Sustainability is becoming more and more important for enterprises across all industries. With the current environmental demands to adhere to governmental climate change regulations and avoid future resource scarcities, it is critical more than ever for businesses to adopt environmental solutions and innovations and create long-term value for sustainability and optimised economic performance.
The advantages of implementing environmental solutions and innovations are massive. It is an opportunity that not only benefits environmental and economic performance but also serves as a chance to increase competitive advantage.
Last year, global trends towards resource efficiency and the exposure to long term environmental risks prompted SAP to update its ‘Global Environment Policy.’ The multinational solutions provider aims to support climate change mitigation by eliminating single-use plastics by the end of 2020 and by implementing and developing ambitious environmentally-focused solutions and innovations to achieve carbon neutrality by 2025.
SAP has also made it its mission to assist customers in achieving their own sustainability goals with the ‘Climate 21 Initiative’ and the release of its ‘SAP Product Carbon Footprint Analytics’ solution.
Christian Klein, CEO of SAP said,
“With many of our customers striving to become more sustainable, our objective is to provide products and services that meet their sustainability challenges and opportunities.”
Solutions and Innovations for Environmental Sustainability
Below we enumerate SAP’s initiatives and various projects to support climate change mitigation:
SAP Plastics Cloud
Plastics Cloud is SAP’s environmental sustainability program that aims to help SAP customers manage plastic use more effectively through collaboration among businesses, governments, and consumers across the plastics value chain. Projects and initiatives include:
- SAP Leonardo Plastics Challenge – This research study program was a collaborative innovation project on the topic of plastic waste reduction that involved leading global firms working with 24 UK citizen participants to provide fresh solutions that meet the global challenge of plastic pollution through a user-centred design thinking approach and the application of new technologies.
- Circular Economy 2030 – A partnership with Google to foster revenue-generating ideas that support circular use cases.
- Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Circular Economy 100 (CE100) Network – SAP recently joined the collaborative network working to accelerate the adoption of circular economy practices and processes that maximize the use of resources.
- Global Plastic Action Partnership – World Economic Forum’s community of businesses determined to create a cleaner ocean by 2030.
- Global Marketplace for Suppliers of Recycled Plastics and Plastic Alternatives – A new marketplace leveraging SAP Ariba solutions to expand the trade of recycled plastics and plastic alternatives.
Beyond Single-Use Plastics
‘Beyond Single-Use Plastics’ is SAP’s company-wide program that launched last July 2019, implemented by the company’s Global Environmental Management System that includes 55 sites, each with local plastic reduction targets.
In China, SAP Labs employees helped SAP’s Global Real Estate and Facilities team implement changes and launch events to help reduce waste by identifying areas where single-use plastics are utilized and sharing their feedback on the implementation.
SAP Labs Hungary and SAP Ireland replaced single-use plastics with more sustainable alternatives such as water bottles and glasses. The two organisations also initiated discussions with their respective catering partners to raise awareness in becoming more sustainable.
Offices in the U.S. that have gone completely plastic-free have also increased since the implementation of ‘Beyond Single-Use Plastics.’
As the expectations on corporate responsibility increase, and as transparency becomes more prevalent, the need to act on sustainability is becoming more critical and SAP is strongly committed to transparency—according to the company, it remains the only global software company that discloses its sustainability performance in a holistic integrated report.
