Written by: Joan Cano Cervelló, Specialty Lead Process & Utilities
In the field of sustainability, it is crucial to address challenges from the outset to identify strategies that help maximize the positive impacts of a project. When working towards a more sustainable world, we face a large amount of complex and often disorganized information, full of terms, acronyms and concepts that make it difficult to analyze. It is therefore essential to conduct a preliminary analysis to understand where we stand before making any decisions.
Firstly, we must know how to differentiate between two commonly heard acronyms concerning sustainable practices: OSD/SDG and ASG/ESG.
The SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) are a global initiative established by the United Nations in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. These goals are tasked with ending poverty, protecting the planet and ensuring peace and prosperity by 2030. The SDGs consist of 17 goals and 169 specific targets that address a wide range of global challenges, from poverty eradication to climate action and gender equality.
The SDGs are focused on global development and are implemented at the country level. They provide the global roadmap for governments, international organizations, NGOs, businesses and society at large towards a more sustainable world.
The ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) criteria focus on the assessment and measurement of corporate performance in terms of environment, society and governance.
These criteria help investors, consumers and other stakeholders understand a company’s impact on sustainability and social responsibility.
If we focus on ESG criteria, we can define them as follows:
Environmental Criteria:
These refer to how a company addresses issues such as natural resource management, carbon footprint, energy efficiency, renewable energy use and waste management. This includes measures to reduce environmental impact and promote sustainability.
Social Criteria:
Social criteria focus on how a company treats its employees, customers, communities and other stakeholders. This includes issues of equality, diversity, workplace safety, community relations and supply chain responsibility.
Governance Criteria:
Governance criteria relate to a company’s governance structure and practices. This encompasses transparency, business ethics, accountability, board independence and risk management.
If we organize all the volume of information described above, we will have an orderly diagram to proceed in an efficient way to the management of the different actions to be carried out, we have our sustainability “road map”.
Once we are located and with clear lines of development, we can go a little deeper in our line of work and find tools that allow us to support actions for the improvement of our sustainable development, within our productive plant, for example, the “climate taxonomy”, which consists of a classification system that aims to clarify and classify, within the European Green Pact (EVP), investments and activities that are sustainable.
Thus, any economic activity that seeks financing and is called sustainable must contribute to the achievement of the six climate objectives corresponding to the “climate taxonomy”.
- Climate change mitigation: generation, distribution and use of renewable energies, increasing clean mobility and seeking to improve energy efficiency.
- Adaptation to climate change: reduce or prevent current or future climate impacts.
- Protection of water and marine resources, avoiding wastewater discharges and providing access to drinking water for the population.
- In Transition to a circular economy, products must include in their manufacture and design the concepts of “durability”, “repairability” and “recyclability”.
- Pollution prevention and control, improving air, water and soil quality or mitigating health risks.
- Biodiversity and ecosystem restoration, protecting natural habitats of species, sustainable forestry and agriculture management.
Keep in mind the work to be done also in the reduction of the water Footprint, which has a great impact on several of the objectives of the “climate taxonomy”.
Analyzing in more detail the supply chain of a product, we go even deeper into our production process and analyze within the ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) criteria the part more focused on manufacturing equipment, production, utilities, generations, reuse, etc.
Let’s go through the entire supply chain. We must be able to analyze what we could call the “embedded footprint” of a product, to be able to measure in a real way the “carbon footprint” that we produce when generating our product from the beginning of its life cycle to its end.
In other words, we measure the “carbon footprint” taking into account the emissions generated in the production of the raw material, as well as the transportation, the emissions in the generation of the manufactured product itself and at the end of the life cycle, the emissions generated for its disposal, if applicable.
There are tools for measuring the product life cycle, which can provide realistic data to help in decision-making.
That is to say, we should not only stay punctual in the analysis of what happens in our small plot of the production plant, but we must also be aware that the entire life cycle must be in line.
