Sustainability Factsheet

September Commentary

Environmental

• Silviu Popovici, PepsiCo’s Chairman and Chief Executive of the company’s operations in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, said that by 2030 half of the material used in the company’s packaging in Europe will be recycled plastic. Currently only 13% of packaging material is from recycled plastics, which the company aims to increase to 45% by 2025 and 50% by 2030.

• In order to achieve these goals PepsiCo has joined NaturALL Bottle Alliance, which is developing 100% “bio-based” bottles. The Alliance, whose founder members include Danone and Nestlé, has already produced 80% bio-based PET at pilot scale and is currently working on a 95% version. The aim is to use materials such as cardboard and sawdust so resources which could be used for human or animal consumption are not diverted.

• Staying with PepsiCo and plastic packaging, the company announced its plans to install “reverse vending machines” in all 36 districts of the state of Maharashtra in India. The machines will take and crush plastic bottles, rewarding the user with points depending on the amount of plastic deposited. These points can be subsequently redeemed, although the article did not state where or for what.

• Unilever mentioned at a recent conference that they were committed to 100% recyclable, reusable or compostable packaging by 2025. They also revealed that the weight of the plastic that Unilever produced was equivalent to the weight of the entire global population and that only 25% is currently recyclable.

• At the Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS) in San Francisco, Unilever said it will help the World Wildlife Fund, and some local organisations “sustainably certify” palm oil operations in Sabah, Malaysia that will cover 60k ha. Walmart said it “commends Unilever on helping implement this model in Sabah and we invite other suppliers to join us in working to reduce deforestation.”

• Greenpeace has a new report on palm oil claiming that:

  1) 25 palm oil groups have cut down 130k ha of rainforest since the end of 2015

  2) Approximately 40% of the deforestation was in Papau, Indonesia

  3) Several consumer goods companies (including Unilever, Colgate, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Kraft Heinz, L’Oréal, Mondelez, Nestlé, Reckitt, and PepsiCo) are/were buying palm oil from the firms which Greenpeace claims are involved in rainforest destruction since the end of 2015

Social

• Visa announced a new relationship with New York Fashion Week which will entail, among other things, contactless-enabled vending machines full of famous designers’ products, some of the proceeds of which will go towards Women’s World Banking, a charity providing funds for female entrepreneurs around the world.

Innovation

• Strkyer’s Mako robot for joint replacement surgery can improve patient satisfaction metrics and recovery times because it can install implants more precisely and with less soft tissue damage than a surgeon–this partly comes down to the robot’s ability to cut through bone and tissue without the extra motion/tremors produced by a surgeon’s hand. About 20% of the patients who receive traditional (i.e. not robot-assisted) joint implants are dissatisfied. Satisfaction scores from patients who received a Mako (~150k procedures completed so far) assisted implant are significantly higher.
• Kone, the Finnish elevator and escalator company, has started offering “people flow” planning and consulting services to building owners. These services seem to be geared towards tenants of buildings with shared workspaces with elevators moving frequently between the various shared workspace floors that increases wait times for people that need to enter/exit the building. Kone monitor the activities of the elevators and then determine where to position meeting rooms to minimize wait times. They are also offering to set up programmes that instruct certain elevators to avoid the shared workspace floors when specific conditions are met.
• Intertek has launched its new Sustainability service, marketing its bespoke assurance and supply chain auditing business, which gives companies oversight into the impact of their supply chains.

Last Month RRI Change

• It was notable in the month that none of our portfolio companies' RRI increased.