It's easy enough to be sustainable on the surface: get a green certification, use biodegradable products, ask employees to reduce waste. Genuinely sustainable practices need to go a lot deeper, though.

On the sidelines of the 2024 AmCham Singapore Regional Economic Conference last month, People Matters got the opportunity to meet Rebecca Liebert, President and CEO of specialty chemicals manufacturer Lubrizol. Here's her take on sustainability, from an industry perspective and a science-based personal background.

Making the entire product life cycle sustainable

Sustainability is not just about using green chemicals or biodegradable products, said Liebert; it's about impacting the entire life cycle of a given product.

“Take cars, the first cars would only last about 3,000 miles. You could only travel a few miles per gallon of gasoline, and they were not very efficient in emissions,” she pointed out. “But once you improve the additive packages, the lubricants, the fuel systems – using Lubrizol's own products as an example, these allow cars to last 300,000 miles, get over 25 miles per gallon, and the volatile organic compounds from the cars are dramatically lower.”

Put in terms of resource use, lengthening the life cycle of a product as resource intensive and widely used as a car means far less material consumed and far less energy used. And even lengthening the life cycle of individual components, whether the fuel itself or the lubricants used, can significantly cut back on resource use and waste generation.

The point where sustainability becomes profitable

Different customers look at different types of sustainability, said Liebert: some focus on the product's end of life, others on life cycle management and whether the product can be as carbon friendly as possible from sourcing to manufacturing to use. And the intersection between sustainability and profitability comes where a business can meet the customer's particular requirements.

“If you are just doing this because someone wants you to commit to a number, but you don't see actual demand for it, then you have to rethink: is that the right strategy? As an example, in the beauty and home space, our customers want biodegradability, and we have seen strong uptake of our latest inherently biodegradable product; on the lubricants side, our customers want life cycle management, and they're asking us to do carbon life cycle analysis testing. It's really very market dependent.”

The challenge, she added, emerges when the market is unable to keep up with external goals and progress cannot be maintained.

“In some cases, we've made very harsh decisions, as an example saying we're going to eliminate internal combustion engines by 2030, where it's going to be hard for technology to develop quickly enough to allow us to meet that,” Liebert said. “We see a little bit of that right now with electric vehicles in the United States, where some big goals were set, but we don't have the infrastructure to support it. We don't have the energy, we don't have the charging stations. So consumers got frustrated with their electric vehicles, and now we're seeing that the demand for electric vehicles is going down because the market wasn't prepared for that level of adoption.”

A collaboration between businesses and regulators

In finding that balance between ambition and achievability, large manufacturers across all industries do have a major role to play in driving sustainability up and down the supply chain. In some cases that may involve closely working with decision-making bodies; at other times it may be a matter of influencing their business partners to adopt best practices.

“We work with a lot of regulators to help get decisions passed that can enable more sustainable solutions,” Liebert said of this, less known aspect of sustainability. She listed, as examples of regulators that Lubrizol works with, the bodies that set fuel standards and oil standards; the building code setting bodies that determine the use of metal or plastic piping for buildings. “And we've worked with many code setting bodies in industries that Lubrizol is associated with. “It's about bringing that whole ecosystem along with us, so that the folks that are making the decisions on how you build it, how you construct it, how you dispose of it, understand what's needed.”

That final point about involving the entire ecosystem is central, she adds, because a business's social responsibility needs to be human-centric and future-centric.

“You want to grow your business, but you also want to be a good corporate citizen,” said Liebert. “We only have one planet that we're going to live on – us, our kids and our grandkids, and all the generations after. And we need to treat the environment as something that's meant for our families in the future. That means innovating products that are going to be as sustainable as possible: building factories that reduce energy emissions and water usage, managing volatiles and other emissions. And it means looking at how our products are cared for in the aftermarket, whether you can recycle them, dispose of them properly, etc.”