RB’s betteRBusiness Strategy – Streamlining Life Cycle Assessments with a New Tool

Objectives

RB is a global leader in health, hygiene and home products. The company achieved its 2020 target to reduce the carbon footprint of products by 20% per dose eight years early. But the company’s ‘betteRBusiness’ strategy has some big 2020 goals – including achieving a third net revenue from more sustainable products. RB needed a bigger, better and faster web-based tool to facilitate sustainable innovation.

Project

RB approached Anthesis because it needed to scale its sustainable product development program to meet the demands of the business in a simple, straightforward way. Anthesis created a new tool which assesses products by multiple sustainability metrics, with traffic light indicators for carbon, water, packaging and ingredients. The tool has a searchable product library where products, brands and portfolios can be compared and results shared across the business. It focuses on hotspots, highlighting opportunities for innovation around key impacts.

Impacts

The new and improved Sustainable Innovation Calculator was launched in November 2013 and within two months had more than half of RB’s global research and development team were using it, with more than 700 product analyses completed. RB was able to achieve its goal of life cycle assessments being done in less than 30 minutes by people who weren’t experts in life cycle assessment.

In 2013, RB saw further decreases in its carbon footprint and water impact (per dose of product) and calculated its total net revenue from more sustainable products.