Colgate-Palmolive – Atul Garg – 2017

Goals

Over the last several years, consumer products giant Colgate-Palmolive has made significant progress in reducing its global intensity of carbon, energy, water, and waste. However, this hasn’t been uniform across its global portfolio of manufacturing sites. EDF Climate Corps fellow Atul Garg was brought onboard to assess the sustainability performance of global manufacturing sites, develop strategies for accelerating their sustainability performance and prepare a roadmap to achieve a net zero profile for carbon, water and waste.

Solutions

Garg gathered and reviewed historic data on energy use, water intake and waste generated. From his analysis, he identified two main opportunities to reduce the environmental footprint: increased sub-metering at end-use level and global sharing of best practices.

After researching industry best practices, Garg quantified potential savings of optimizing processing equipment, including boilers and air compressors. He then developed a strategy and toolkit for helping plants achieve a “net zero” profile in terms of carbon, water and energy in a cost-efficient way, and prioritized sustainability projects. In collaboration with the sustainability team, Garg applied this toolkit and strategy, as well as developed a site-specific roadmap containing expected investment and payback data, for one of Colgate-Palmolive’s sites in New Jersey. Lastly, Garg identified additional potential sites for a “net zero” profile in the future.

Potential Impact

Colgate-Palmolive’s manufacturing sites will now have a single source of actionable tools, knowledge and data to assess their sustainability efforts as related to achieving “net zero”. Colgate-Palmolive is better positioned to address environmental sustainability in its investment decisions and strategically plan the rollout of its “net zero” profile goals for its global sites. Meanwhile, the New Jersey site is planning to implement the suggested “net zero” plan as a way to continuously reduce its carbon emissions, water consumption and waste.