Climate Action Plan models collaborative transparency

Global ingredient supplier Corbion is making public its newly updated Climate Action Roadmap, aiming to spark greater collaboration and knowledge sharing among manufacturers worldwide. The roadmap provides a detailed breakdown of concrete actions taken so far, and defines the steps ahead, to achieve its recently revised, more aggressive, science-based emission reduction targets. The new targets were introduced to analysts and investors at Corbion’s Capital Markets Day last December.

"A target without a plan for achieving it is just an idea," said Diana Visser, Senior Director-Sustainability at Corbion. “We are determined to put our ideas into action and to share those ideas in a collaborative way with our customers and stakeholders. If climate change were just a concept and not something actually harming people and economies around the world, perhaps words would suffice. But the only thing that makes a difference is what we do.”

The plan recaps Corbion’s sustainability journey and progress made since 2016, which, in the first five years, resulted in a 27 percent reduction in Scope I, II and III emissions per ton of product. From that point, seeing opportunities for even greater reductions, Corbion set new, more ambitious targets, which were validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) last year.

The roadmap summarises key considerations in every segment of Corbion’s overall value chain and outlines current and completed initiatives, including numerous efforts through which Corbion is collaborating with suppliers and partners to reduce impacts throughout the supply chain. In fact, Corbion ranked in the top 8 percent of companies on the 2022 CDP Supplier Engagement Leaderboard for its work with suppliers to mitigate climate change.

Covered in Corbion's Climate Action Roadmap are:

• A transition to renewable energy
• Radical process development
• Supplier engagement and raw material certification
• Support and promotion of regenerative agriculture practices
• Reduction of transport emissions
• Elimination of waste sent to landfill
• Sustainability performance transparency
• Active promotion of climate action

Sustainability efforts at Corbion have grown in terms of scope, maturity, and sophistication with time. Having developed the ability to estimate future emissions, Corbion is now able to take into account both the increases that come with growth and reductions realized through sustainability initiatives, providing a well-founded projection of the net result.

"We are committed to transparency because none of us can do this alone," Ms. Visser added. "To protect ourselves and future generations from the most damaging consequences of climate change, we must act now. We are working with our customers, suppliers and sustainability experts around the world, sharing information and ideas, and creating solutions grounded in reality in order to make the greatest impact possible. Anything less puts our shared future at risk."