Success Story

Driving impact with sustainable products

Accelerating sustainability through a holistic portfolio change

Sustainability Transparency

Circularity, Transparency and Safety icons

Nature needs them, customers demand them, and we have the technologies at hand to provide them: products and solutions that drive impact in sustainability. But how well are we set up to deliver them? Sjoerd Dijkstra, Director Sustainability Strategy & Excellence, Adhesive Technologies at Henkel talks about how Henkel's Adhesive Technologies business is raising the bar to remain competitive by assessing its product portfolio.

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A new methodology to assess our portfolio

In 2023 products from the entire range of adhesives, sealants and functional coatings have been looked at to find out more about their sustainability performance. More specifically this means an assessment of approximately 88 percent of the net sales value from Henkel's Adhesive Technologies business in 2021 and 2022 respectively. The results will serve as a baseline for strategic steering and further development of products and solutions.

“Already today we help our customers reach their sustainability targets,” says Sjoerd Dijkstra, Director Sustainability Strategy & Excellence, Adhesive Technologies at Henkel “But to remain competitive in the future, we have to further accelerate our contributions to sustainability. And we need to trigger a holistic portfolio change.” 

"There was no blueprint available from scratch, so we had to develop an internal assessment methodology,” explains Sjoerd. This established a systematic framework, to investigate the footprint of our own operations and raw material use, and to assess how our solutions enable customers to drive their sustainability agendas. “Here we specifically looked into four focus topics: climate, circularity, safety and nature,” he adds. “But we also analyzed what chemicals are contained in a product, placing a special focus on its impact on safety.” Next was to compare our solutions with market and industry standards, to assess if they match or even exceed them. Also considered for the final evaluation were the risks of counterbalancing a positive sustainability impact in other steps of the value chain.

 

The assessment covers the following topics across the value chain

As a result, the assessment clustered products into four main categories: Challenged, Straight Performers, Contributors and Pioneers. To be classified as Pioneer or Contributor, a contribution to at least one of the four key dimensions had to be proven through relevant documents. “The assessment revealed that products classified Pioneers or Contributors already make 19 percent of our current portfolio,” says Sjoerd. “Using these insights for business steering and innovation processes, will significantly help us to further transform our portfolio. Our assessment sets us on the right track, which now also has been proven by an external audit.”

The results of the assessment create a clear understanding about the contribution and performance of each product and help to anchor sustainability as an integral part of our business strategy. In addition, it provides even more transparency for our customers and supports the transformation towards new solutions enabling emission reduction and circularity.

YouTube Thumbnail Accelerating sustainability through a holistic portfolio change (Thumbnail)


In the video, Sjoerd Dijkstra shares more about the journey to transparency at our Adhesive Technologies business and the impact we have with our products and operations.

How the methodology is brought to life 

"After the methodology had been developed and carefully cross-checked by our internal experts, the IT infrastructure was set up in SAP to enable proper assessment of each and every product we sell,” explains Sjoerd. Once the ability to categorize all products was built into this tool, the actual assessment could start. “Product development and sustainability specialists from each business unit went through their products to decide on the category and, if required, upload the proof documents required to justify their evaluation.” The software tool made sure that Sjoerd and the central team could track and trace what people decided and helped collect the proof documents in a structured way. Thousands of products needed to be assessed, so it was imperative to double-check if there was sufficient quality of proof documents and whether assessments were done according to criteria. Once in place, the approach was confirmed by an external audit."

With 19 percent of our entire portfolio making a significant contribution to sustainability, our Adhesive Technologies business is in a good position compared to the industry. “But we need to continuously step up our efforts to remain cutting edge. I believe in 10 to 20 years we need to have completely transformed our entire portfolio,” Sjoerd says. “We need to grow the share of Pioneers and Contributors against criteria that will become even more challenging in the future. With our portfolio assessment we now have the compass at hand to turn sustainability into a real business driver.”

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