Company
Reckitt Benckiser is a multinational consumer goods company headquartered in Slough, England. It is a major producer of health, hygiene and home products. RB has 45 manufacturing facilities, employees over 37,000 people and operates in nearly 200 countries.
Sustainability Performance
In 2012, Reckitt Benckiser launched betteRBusiness, a strategy with three headline targets for 2020: 1/3 net revenue from more sustainable products, 1/3 reduction in water impact, 1/3 further reduction in carbon footprint.
RB reports to CDP with scores of 99/B (2013) and 93/A (2012). RB is listed in the CDP Global 500 CPLI.
Challenge
To support their strategy, RB was challenged with considering sustainability early in the design of its products. RB’s R&D organization is large and spread across the world and product teams are already time poor as RB is in a fast moving and competitive industry.
Solution
RB’s solution is three prong:
- RB leverages its ability to focus on targets and beat them. The program has the full support of senior R&D leadership. They put in place a full-time project manager and sent her around the world visiting R&D teams, training and supporting sustainability brand champions.
- Their tools solution was driven by “making it simple for product designers”. RB invested in building a well designed factor and model library of their materials and processes. And they decided to use a streamlined LCA that focuses on the data and scope that designers work with daily.
- The sustainability team, based on some trial experience with their own home-grown Excel tool, wanted a modern, high-performance, easy to use, highly visual web capability.
Footprinter Tools
RB utilizes a full suite of Footprinter tools centered around Green Design for individual product sustainability assessment and innovation.
Footprinter Expert is used to build libraries and keep them up to date. Portfolio is used by the sustainability team and brand teams to track performance against targets.
Success
RB has over 600 product designers using the Green toolkit and has assessed well over 1,000 products over two full internal R&D pipeline reviews.
RB recently won two awards from 2degrees for their sustainable product innovation program: Runner Up – Solution of the Year, Winner – Internal Engagement!