LASKOLITE has provided innovative and sustainable performance plastics for 75 years. Since its founding in 1950, we have been committed to putting our people first, and this focus has remained consistent throughout our history. With our eyes always to the future, PLASKOLITE identified the need for a robust ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) program and increased sustainability efforts. While our company had embraced these initiatives informally for decades, we understood that an official program was integral for business growth and development, transparency, and continuity.

In 2019, PLASKOLITE implemented a formalized approach to ESG. We knew that many of our current activities would complement the initiatives, but centralizing the data and focusing on standardizing processes were most needed. With this in mind, our leadership made the decision to move forward with a formal ESG program, going beyond words and taking major action.

To get started, PLASKOLITE established an ESG core committee. As we considered the structure, we decided there should be no more than seven team members. This included an executive sponsor, chairperson and vice chair. If your company is considering something similar, it’s important to involve a diverse cross-section of departments in the membership of the committee. This could include environmental, human resources, marketing, safety, finance, operations, technology, engineering and others as appropriate.

Once the committee was established, PLASKOLITE created sub-committee working groups for each area of the program. Broken up by environmental, social and governance, each group had a leader that would ensure workflows stayed on track and ensured all data and documents were reviewed and met expectations. The working teams generally met biweekly while the core committee would gather monthly to measure progress and confirm alignment. The executive sponsor generally attended all meetings, providing feedback and context as the teams worked through the program implementation.

Documentation is a critical component of any ESG program. As such, the core and working teams needed a central location to store all materials. An ESG portal was created to house all documents and provide an area for the working groups to collaborate. As many companies work across multiple offices, factories, countries and regions, having a centralized repository for all this information is extremely important and enables efficient sharing of ideas and collaboration.

Once the working teams had completed their initial work, we began to leverage external resources to confirm compliance with industry standard practices and challenge our assumptions. A third party was used to perform a materiality assessment to guide and confirm our focus, targeting areas that garner sustainable impact across the business with respect to the environment. These included energy and green house gasses (GHG), facilitating a closed-loop economy and waste management.

For energy and GHG, we identified improvement opportunities that included replacing older incandescent bulbs with LED lighting and upgrading aging HVAC systems at some of our manufacturing facilities. We also began tracking carbon emissions including Scope 1 (direct from our operations) and Scope 2 (indirect such as electricity generation) while looking at other ways to reduce our footprint.

As we examined the initiative around closed-loop economy, we looked to ways we could increase our recycling rates with both post-industrial and post-consumer scrap. We also began to explore how we could incorporate biobased raw materials, working with our research and development team to launch new and innovative products that would create unique value with our customers.

Shifting our focus to waste management, PLASKOLITE launched a “Run-to-Size” initiative where we would manufacture to a customer’s specific requirement based on their application, moving away from only offering the traditional standard sheet sizes. This would enable our partners to only pay for what they need, reducing waste created during typical fabrication and ensuring this scrap is ultimately kept out of landfills, creating a “win-win” for all parties involved. Finally, we conducted climate risk assessments for all of our products.

Once these materiality assessments were finalized, it was time to create our initial ESG report. This would be published annually and would align to goals set by the United Nations Sustainable Development Group (UNSDG). There are currently 17 goals to help guide the program and reporting. Depending on the situation, this document can be maintained internally or published and made available outside the company. Some organizations may decide to take a cautious approach with early reports and hold off on sharing externally until confidence is built in the content and presentation.

Beyond environmental, a strong ESG program should aim to include meaningful social components. At PLASKOLITE, we addressed this aspect through expanding our community relations efforts. We focused on volunteering, support of local efforts to feed those in need and other programs that would benefit the communities we operate in. Management of our internal training programs also fell under this category, and we expanded our formal training while increasing mentoring opportunities for our team members. Recognizing that people are our greatest asset, we also planned ways to celebrate our employees throughout the year.

The final pillar of ESG, governance, revolves around compliance as it equates to the cost of doing business and connects to laws and regulations at the local, state and national level. While ESG guides us to always seek to do the right thing as a matter of principle, this would include efforts related to responsible sourcing, code of ethic, company diversity, etc. There are many resources available to help companies identify key areas of governance based on where and how they do business.

Anyone that has been exposed to ESG initiatives understands that the work is not done once the annual report is published. Continuous improvement must be ingrained into these efforts, striving for year-over-year improvement on the various initiatives. PLASKOLITE subscribes to external ESG platforms to help evaluate our ESG program and benchmark our performance. When using these third-party resources, it is a clever idea to focus on high impact actions first, then work your way down the list. After receiving a scorecard, there will be corrective actions to review and implement that will help drive improvement for the next assessment. There are numerous data gathering platforms available, so be sure to investigate the one that is most relevant for your industry and the markets you serve. Certain platforms are more geared toward environmental initiatives while others cater to investors. Be sure to choose wisely when subscribing to avoid oversharing data which might not be appropriate.

Strong employee participation helps drive the best ESG efforts. With this in mind, we created an action plan to maximize the program with increased team member engagement through allyships and employee resource groups. This feedback is equally important as the external evaluations in determining the overall success of these programs at PLASKOLITE and ensuring we never lose focus on the critical elements that impact our greatest asset — our people. The commitment to ESG requires continuous efforts to ensure measurable goals of the company are achieved. All goals should have specific reporting in order to track progress towards a sustainable outcome. A forward path includes transparency on ESG initiatives to build trust with internal and external stakeholders. Navigating the ESG landscape is challenging as the initiatives continue to evolve; programs must be evaluated at least annually and refreshed as appropriate to align with the latest thinking. As the evolution occurs, one must be able to decode the changes and sift through the basics. At PLASKOLITE we believe this can be done by creating a robust ESG program that builds on best practices and areas of improvement. Any successful program will need continued support from the company’s executive team, ESG committee members and strong employee participation to maximize its potential benefit.