Everybody has heard of environmental footprints – but what is the best way to understand and measure them? Based on reliable data and rigorous methodologies, companies are getting an increasingly clear picture of their footprint at every step in the value chain. New technologies are supporting this development and enabling more accurate calculations of key factors in the push for sustainability. Companies are also making insights available to stakeholders and creating more transparency about their upstream and downstream impacts. In this way, leading businesses can measure and improve their efforts to cut carbon emissions and enable a circular economy. And they can empower suppliers and customers to achieve progress too.
Success Story
Creating clarity about our contributions to sustainability
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Understanding and having the ability to manage sustainability is the basis of the push for more transparency. There is huge potential to collect and analyze data from every step of a product’s life cycle – from raw materials through to manufacturing, use and disposal. Once companies get those insights, it opens up game-changing opportunities to drive progress for sustainability.
Transparency is a complex topic, especially in the context of sustainability. It carries multiple meanings – from compliance with regulations corporate reporting, to detailed product labelling as well as enabling sustainable offering and business steering. It also covers a huge range of topics and metrics including carbon emissions, recyclability, safety data and much more.
We have made a clear promise to deliver 100 percent end-to-end transparency on the sustainability of all our products according to leading standards by 2030. What are the biggest challenges and opportunities of achieving transparency for sustainability? How are we driving progress at Henkel? And what is the future outlook for this data-driven approach?
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What are the biggest drivers and opportunities of transparency for sustainability?
Today, sustainability is a major focus topic for stakeholders across industries worldwide – and they want access to reliable and transparent information as proof of progress. Businesses are seeking information to better understand their impact along the value chain. Investors want to know their capital is flowing into responsible companies. And regulators are accelerating the need for science-based communication: The European Union’s (EU) Green Deal and the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) for instance, will introduce regulations focused on enhancing transparency about companies‘ greenhouse gas emissions, use of renewable energy and a huge range of further sustainability-related topics.
Alongside the challenges of meeting these diverse expectations with high-quality data that covers the entire product life cycle, there are also big opportunities created by the trend for more transparency about sustainability. It provides businesses with a more detailed understanding of their impact across the value chain, so they can transform their portfolio and steer their sustainability efforts more effectively. When industrial companies share data about sustainability, it enables their customers to make more informed choices on designing and formulating products. Transparency also helps to advance progress for standardized and credible methods of showing how products contribute to sustainability. And it opens up potential for closer collaboration among partners from across global value chains.
How are we driving progress for transparency at Henkel?
Transparency begins at home. That is why we have developed an internal assessment methodology to understand the impact of our products along four key areas: Climate, Circularity, Safety and Nature. The results of these assessments are integrated from end-to-end in our strategic steering processes and the methodology was successfully audited by an external third party in 2023.
Supported by digital tools, detailed insights from every step of the value chain can be assessed to help us optimize our portfolio and processes for sustainability. In this way, our teams gain a deep understanding of where we can create value and take meaningful action to strengthen our contribution to every aspect of sustainability.
1,000+
experts have been trained to analyze product contribution to sustainability.
100,000+
customers in 800+ industries worldwide use innovations from Henkel Adhesive Technologies.
On top of this, we work closely with our partners around the globe to support progress for better data and increased transparency about sustainability. This includes our active participation in the cross-industry group Pathfinder, a project led by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) that aims to develop a framework for exchanging carbon emissions data about products. We are also a founding member of Together for Sustainability, which brings together businesses from the chemical sector to share sustainability data. And we are participating in Catena-X, a cross-industry consortium in the automotive sector that aims to develop a framework for calculating and building a data ecosystem for exchanging product carbon footprint information, among others.
To provide clarity about the impact of our products, we are developing tools to assess the sustainability performance of our portfolio automatically. With the data we have gathered, our teams have now created a completely new level of transparency for us and our customers.
Rüdiger Ohs, Head of Sustainability Data & Analytics, Henkel Adhesive Technologies
Recently, we developed the Henkel Environmental Assessment Reporting Tool (HEART) to provide our industrial customers with a comprehensive sustainability and performance profile of our products. This digital tool enables the automatic calculation of the product carbon footprint of about 58,000 products. It maps the cradle-to-gate emissions from raw materials, production, packaging and logistics. The underlying calculation methodology has been verified and certified by TÜV Rheinland. As a result, our customers now receive full transparency about the individual cradle-to-gate sustainability impact of the majority of our products, which empowers them to better understand and reduce their own environmental impacts.
In 1992,
Henkel became one of the first companies in Germany to publish an environmental report. Today, our corporate publications are still the central source for information about our company’s overall strategic contributions to sustainability. In 2025, we will embrace the requirements of the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) for companies headquartered in the EU.
What is the future outlook for this data-driven approach?
By sharing insights into the sustainability performance of individual companies and products at every step in the value chain, there is enormous potential to unlock measurable and meaningful progress. For creating transparency, it is pivotal to build an effective and flexible IT ecosystem, which allows easy ingestion and analysis of supplier data, to analyze sustainability performance on product, manufacturing and corporate level, and deliver relevant sustainability data to customers. To manage the complexity of the IT landscape and to drive our digital agenda for sustainability, we have developed our own “Sustainability Information Hub” framework. At Henkel, we are constantly seeking ways to improve our data and tap into the latest technologies for measuring sustainability. We are also collaborating with partners to lead progress for this important trend.
Having these technologies in place allows us to provide powerful data alongside our products and services. In this way, we are giving customers trustworthy information to support their decision-making and enable them to move closer toward their sustainability goals – while developing products that meet the expectations of consumers, investors and regulators by measuring our environmental footprint.
The transformation for sustainability is a once-in-a-generation task that requires close collaboration from organizations in every industry worldwide. Transparency is a key enabler of this essential shift.
Ulla Hueppe, Vice President Sustainability, Henkel Adhesive Technologies
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