How do you blaze the trail to become a zero environmental impact company?

Collaborating with Implement Consulting Group, a global pharmaceutical company significantly amplified its environmental goals in response to the growing global climate crisis. In 2019, the company embarked on an ambitious journey to adopt circular economy principles, aiming to leave zero environmental impact. This required a dramatic rethink of operations and leadership across its global organisation.

A front-runner in sustainability

Every day, millions of patients around the world depend – and have long depended – on the global pharma company's therapies and delivery devices. The organisation employs thousands of people globally, and a key part of its mission is to defeat some of the world’s most prevalent chronic diseases. For a company of this scale, becoming a circular organisation with zero environmental impact is a massive statement.

However, when it came to setting and achieving ambitious environmental goals, the company had an impressive track record. At the turn of the century, they, as a frontrunner, aimed to reduce carbon emissions significantly. To achieve this, they partnered with a leading energy company and pledged to purchase a sizeable share of the power generated by a new wind farm. This allowed them to power all their local operations with renewable energy, and they reached their target four years ahead of schedule.

By 2020, they had reached another major milestone: all their global production facilities were powered by renewable electricity, achieving a goal they set in 2015. This was accomplished by implementing a variety of renewable energy solutions across different locations, including hydroelectric power in South America, wind power in Europe and Asia, and solar power in North America.

A commitment to circularity

While major achievements had been accomplished on the environmental agenda, a cornerstone of the strategy work was the realisation that the only true solution to global environmental challenges is leaving no harmful impact on the planet.

This realisation required a shift from a short-term approach to a long-term strategic one. The company did not simply focus on reducing carbon emissions – they changed their focus towards becoming a fully circular company. This meant keeping resources in circulation for as long as possible and transforming waste into value.

Moving away from the classic "take, make, and dispose" mindset was the starting point for the company’s new environmental strategy. Launched in 2019, this strategy infused circular economy principles into every aspect of the company and its ways of working. The goal was to eliminate waste and continuously reuse and recycle resources.

This involved transforming existing business models and embedding a new way of thinking across supply, operations, and products, with three key focus areas:

• Circular supply chain: The company started to proactively collaborate with suppliers to embed circular thinking, shifting toward green sourcing and procurement to reduce the company’s carbon footprint.
• Circular company operations: They ensured zero carbon emissions from their operations by using renewable energy, and they moved toward the elimination of energy, water, and material waste by applying circular principles.
• Circular products and services: The company designed new products and services for circularity, upgraded existing products to fit circular models, and moved toward solving end-of-life product waste challenges by reusing and recycling.

An engaging and explorative strategy approach

To determine the new strategic direction, a company-wide strategy process was launched in 2019 to derive fact-based strategic choices and to get the entire organisation involved.

The strategy process was anchored with executive management and key stakeholders and used four key principles to design the strategy and accelerate its implementation:

• Exploration of multiple strategic positions: Strategic issues were identified, and different transformative opportunities were explored using insights from deep analysis of current and future outlooks as well as best practices from other leading global organisations.
• Iterative prototyping and assumption testing: Key assumptions were weighed, quick feedback was received, and the assumptions that needed to hold true for desirable strategic positions were validated. A scientific approach to decision-making enabled the company to test and analyse key initiatives systematically.
• Organisational co-creation and mobilisation: All parts of the organisation were involved in co-creative idea-generation sessions, design labs, and large-scale workshops. Company-wide discussions were held to consider strategic choices and potential trade-offs in an open and transparent manner.
• Balancing strategic choices with agility: The strategy was designed to be simple, clear, and aligned with the rest of the organisation. The implementation model balanced several large, cross-organisational transformations with cascading choices to all parts of the company. This meant local teams were involved, turning corporate goals into concrete actions.

A global sustainability leader and circular company

By now, the company is well on track to becoming a circular company with a goal of achieving zero CO2 emissions from operations and transportation by 2030.

By shifting their ways of working and applying circular economy thinking across the organisation, they increased resource efficiency and transformed waste into value. The strategy empowered the company to make profound choices with a circular mindset, placing sustainability at the forefront of their strategic agenda.