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Wednesday, March 14, 2012

DuPont Executive Highlights Company’s Path to Sustainability

by Avery Fellow

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 VANCOUVER, B.C.--DuPont has incorporated sustainability into its business by enlisting leadership, embedding the concept in its operations, and seeking out opportunities for collaboration, a company executive said March 14.

Jim Weigand, president of DuPont Sustainable Solutions, said the company started becoming more sustainable by having corporate leadership take a strong stance on the issue. In 1989, DuPont’s CEO at the time, Ed Woolard, set a suite of environmental performance goals, Weigand said.

“At the time, we were probably one of the worst polluters in the world,” Weigand said. To address this issue, the company set a number of sustainability-related goals, including reducing emissions of air toxics by 70 percent. The company has now surpassed that goal, Weigand said. He was speaking during the opening session of the GLOBE 2012 conference on business and the environment in Vancouver.

DuPont next incorporated sustainability in its business operations. It created a sustainability office and named Linda Fischer chief sustainability officer. Her office sets internal goals and metrics for sustainability across the company. “It’s not with a huge team, it’s a small team, because what we’ve done is put sustainability into our business operations,” Weigand said.

The office conducts an annual sustainability review with the president of each business unit, including Weigand. “It is a big help to how we have operationalized what we do in DuPont,” he said.

In 2000, the company started setting goals to make products and services more sustainable. DuPont had earned $1.6 billion in revenues from products that improve energy efficiency or reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the end of 2010, Weigand said.

In 2008, the company started focusing on applying science to find solutions to global problems related to food, energy, and environmental and public protection. The world’s population is estimated to grow to 9 billion by 2050, Weigand said, which means “we will need 70 percent more food than we have today.”

DuPont began looking at alternative fuels and clean technology to make its processes more efficient. It chose to pursue cellulosic ethanol, using corn as the feedstock. To prevent a conflict with food production, the company has worked to make agricultural production of corn more sustainable. The company developed a process to use residue from corn harvested for food to produce cellulosic ethanol, helping DuPont achieve both food and energy goals.

The company is also working with a Canadian company on a microbial and enhanced oil recovery technology. The technology uses biology and nutrients indigenous to Canada to help produce 15 percent to 20 percent more oil from each well. “It’s a technology that we’re very excited about … and we’re looking forward to advance that technology further this year,” Weigand said.

DuPont recognized that collaboration is a key factor in solving emerging global issues. “What we have to do is embrace our competitors, our suppliers, our customers, governments, NGOs, and academia, and look at all these issues,” Weigand said.

DuPont has formed what it calls a Global Collaboratory to encourage collaboration to find solutions to food, energy, and environmental and public protection issues. More information on the Global Collaboratory is available at http://collaboratory.dupont.com/.
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