocation, and it must also be affordable and reliable.
“If sustainability is everyone’s job, then it’s no one’s job…if you don't get the governance, right, everything else will fail. The problem with sustainability is that it's everyone's job, which means it can be no one's job,” said Sophie Graham, chief sustainability officer at IFS. “There's really a challenge in terms of making sure that the resource allocation is there across the business, and that really starts from the top from my perspective, so getting it top level support.”
“As consumer costs rise or power supply becomes constrained or not reliable, sustainability goals can often take a backseat,” said Carol Johnston, vice president of energy, utilities & resources at IFS. “You add on top of that the ever-shifting winds in North America, political winds that haven't really helped this transition either.”
Resource discussion: Whose job is sustainability at our business? What resources do we have allocated to sustainability? Does management support our sustainability efforts?
4. Sustainability won’t succeed without the right data reporting and modeling.
“Get your data into systems. Once it's in systems, we can work with it. We can have bring it into a central location….the next step, once the data is in, is ensuring data quality,” said Keam.
“It's not going to be enough to just report out a single data point. With a lot of the regulation that's coming in the EU, but also in the U.S., it's looking at things like climate risk reporting in different warming scenarios, and how your business fares under those different scenarios. So you have to do that forward looking modeling,” said Graham.
Data discussion: Do we have a centrally located system? Can we ensure data quality? How is climate change likely to affect our business and what data do we need to model those outcomes?
5. Technology has sustainability implications too.
“I'm just reflecting on the energy consumption, the usage around the growth of AI. And I'm also quite interested in it and watching it because it's twofold. It's that AI is going to bring a lot of efficiency, while using a lot of energy to do so,” said Keam. “I really think that the future is not thinking ‘AI here’ and ‘sustainability here.’ We're seeing sustainability and AI embedded as part of our future.”
Technology discussion: How do we measure the efficiency of our equipment? How do we balance the efficiency gains from technologies like AI with their own power needs?
6. Sustainability will take private and government investment.
“Looking forward now, so moving out of last year and into what's coming, we're seeing the energy and utility investments in sustainability initiatives set to increase dramatically—refundable, renewable credits, tax credits for energy storage, and carbon capture credits,” said Johnston.
Investment discussion: What government initiatives are available to help our business transition to a greener economy? What investment do we need to support sustainability initiatives?
Trying to understand U.S. industrial policy, how the government is working with industry on sustainability issues and how that might affect your business? Learn more about government’s role in industry led by Inflation Reduction Act investment, the status of scope 1, scope 2 and scope 3 emissions standards and reporting, and plans from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Transitions for billions of dollars in grants, cost shares, and loan guarantees here. DOE supports a government enabled, industry-led energy transition. Are you part of industry leading this transition?
