Sustainability in Action
March 31, 2010 Attendees at Session I of the International Cotton Conference will be treated to a presentation from Karin Ekberg, Head of Environmental Services, adidas Group and Philipp Meister, Manager Materials Sustainability, brand adidas. The presentation surrounds the environmental aspects of the Group’s 2009 Sustainability Report, released March 2, which provides a detailed look at the company’s progress on a wide variety of sustainability projects ranging from reducing environmental impact to its efforts surrounding labor and workplace standards.
As the individual who coordinates adidas’ Group wide, cross-functional, and cross-brand projects in the environmental area, Ekberg emphasizes the importance of maintaining a wide view when approaching sustainability.
“It is certainly challenging to integrate our environmental work into each aspect of the value chain – and into all of our business processes,” says Ekberg. “But we think that it is the best way to move forward and to make improvements: to have an integrated approach where all business processes can take on responsibility in a constructive and pragmatic way.”
Adidas’ environmental efforts include work with their own employees, processes, and facilities, as well as collaborative work with their suppliers. Activities extend beyond work to minimize emissions to include elements such as innovative product design and pattern efficiency which can help to conserve resources for the entire product life cycle. The Group recently finished updating their strategic plan – complete with an ambitious list of projects and quantifiable targets, that will drive their efforts through the year 2015.
Ekberg says adidas makes its sustainability approach a holistic one, and realizes that the cumulative environmental footprint of the company depends on continued progress in a variety of areas. “There are many areas where we have experienced quite a bit of success,” she says, “supply chain outreach, the environmental area, but also in product development – the development of new and more sustainable materials. These are all elements of our environmental strategy”.
Defining and quantifying progress is a cornerstone of the programme.
“We have defined quite ambitious targets within our own locations, for example, ” Ekberg says. “The targets are quantified which means we are able to follow up in a quantified manner to assess how we are doing in each area. This approach is part of our Green Company initiative, and involves all of our physical locations worldwide.”
Adidas launched the Green Company Initiative in October 2008, with a bold objective of evolving into a zero-emission company. The Green Company approach extends to all areas of adidas’ business as part of its continuing environmental strategy. Ekberg says Green Company is especially indicative of the success they’re having getting traction with employees throughout the entire organization. “At many of our locations we have what we call Green Teams, teams of employees that – on a voluntary basis – support our efforts to reach our Green Company targets. They come from any area you can think of in the business, and are very engaged in the process.”
The Initiative has given rise to a number of pages on the company’s intranet where they post information about all of the different local teams, what they are doing, and what kind of progress they are making implementing their ideas. “In some cases they have provided us with videos about their accomplishments,” Ekberg says, “so there is a lot of information sharing and tracking among our employees as to what’s going on in the Initiative.”
Sustainability efforts extend outside the company, too. Each of adidas’ potential suppliers is evaluated through an audit as part of the company’s regular sourcing activities. Standards and protocols for all potential new suppliers are evaluated before they are approved, a process that includes both labor and environmental practices. Ekberg also reports that outreach activities, such as a series of energy workshops that adidas held, help adidas push the sustainability message deeper into the value chain. To date more than 100 of adidas’ suppliers participated in the energy workshops, many of whom subsequently defined their own programmes to conserve energy.
To learn more about these programmes, download the full 2009 Report, at: www.adidas-group.com/en/ser2009
photo:
Ekberg
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