There is a Materials Gap to Net-Zero Carbon Consumer Products

Who is building the bridge?

Consumer products companies like Nike, Lego, and IKEA have all made significant promises to meet aggressive targets on sustainability with the ultimate goal of becoming net-zero carbon producers.

Nike’s “Move to Zero” refers to its “journey towards zero carbon and zero waste” with the brand hoping to reduce carbon emissions across its global supply chain by 30% by 2030. The FY18 Impact Report carries a more ambitious goal, “Our Moonshot Ambition; How can we double our business while halving our impact?”

LEGO promises to move to a biobased set of plastic materials for its bricks and committed $155 million for the development of a Sustainable Materials Center that would guarantee fully sustainable materials in its products by 2030.

IKEA has made some of the most significant commitments to sustainability, possibility because they are a private company. IKEA announced its People and Planet Positive strategy in 2018 to become a circular business by 2030, meaning that they will only use materials that can be reused, refurbished, or recycled.

And all have made significant progress.

And all have also come across the same fundamentals limitations of our current materials production systems that we must overcome to reach these goals.

Nike still makes its products primarily out of cotton, leather, and polyester derived from oil.

LEGO only makes 2% of its bricks from bio-based plastic.

IKEA has 6% of its carbon footprint come just from the petroleum-based glue it relies on to join its products together.

The challenge all these companies are facing is the fundamental limits to our current materials production systems; the current production systems can’t supply the necessary materials for these companies to meet their net-zero carbon goals. Consumer products companies, at the same time, appear unable to influence their upstream producers in their material supply chains to develop and innovate: not just new materials but new, sustainable ways of producing existing materials.

Just because a material is bio-based doesn’t make it sustainable. LEGO, for example, uses bio-based polyethylene made from sugar cane. But the growth, harvesting, and conversion of sugar cane into ethanol and, ultimately, into polyethylene still requires tremendous amounts of energy. It only works economically in places like Brazil, where there is an excess capacity of sugar cane. Likewise, cotton and leather are both derived from living organisms, but the production of those materials also has a similar carbon footprint to other agriculture and livestock products.

There is no magic bullet — no zero-carbon material or process out there to be discovered. We have to accept that we need to look at our materials supply chains holistically. We must start to develop end-to-end sustainability strategies where we focus on everything from new material compositions, processes for production, materials reuse, and more sustainable sources of raw materials.

Often, these challenges can be unexpected, like the presence of child labor in the supply chain for lithium-ion batteries, which comes from its reliance on cobalt mined in the Congo.

Consumer products companies can’t just sit and wait for their suppliers to provide the sustainable innovation needed to de-carbonized their materials supply chains. We need new kinds of industry partnerships that share the risk and the reward of developing the sustainable materials supply chains and production systems to enable the ambitious but necessary goals of the consumer products industry to become carbon neutral.