THE SUSTAINABILITY INTERVIEW as long as we’ re moving forward on those things every day. We’ re going to be sustainable in the long run and continue to work as a company that proudly delivers sustainable packaging solutions.”
Where sustainability was once a‘ niceto-have’, leaders are now working to embed the principles into broader company strategy. For Sophie, the driving force behind the change is a continued theme of tying sustainability to long-term value creation.
She continues:“ We have a really customer-centric business strategy with which sustainability has to walk hand-in-hand for the business to be the flywheel that drives innovation. It drives our value proposition, supply chain and resilience throughout our value chain.
“ Fundamentally, we’ ve shifted from sustainability being layered on top of the business to sustainability being laser-focused on real impact – dependencies that drive business value, areas that our customers care about and projects that are durable.”
The shift is a journey – not an overnight fix. Sophie’ s advice for leaders taking on that challenge is, first and foremost, to listen – to customers about their requirements, to suppliers about their capacity and to stakeholders about priorities. IP continues to learn a lot from actively listening.
Sophie expands:“ The big shift that we’ re seeing is from customers and stakeholders who are focused broadly on big corporate goals to looking at what specific products are going to deliver in terms of its positive impact on nature or the reduced greenhouse gas emissions associated with the product or circularity.
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