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When it comes to sustainability, Avantor is committed to creating a better world through positive social and environmental impacts. We sat down with Nate Belke, Sustainability Manager at Avantor, to find out more about the company’s sustainable practices now and plans for the future.
Our Sustainability program was formalized in 2012. Avantor is committed to creating a better world by delivering positive social and environmental impacts for our associates, suppliers, customers, and communities. We live by that commitment each day, making a difference in the communities where we work and live across the globe. To accomplish this, we provide sustainable products and service solutions for the life sciences, advanced technologies, and applied material industries through:
Combined with the ability to provide detailed and transparent reporting and information, we can support our customers in achieving their sustainability goals, targets, and initiatives.
Integrating sustainability into the way we do business allows us to reduce our operating expenses and footprint. Applying the lens of sustainability reduces our risk exposure and provides opportunities to innovate and deliver new product and service solutions to our customers.
Our team communicates with our associates through several channels. We conduct sustainable business practice trainings to our associates and regularly communicate sustainability-related updates, achievements, or tips through our internal SharePoint. Our team also engages with various business functions to collaborate on opportunities to better integrate sustainability into their efforts.
As an industry leader and public company, our key stakeholders both internally and externally care about sustainability for their business. We understand that in order to help our customers, suppliers, associates, and investors achieve their goals, we need to address sustainability-related performance. By connecting our relevant stakeholder to the business unit, we are able to best identify stakeholder needs and how our business can better meet those needs while improving our organization.
We haven’t necessarily had misconceptions about our products, services, or the Sustainability program, but it is becoming increasingly important to provide as much transparency to our stakeholders as possible. We address this with our Environmentally Preferable Products (EPP) program and sustainability-related reporting capabilities to help customers make more informed purchasing decisions.
We continue to engage our suppliers on communicating expectations surrounding operating sustainability and social responsibility. Our organization has come a long way since 2012 by implementing a Supplier Sustainability Charter and initiating a Supply Chain Sustainability Assessment and Risk Assessment. This has allowed us to better understand and support our supplier’s corporate social responsibility and sustainability initiatives, which in turn allows us to better support our customers.
VWR had published an annual Sustainability Report with information regarding our environmental, social, and economic impacts and performance. We use cloud-based software to capture our environmental performance and consumption at our site and locations as well as other HR and communication tools to capture social-related metrics. As part of our new organizational structure under Avantor, we are developing the framework and process for our overall Avantor Sustainability Program as well as our reporting capabilities.
Conducting stakeholder engagement on environmental, social, and governance-related topics can go a long way in prioritizing which initiatives will be best to focus on. Historically, we have referred to our materiality assessment results and other engagement surveys to help inform our leadership and Sustainability team on where we should be focusing our efforts.
We continue to see specific engagement surrounding product end-of-life and product transparency. As a result, we are continuing to evolve and enhance our Environmentally Preferable Products (EPP) program to provide more products and services that consider natural and raw material resource usage, material recyclability, and third-party verifications of product attributes.
Our current major focus is continuing to integrate and enhance our sustainability programs to better serve our Avantor customers. As part of our new organizational structure under Avantor, we are developing the framework, process, and reporting capabilities for our overall Avantor Sustainability Program.
Educational institutions have a responsibility to reduce their environmental impact on the planet.
But schools are also in a unique position to educate students on the importance of acting in a sustainable manner.
As Avantor’s channel brand, VWR serves as a leading global provider of product and service solutions to laboratory and production customers in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, industrial, education, government and healthcare industries. The contract provides access to mission critical product and service solutions across education at significant savings through a strong national distribution network
