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Transitioning in the workplace comes with a whole host of challenges. For those who do so, a supportive environment is key, and employers and allies alike can help ease the process by creating a safe environment. 

“Our words matter," Josh Saterman, CEO of the consulting firm Saterman Connect, said during a recent virtual event on what workplaces can do to better support their transgender employees. "Our world is full of complexities. And while these complexities do not have to be scary, unfortunately, we do live in a moment where these complexities are giving rise to fear tactics and hate. So, our job today is to explore these words ‘evolving’ and ‘transitioning,’ embracing the idea that transition and evolution are all around us every day.”

Defining transition

The panel featured personal stories about what transitions really mean for individuals, as well as discussions on how we typically talk about them. James Barnes, for example, didn't see his gender as having transitioned, but rather how other people perceived it. Known as The Trans Coach, Barnes helps companies develop a level of understanding and empathy that goes beyond providing employees with trans resources to fostering a sense of community, as well.

Likewise, when it comes to her son, Lisa Moore said transition and evolution would not be the right words. “I think he would just stop me in my tracks and say, ‘Be clear, this is a correction,’” said Moore, who is the chief people officer at Yahoo. “‘This is not an evolution. I didn't evolve to be a boy. I was always a boy.’ So [for him], this is just kind of correcting, or realigning or something like that.”

While the word transition can be utilized to describe the journey involved, "we do get to a point where we realize that . . . we've always been this person," said Jonovia Chase, lead organizer at House Lives Matter. “What we're changing is a physical part of us that is aligned with how we feel about ourselves and how we choose to display ourselves in the world, which is no different than anyone else.”

Creating inclusive workplaces

These trans leaders and allies shared their top pieces of advice for employers looking to create workplaces that embrace trans employees as they progress in showing their authentic selves.

One size does not fit all. “Literally no one size fits all,” Moore said.”So, let's not put words in policies and processes that aren't inclusive or can't relate to more [than just one] interpretation, as everybody's individual situation needs to be considered. Everybody's in an individual situation.”

While some people may want to share their stories of transition — no doubt serving as inspirations to those who do not yet feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work — not everyone will want to discuss their gender identity with co-workers or employers. Not only does this need to be respected, but employers also have a duty to protect everyone’s right to privacy. It’s important to recognize that not everyone’s gender identity falls within a binary of established terminology.

Create a sense of community in the workplace. Ultimately, it boils down to being serious about creating an inclusive community that people want to be a part of because they feel they belong, can be their true selves and walk their own paths, Saterman said. 

Make it safe to be authentic. “Safety is critical, so if I don't feel safe, you're not getting my full intersectionality,” said Dave Ciliberto, adjunct instructor of diversity and inclusion at Cornell University. “If I do feel safe, then you will get a lot of it."

Safety means standing up for people and not allowing any form of discrimination or intolerance in the workplace. It is important to shut it down immediately — even if that means a terse “shut up” to offenders, Ciliberto said. "It's up to the workplace to create a safe environment for people.”

“You can't get to the business without a very, very psychologically and physically safe employee population,” added Irene Brank, head of learning at Mass Mutual.

It’s not just trans employees who need support. “My friends who are cis need coping skills as well,” Barnes said. It’s not about isolating trans people. Company trainings need to be inclusive and teach cis employees how to be respectful and supportive of their co-workers.

Diversity and inclusion lead to better business outcomes

That an inclusive work environment and diverse staff lead to better business outcomes has been well-established. However, considering the current backlash against the LGBTQ+ community — and especially trans people — it is more important than ever that businesses are supportive and aim to create workplaces where employees can be their authentic selves.

“A failure to adopt trans-specific policies and practices can cost businesses dearly in the form of higher turnover, decreased engagement and productivity, and possible litigation,” a trio of researchers warned in the Harvard Business Review.

So, it’s no wonder that many companies have implemented trans-friendly policies. Amazon, AT&T, IBM, Chevron, Mastercard and Google are among the major companies with policies that advocate on behalf of their trans workers. But this work is not limited to big employers. Creating safe workplaces, utilizing inclusive language, and recognizing people’s individuality and authenticity is something all businesses are capable of doing. 

Image credit: Nito/Adobe Stock

The U.S. has had a child hunger problem for decades. The COVID-19 pandemic turned that problem into a crisis.

Before the pandemic, 1 in 7 American children experienced food insecurity. The pandemic narrowed that ratio to 1 in 4 by the end of 2020, and nearly 1 in 6 families with children have struggled with food insecurity in the past year. 

Hunger, clearly, is not just a U.S. problem. The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for an accelerated response to end hunger in all its forms by 2030. But the pandemic’s impact on economies and supply chains led to global hunger increasing for the first time in nearly a decade. 

While many people are back to work and the economy is slowly growing again, agencies that support at-risk families are still trying to make up ground.

“Though we’ve seen improvement since the pandemic, too many are still struggling to keep food on the table as inflation wreaks havoc on families who are most vulnerable,” said Travis Arnold, president and CEO of Feed the Children, a 40-year-old anti-hunger organization that provides aid to children in the U.S. and abroad. In 2022, the agency distributed about 92.6 million pounds of food and essential items worldwide, benefiting more than 11.5 million people globally.

Corporate partnerships can help nonprofits and communities fight hunger

Nearly 10 percent of the global population, up to 811 million people, faced hunger, food insecurity and malnourishment in 2020, according to the Food and Agriculture Association of the United Nations.

More corporations have had to step up with supplies, service and partnerships. One successful pairing is the ongoing collaboration between Feed the Children, Herbalife and the Herbalife Nutrition Foundation. These organizations have partnered since 2019 through Herbalife’s global health and wellness initiative. According to Feed the Children, this collaboration focuses on expanding access to healthy food, identifying sustainable food resources and improving nutrition education, as well as raising awareness about the global hunger crisis.

Worldwide, Herbalife provides nutritional supplements to support thousands of children and families in the countries where Feed the Children works, Arnold said. “In the U.S., we have partnered for multiple community events, most recently in the Los Angeles area,” he told us. “Through our partnership, we have been able to provide both food and resources to thousands of families without life’s essentials across the country. These products help to supplement meals to thousands of families who are struggling to make ends meet.” 

As important as the money and supplies Herbalife contributes is the educational material it produces and presents. “Herbalife not only provides a generous means for Feed the Children to scale our impact, but also meaningful ways to talk about the power of our work with new audiences,” Arnold said. The company’s registered dietitians and nutrition experts regularly provide educational materials, including meal and snack recipes, to pack into food donation boxes. The company has printed and delivered 48,000 recipe cards for Feed the Children food boxes.

In preparing recipes, Herbalife experts focus on creating meals that are accessible, affordable, nutritious and can be fun to prepare, according to the company. Recipes adhere to guidelines including the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s low-cost ingredients index and utilize foods often found in boxes that Feed the Children distributes. Bilingual recipe cards, in English and Spanish, also are available.

Scaling nutrition education worldwide

Herbalife and Feed the Children are looking to create additional joint education programs, including resources for teachers, teacher stores and nutrition education seminars for community partners. 

In terms of Feed the Children’s own direct education efforts, it sponsors a support program for new mothers and pregnant women. Called Care Group, the program utilizes a peer-to-peer behavior change methodology: Facilitators work with pregnant women and new mothers directly to educate them about prenatal and postnatal nutrition, the benefits of breastfeeding exclusively for the baby’s first six months, and the types of supplemental foods to use until the child is 2 years old. “We help mothers learn how to select and prepare meals that provide the diversity of vitamins and nutrients growing bodies need,” Arnold explained. 

Feed the Children also manages child-focused community development programs that focus on reducing hunger and malnutrition, teaching health, and promoting self-reliance in eight countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

And thanks to increased monetary and product contributions from corporate partners, Feed the Children expects to reach even more families in the U.S. and around the world this year, Arnold said. 

The extra aid from Herbalife alone will supplement 300,000 meals and beverages for families in the U.S. The company has also increased its financial commitment to Feed the Children’s international program by $500,000 over two years. Globally, Feed the Children expects to expand programs designed to improve the health and nutritional profile of women and children. These resources include supplementary feeding supplies, deworming medicine and vitamin A supplements for children. 

Partnerships are key to success

Corporate collaborations and other pairings are critical to the ongoing mission and success of Feed the Children and its fellow aid organizations, Arnold said. 

“Partnerships are vital to success in every aspect of our work. Whether here in the U.S. or in communities around the globe, we cannot do this work alone,” he told us. “We are providing access to food and reducing the stigma around food insecurity through community events and resource rooms across the country. We are engaging communities in developing countries with education and empowerment. Our work with Herbalife is one example of how companies can make a significant contribution to a global issue through collaboration and true partnership.”

This work is needed now more than ever. With the price of basic necessities including food, energy and housing continuing to rise, the number of families straining to meet expenses are expected to increase in the coming months, Arnold observed. 

“During the pandemic, we learned to be innovative in order to get food and essentials to families in their own communities,” he continued. “Many of these efforts continue today through our network of community partners, as well as through the generosity of our donors and corporate supporters. It takes all of us working together in order for these efforts to be successful.” 

This article series is sponsored by Herbalife Nutrition and produced by the TriplePundit editorial team.

Images courtesy of Feed the Children and Herbalife Nutrition

Around 100 million U.S. residents, about a third of the country's population, don't have a public park or outdoor recreation area within a 10-minute walk of their homes. "When you dig just one layer down, roughly 73 percent of those 100 million people identify as people of color," said Wilma Wallace, chief diversity and social impact officer at the outdoor gear retailer REI Co-op. "That isn't a coincidence. It's the result of decades of systemic racism in our society." 

This so-called "nature gap" inspired REI to launch the Outside in 5 campaign. With the ultimate aim of allowing every American to access green space within a five-minute walk from home, the effort channels capital to community nonprofits that support access to the outdoors and calls on U.S. lawmakers to fund green spaces in underserved communities by passing the bipartisan Outdoors for All Act. 

Understanding the U.S. "nature gap" and racism in design

REI selected one of its longstanding partners, Friends of Anacostia Park, as the featured organization for the launch of Outside in 5, because the story of the nonprofit and the community it serves sadly mirrors how racist design decisions have impacted U.S. communities for generations. 

Anacostia Park spans 1,100 acres along the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. Much of the park runs adjacent to Wards 7 and 8, home to historically Black neighborhoods that have faced chronic disinvestment and are still among the city's poorest. Though they're neighbors to the park, a stretch of interstate highway cut residents of the Anacostia neighborhood and surrounding communities off from accessing it. 

"Interstate 295 cut through the park, separated it from the surrounding community and really divided the park as well," Wallace said. "It’s the story of so many communities, particularly communities of color, in this country. The highway infrastructure was built through neighborhoods — either dividing communities and/or cutting neighborhoods off from access to public goods like parks, swimming pools and other things that really bring a community together." 

Historians point to similar examples in cities including Miami, Nashville, New Orleans and Kansas City, where freeways took noticeable detours to cut through Black neighborhoods. An estimated 1 million Americans were displaced by interstate construction, and most of them were Black people, other people of color, and low-income people. 

This wasn't by mistake. In some cases, "not in my backyard" syndrome within wealthy white neighborhoods sent developers searching for alternate locations where residents had fewer resources to resist. In others, it was something even worse.

"In many cases, state and local governments, with federal acquiescence, designed interstate highway routes to destroy urban African American communities," historian Richard Rothstein, who specializes in housing policy, wrote in his 2017 book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.  

In 1938, for example, "Secretary of Agriculture (and subsequently Vice President) Henry Wallace proposed to President Roosevelt that highways routed through cities could also accomplish 'the elimination of unsightly and unsanitary districts,'" Rothstein wrote. As the interstate system took shape in the 1950s and 1960s, "Mayors and other urban political leaders joined in, seizing on highway construction as a way to overcome the constitutional prohibition on zoning African Americans away from white neighborhoods near downtowns." 

President Joe Biden's Infrastructure Plan earmarked $1 billion to reconnect Black neighborhoods that were impacted by racist design decisions including the construction of interstate highways. But community work is needed, too, both to address the physical barriers and to help heal the hurt of generations of division and disinvestment. 

In Washington, D.C., Friends of Anacostia Park has worked to reclaim access to the city's largest green space. It has revitalized neglected areas of the park, opening up new routes for neighborhood residents to safely access it. The park now hosts amenities including a roller rink, barbecues and playground areas, and the nonprofit partners with the National Park Service to implement improvements suggested by residents of Wards 7 and 8 to better reflect their vision for the park. 

How Outside in 5 and companies like REI can help

REI and the Outside in 5 initiative will support a slate of summer programming, adding to the outdoor activities and youth enrichment programs already offered in Anacostia Park.

On the surface, hosting events and summer parties may seem small in the face of such monumental challenges, but efforts like these speak to the nuance of expanding access to something like the outdoors, Wallace said. It's not just about removing physical barriers — it's also about creating space that allows people to feel comfortable enjoying their time outside in a way that makes sense for them. 

"How do you recreate the narrative around what it means to be in the outdoors?" Wallace said. "It doesn't mean climbing a 16,000-foot mountain. It can be walking around your neighborhood. It can be sitting on your stoop and watching nature. It can mean, hopefully, accessing green space that is within five minutes of your door."

The company aims to bring similar efforts to more communities across the U.S. in the coming years, in partnership with locally-led nonprofits like Friends of Anacostia Park. Customers who enter REI stores and shop on its website will be prompted to learn more about the effort and how they can help, including tools that make it easy to contact their congressional representatives in support of the Outdoors for All Act. 

While it's too early to tell what the outcome of the program will be, a similar effort — REI's Cooperative Action Fund, which launched in 2021 to support community groups that expand access to nature among historically underserved communities — is already showing signs of success.

The fund received more than 1 million individual donations from REI customers, co-op members and employees within its first 18 months. It has already distributed $4 million from individual donors and REI to 40 nonprofits that open up access to the outdoors. Those groups include Rails to Trails — which looks to convert unused rail corridors into public green space, with more than 24,000 miles of rail-trails already in use across the U.S. — and Boston-based Bikes Not Bombs, which aims to use the bicycle as a "vehicle for social change" in Black communities. 

REI will donate $5 from every new co-op membership to the Cooperative Action Fund as part of the Outside in 5 campaign. The fund plans to announce investment in another 250 nonprofits this fall, all aimed at creating equity and access in outdoor spaces, Wallace said. 

The work goes on (and on, and on...)

These efforts build on REI's 2021 commitment to work toward becoming an "inclusive, anti-racist, multicultural organization.” Wallace knows these are lofty words, but argues that putting them on paper sets the company down a path toward where it needs to be. 

"We realize this is not something that's going to change in a month or a quarter, which is how many businesses measure their impact, but that this is a long-term, multi-year, generational commitment," she said. "We're trying to address, reverse and, to some degree, dismantle hundreds of years of systems, policies, laws, practices and culture that have created a country that has a hierarchy of race and power and access to privilege." 

So far, the effort includes internal education sessions on anti-racism, changes to the company's product impact standards to ensure what it sells is inclusive to all customers, a $30 million investment fund to support founders of color looking to enter the outdoor industry, and outdoor access programming like Outside in 5. 

The Outside in 5 effort will be supported by REI's Cooperative Action Network, which allows customers to engage in activism online by contacting their representatives in support of policies that address inequitable systems and expand access to the outdoors. Click here to contact your local lawmakers in support of the Outside for All Act, and find more ways to get involved. 

Images courtesy of REI 

With the official seal of approval from the iconic toymaker Mattel, the Barbie movie could have been just another lighthearted romp through Toyland, starring the best-selling doll in history. Instead, the film challenges extremist politics with a faithful portrayal of the gender-role-bending world of Barbie, plunging Mattel into the center of today’s culture wars.

The Two Faces of Barbie

The Barbie doll is often criticized as an idealized, impossible representation of female beauty as seen through male eyes, but the power of transformation has also played an equal role in her story.

When Mattel launched Barbie in 1959, she moved seamlessly from the life of a risqué German novelty doll to a new life with a respectable job as a successful American fashion model. She has been on a dizzying whirlwind ever since.

Mattel points out that Barbie has more than 200 distinct careers under her belt, including many that have broken gender norms in the real world. “She first broke the 'plastic ceiling' in the 1960s when, as an astronaut, she went to the moon…four years before Neil Armstrong,” Mattel observes.

Barbie also began running for president in 1992, carrying on a long legacy of female candidates for the White House that began with the 19th century women’s suffrage activist Victoria Woodhull.

What about Ken?

In contrast, Ken has little to show for his more than 60 years of existence. When introduced in 1961, Ken was apparently meant to fill a hole in Barbie’s life. However, as amply illustrated by the Barbie movie, Ken was never equipped to match Barbie as she romped from one career to another, acquiring cars and houses along the way. The two never started a family, either.

While this comparably lesser role may seem unfair to Ken, the decision to keep the focus on a single, childfree Barbie was a bottom-line strategy that continued to pay off for Mattel through decades of women’s progress in the workplace.

“Barbie recognizes girl-relevant careers in which women are traditionally underrepresented to show girls that they can be anything,” Mattel explains. “Barbie’s career line reinforces the brand’s purpose to inspire the limitless potential in every girl.”

Yet another culture clash

Over recent years, it seems right-wing pundits and politicians pounced on every opportunity to amplify cultural outrage on matters concerning race, gender and sex, with Bud Light and Target being the most recent examples of their ire.

In that context, the right-wing reaction to the Barbie movie was as predictable as it was over the top. Much of the outrage focused on the treatment of Ken, with one pundit complaining that the Barbie movie is “possibly the most anti-male film ever made."

That is understandable. Rather than creating a Ken character that is more interesting than his role in the Mattel pantheon, the Barbie movie made the most of Ken as a sidebar, just as he is at Mattel, forever hovering in the glorious world of Barbie but never anchored by a career of his own.

That is an actual fact in the real-life world of the Barbie toy family, and the Barbie movie played it to the hilt with the gleeful participation of its marketing team. The now-famous tagline is spread far and wide: “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.”

All that progress comes to a screeching halt

Ginned-up outrage made a dent in sales of Bud Light, but so far the calls for a boycott of the Barbie movie have proved, for lack of a better word, impotent. The movie opened with the highest-grossing debut weekend of 2023, and it shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, ticket sales are over-performing in the conservative strongholds of southern U.S. states, despite the manufactured outrage.  

The real question for Mattel is not how to defend the Barbie movie against ineffectual right-wing attacks. The question is: Can Mattel step up and defend its vision of women's “limitless potential” against the torrent of anti-woman judicial decisions and legislative actions pouring forth from statehouses across the nation, including restrictions on abortion as well as legislation directed against transgender and other gender non-conforming persons?

After all, Mattel appears to have envisioned the movie as a means of bringing Barbie up to date. If that's the case, they got what they wished for — and more.

“Well, from the beginning, we were set out to create a cultural event," explained Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” program last week. "This is more than making a movie. Barbie is a pop culture icon that is both timeless and timely. And we always believe that this will be something very special, not conventional that will create a real societal event."

Bridging the dream gap

The anti-woman movement clashes directly with Mattel’s recent efforts to put some real muscle behind its “limitless potential” mantra. The toymaker funds research into the conditions under which young girls lose confidence as leaders, and that research led to the establishment of the Barbie Dream Gap Project in 2018. The initiative supported Mattel’s elaborate leveraging of International Women’s Day in 2022 to focus on women’s leadership around the globe.

This year, Mattel focused its Women’s Day activities on highlighting STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers. “Barbie knows that seeing is believing — and access to successful female role models in STEM is essential for children to build and maintain an interest in the industry,” Mattel explained.

If Mattel really is serious about closing the dream gap, advocating for female leadership is just a first step. Right now, what girls in the U.S. are seeing and believing is a dystopian future in which their opportunities are thwarted by relentlessly unforgiving laws that leave them unable to control crucial decisions on reproductive health and gender-appropriate medical care.

In the runup to the all-important 2024 presidential election cycle, Mattel has a golden opportunity to prove it is serious about bridging the dream gap. Providing financial support to candidates who support equal rights is one place to start. However, in consideration of Barbie’s high brand awareness, leveraging Barbie herself could prove much more effective.

Given Barbie’s focus on fulfillment through work, Mattel could help advocate for the Time to Vote campaign, which encourages employers to provide paid time off for voting. The campaign currently counts more than 2,000 participating businesses, and Mattel is not on the list — yet.

Mattel could also launch another Candidate Barbie to support voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote campaigns, appealing to girls and adult toy buyers as well. Girls are too young to vote, but they are not too young to influence the adults in their lives, and women voters have already begun pushing back against repressive abortion laws.

Barbie’s all-American image is also well positioned to help push back against the voter fraud canard and other election-related misinformation promoted by former President Donald Trump and his allies.

Mattel has already established a track record on diversity and inclusion as Barbie conquers one career after another. It remains to be seen whether or not an Equal Rights Activist Barbie will step up to the plate, but here’s hoping.

Featured image: Brecht Bug/Flickr

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected to release its long-awaited climate disclosure rule this fall, and businesses are preparing for change. The intent is to create a framework for companies to make climate-related disclosures in a way that is standardized and allows for comparison. 

“I think it is helpful to frame the SEC proposal not as a climate proposal, but rather as a proposal to enhance and standardize climate-related financial disclosures,” said Emily Pierce, chief global policy officer at the carbon accounting firm Persefoni and a former SEC lawyer involved in developing the proposed rule. 

What's different about the SEC climate disclosure rule?

The SEC’s forthcoming climate disclosure rule has been over a decade in the making. In 2010, SEC staff issued guidance stating that climate change could impact business operations as it carries material risks that affect financial performance, Pierce said. And anything that could impact financial performance should be communicated to investors.

Five years later, the investor demand for information was growing steadily. “By 2015, there was a collective concern about investor demand for sustainability information,” she said. “Investors were not getting the information they were asking for, and the marketplace was inefficient.” 

The Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) rose up to meet that demand shortly after the Paris climate agreement was adopted in 2015. “TCFD developed helpful disclosure frameworks for governance, strategy and risk management processes," as well as metrics and targets to measure a company's greenhouse gas footprint, Pierce said.

“TCFD is a market norm, but it wasn’t always complete and comprehensive, and it didn’t allow for comparison," she explained. "The SEC was inspired by the TCFD framework that investors and companies have found useful.”

What do we know about the new rule?  

The SEC's proposed rule covers how companies communicate their climate-related risks. Companies will be required to disclose material risks, including physical risks and transition risks, related to climate change. These may include sea-level rise, more frequent extreme weather events and wildfires, or changes in government regulation and consumer demand. 

Importantly, the rule will not initially apply to all companies, but will be phased in over time. “Phasing is an important part of the proposal, because it’s our way of managing implementation,” Pierce said. “We have to strike the balance between investor protection and creating a rule that is feasible for companies to implement. I think the most likely scenario is that, if it is finalized this year, companies will need to gather data next year for fiscal year 2025.”

The rule will also hold companies’ feet to the fire for claims made about net-zero and emissions reductions. If a company has a public target related to cutting emissions, the SEC will require additional disclosures and obligations related to that target. 

“A lot of companies calculate their greenhouse gas emissions today,” Pierce said. “But they do it in a way that does not have as much control over their data, calculations, and outputs compared to what they would have in their financial calculation reporting. When you’re making information investor-grade and compliance-ready, you should bring lessons you have learned from the financial space into the carbon accounting space.” 

Emissions created by a company's direct operations — Scope 1 emissions — and emissions associated with the company’s purchase of energy — Scope 2 emissions — will need to be externally assured, Pierce said. But smaller companies will not need to disclose value chain emissions from assets the company does not own — Scope 3 emissions — unless they set an emissions target for Scope 3, she predicted. 

What's next?

The climate disclosure rule should not contain any surprises compared to the SEC's current proposal, Pierce said. But the timing of release will be later than anticipated, due to the unprecedented number of public comments and feedback. Many analysts agree it will be released this fall.

“To be ready for climate disclosure, companies need to bring discipline and processes to their broader corporate thinking about governance, strategy and risk management,” Pierce said. “Additional discipline and processes will help them communicate about what they’re doing.” 

A lot of companies are already thinking about these issues, calculating their emissions and gathering the necessary information, Pierce said. “There are market rewards to decarbonizing, and they see the value in that. We will see an increase in the market rewarding sustainable behavior, whether it is in access to capital, customer preference, more business-to-business relationships or consumer demand."

Image credit: Ale Alvarez/Unsplash

Owens Corning is in a unique position. While more than 60 percent of the company’s revenues come from composites, insulation, and roofing products that help make homes and buildings energy efficient, the processes that create those products have historically generated their own significant greenhouse gas footprint.

Taking the position that manufacturers must step into a lead role in combating climate change, Owens Corning has committed to make dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade. Using 2018 as a base year, the company aims to halve direct emissions from its manufacturing operations (Scope 1), as well as emissions from the generation of the electricity it purchases (Scope 2), by 2030. It’s also looking to cut value chain (Scope 3) emissions by 30 percent this decade. 

The company has already made significant progress on those goals, having achieved a 22 percent reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions since 2018, according to its latest sustainability report. More than half (around 56 percent) of the electricity the company used in 2022 came from renewable sources, including wind, hydro, solar and geothermal energy.

“These results move the company closer to its goal of a 50 percent reduction in absolute Scope 1 and Scope 2 market-based GHG emissions by 2030,” Owens Corning’s director of sustainability, Julie Childers, told TriplePundit. “In the areas where there is room to do more, like Scope 3 emissions, we’re making investments in our people and processes to unlock ideas and move in the right direction.”

Moving renewable energy goals from ambition to implementation 

Owens Corning is now on its third-generation sustainability goals. Sourcing renewable energy and improving energy efficiency were central to all of those ambitions. And the company has come a long way in defining what that means in practice. 

“Our last two sets of goals were designed to really understand how that electricity was generated,” Childers said. “We built methodology in our databases to better track and drive to renewable sources.” In 2015, the company invested in two large wind farms that now account for almost half of its electricity use in the U.S.  

“As we moved into our third-generation goals, we set science-based targets for our greenhouse gas emissions and aligned a renewable electricity goal of 100 percent for the same period,” Childers said. “This is an exciting time for us as we continue down this journey and expand our renewable electricity usage into other countries where we operate.”

Overcoming challenges on the journey to lower emissions 

Of course, as with any corporate decarbonization journey, there will  always be obstacles to overcome  . 

Making further progress on Scope 2 emissions, for example, will mean a complex process of transitioning to renewable sources across all of the global regions where Owens Corning does business.

“When you operate in 31 countries, it certainly adds a layer of complexity,” Childers said. “But that complexity only affects how we get things done. We are united as a company in our mission and our goals.”

Beyond sourcing more renewable electricity, the company is challenged to find new solutions — such as hydrogen and biogas — for glass melting processes that are currently dependent on fossil fuels. To further drive decarbonization in its composites business, Owens Corning joined 22 other companies in a collaborative project called H2GLASS that aims to develop ways to replace natural gas with hydrogen in glass manufacturing, Childers said. 

When it comes to manufacturing insulation, Owens Corning is working to lower the global warming potential of the blowing agent blends used to create polystyrene foam. It’s also pursuing circular innovations within its research and development portfolio to reduce emissions from input materials, Childers said. 

Looking ahead 

Owens Corning aspires to have contracts in place covering 100 percent of its global enterprise electricity by 2025 and aims to have those contracts operational by 2030, Childers said. The company entered into a virtual power purchase agreement (VPPA) in Spain that is expected to come online in stages throughout 2023 and 2024, ultimately producing 223 gigawatt-hours of energy per year.

“This agreement, along with wind-driven VPPAs in Finland and Sweden, means that 100 percent of Owens Corning’s European production sites and science and technology centers will be covered by contracts and VPPAs supplying guarantees of origin enabling renewable electricity,” Childers said. “As we work to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half, purchasing electricity only from renewable sources is essential. In addition, we must work to reduce emissions from our processes and improve energy efficiency.”

Owens Corning has implemented more than 1,270 energy efficiency projects in its facilities around the world since 2006, Childers said, resulting in an estimated reduction of more than 1.47 million megawatt-hours per year. 

“These projects include lighting retrofits, pump optimizations, heat recovery, insulation improvements and process optimizations,” Childers explained. “In 2022, we implemented 12 projects, generating annual energy savings of over 17,000 megawatt-hours and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by over 4,400 metric tons per year.”

Childers is optimistic that Owens Corning will achieve most of its goals in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and expanding the use of renewable energy.

“I am a part of a company whose commitment to sustainability is deep and unwavering,” she said. “I’m surrounded by a team of mission-driven sustainability professionals who are amongst the best of the best, and our employees are working hard every day to bring our strategy to life and advancing our cause. We’re making meaningful progress toward our 2030 goals.”

This article series is sponsored by Owens Corning and produced by the TriplePundit editorial team.

Images courtesy of Owens Corning