
The top executive of Henkel India, shares the various initiatives the company has undertaken to decarbonise the supply chain and make a positive contribution to climate protection.
Cyclones, floods, intense heat waves are just some of the examples of extreme weather and resulting disasters. Climate change has already had observable effects on the environment. It is a global problem that necessitates countries and companies to adopt practical and scalable ways to achieve decarbonisation. At Henkel, we want to make a positive contribution to climate protection and become a climate-positive company by 2040. Our sustainability goal is to become three times more efficient by 2030. As a part of our commitment, we have defined emission reduction targets. These include targets covering greenhouse gas emissions from Henkel's operations and emissions from our value chain. Our ambition is to achieve more with less. This means we create more value for our customers and consumers, for the communities we operate in, and for our company at a reduced environmental footprint. We aim to deliver more value on the focal areas of social progress, performance, and safety and health. On the other hand, we aim to reduce our energy consumption and carbon emissions, resources necessary and the amount of waste produced, as well as the use of water and wastewater. These approaches cover the entire lifecycle of the products:
Sourcing raw materials and supplier management
Transport and logistics
Packaging of our products
Consumption and disposal of our products
Henkel is committed to the responsible management of raw materials, especially the conservation of natural resources and biodiversity. A case in point is the 'Sustainable Guar' initiative, which focusses on guar and guar derivatives, important plant-based raw materials used by our hair and body care brand, Nature Box. This initiative supports guar farmers in Bikaner desert region of Rajasthan. The farmers learn sustainable farming methods and receive valuable advice on planting their vegetable gardens.
Henkel has taken efforts to promote sustainable development practice among its up-stream as well as down-stream supply chain entities. We are one of the founding members of 'Together for Sustainability' initiative along with a group of chemical companies. Under this initiative, suppliers are audited on sustainable development practices by a third party. We have defined sustainability goals for suppliers and measure their performance against it.
Our distributors are trained on sustainability. We measure the performance of our transporters on various parameters such as vehicle condition, safe driving practices, fuel consumption, etc. A monthly performance scorecard is given to all the transporters.