What’s the Key to a Winning Sustainability Strategy? Integration

This blog post is guest authored by Virginie Helias, Chief Sustainability Officer

This post is also part of our series on P&G’s Integrated Growth Strategy. Click the links below to read the other stories in this series:

• Inside P&G’s Integrated Growth Strategy
• The Science Behind Superior Products: From Insight to Innovation
• 3 Keys to Successful Digital Transformation
• Winning at Shelf: How P&G Delivers Superior Retail Execution
• Supplying Your Favorite Products: From Production to Your Home
• The Art and Science of Improving Everyday Household Products

A component of our strategy is environmental sustainability that delights consumers, customers, employees, society and shareholders. Sustainability is a journey full of interconnected opportunities. Here’s how we embrace integration inside our company and out to fuel continued progress, with accountability embedded in our business teams.

Embedding sustainability into P&G’s business strategy.

Our strategy seeks to deliver across three levels of impact: reducing our own impact, enabling people to reduce their impact, and helping scale solutions across industries.

Reducing our impact across our operations and supply chain — what we control. Only a few examples of our progress:

• We have reduced Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions in our manufacturing operations by 60% since 2010.
• 99% renewable electricity drives our operations.
• Water use efficiency per unit of production in our operations is up 26% since 2010.
• 80% of consumer packaging is designed to be recyclable or reusable.

Enabling people to reduce their impact. We continue to provide product innovations and education that can accelerate consumer progress on their individual sustainability journeys, making it easier to reduce resources like energy, water and waste when they use our products. Learn more in the video clips below about just a few of the ways we’re providing irresistible superiority for consumers that is also more sustainable:

Scaling industry-wide impact. We can act as catalysts for cross-value chain collaboration by scaling industry-wide solutions that reduce environmental impact — helping to increase the scope, speed and spread of change.

One example is the 50 Liter Home Coalition, which addresses solutions for water scarcity, as about one-quarter of the world’s population experiences extremely high water stress annually. The collaboration recently reached an exciting milestone — after one year, its Los Angeles pilot demonstrated that people could reduce indoor water consumption by over 20% vs. a control group, using existing products and solutions. Less water per person per day, with more delight. Learn more about this project.

Teaching the power of “and.” To deliver consumer delight — whether that’s shampoo, laundry detergent, dish soap or any other category — we continually work to increase sustainability in ways that deliver on superior performance without trade-offs, because in P&G’s categories, performance is what drives consumer brand choice. This means innovating to solve everyday problems through irresistible superiority that drives market growth and is more sustainable. At P&G, it’s important we convey how delivering on both enables us to serve consumers and fuel our purpose of improving lives for generations to come. Learn more here:

Overall, sustainability comes to life best when it’s baked in versus bolted on. It should be integrated into the business strategy and value proposition; grounded in science and powered by consumer insights; and enabled by employees and other partners who are empowered to challenge the status quo and make a difference.