Walmart + Grove Collective Offer Insights on Scaling Sustainability

At this week’s Fast Company Innovation Festival, one session looked at “Scaling Sustainability” and featured a discussion with Kathleen McLaughlin, executive vice president and chief sustainability officer of Walmart, and Stuart Landesberg, cofounder and CEO of Grove Collaborative. They looked at how companies can scale up sustainability efforts “to meet the urgency of challenges like the climate crisis and loss of biodiversity.”

Their takeaways and advice included:

Set ambitious goals—When Grove Collaborative launched in 2016, “We put a stake in the ground that we want to be 100% plastic-free,” said Landesberg. “We’re already carbon neutral and plastic neutral today.” And the company aims to be 100% plastic-free by 2025.

Help consumers think of themselves as sustainable customers—Landesberg said that Grove Collective’s impact goes beyond its products “to actually helping millions of consumers start to believe that they can live more sustainable lives in general. That will create the sort of cascading impact where folks really put pressure on all of the companies like us to innovate and keep innovating for a more sustainable future.”

Put sustainability at the core of your business—McLaughlin encourages companies to, “Find that intersection between the social and environmental issues, the product services and operating model of your business, and the kinds of benefits that might be economic or around capability.” The intersection of those “is the sweet spot.” And, “It’s not philanthropy, it’s not corporate social responsibility…It’s much more central to how you operate your business.”

View the original article here.