Building sustainable supply chains is essential for protecting the planet, meeting consumer expectations, and driving profitability. Achieving this requires bold collaboration, innovative thinking, and a cultural shift to overcome complex challenges.
In this video series, Unipart explores the key challenges and opportunities of building circular, connected, and sustainable supply chains, featuring expert insights from Jen Hunt, Director of Sustainability at Unipart; Chris Dixon, Managing Director of Unipart Consultancy; and special guest Roger Singleton, CEO of Riskoa.
Roger, an expert in industrial decarbonisation and lifecycle carbon analysis, shares his extensive experience, including insights from leading a two-year decarbonisation programme with Burnley College and over 30 industrial companies in the northwest.
Together, they explore key topics such as how to adopt circular principles to reduce waste and enhance efficiency, and using lifecycle assessment (LCA) to optimise processes. The discussion emphasises the role of leadership, technology, and innovation in driving a cultural shift towards sustainability, empowering employees, and aligning operations with environmental goals.
Ultimately, their conversation suggests that rather than viewing sustainability as an obligation or an afterthought, businesses should embrace it as an opportunity for innovation and long-term success.
Key highlights:
- Net Zero vs Carbon Neutrality: The team covers the key differences between these concepts, offering practical examples to help supply chain professionals reduce their environmental impact.
- Sector Differences in Circularity: A comparison is made between industries like automotive and electronics, which lead in reusing components and extending product lifecycles, and the fashion industry, where the focus is still often on a “throwaway” mentality.
- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): The conversation explores how LCA can identify emission hotspots, with a focus on using simplified methods and AI to make implementation faster and more accessible for businesses.
- Cultural Shift for Sustainability: Emphasis is placed on the role of leadership in nurturing a carbon-conscious culture, empowering employees to make sustainable choices, and driving organisational transformation.
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Watch the full videos
Part one:
Part two:
Part three:
Part four:
Read the video transcripts here:
Part one:
Jen Hunt: Clearly an important step in making a difference in this space is to set targets, is to set goals, in line with your ambition as an organisation.
And so deciding to be carbon neutral, carbon zero, net zero, and many other references, are essential. So let’s first clarify if we can, the distinction between all those things, and really just start by thinking about where’s the best place to start if you’re an organisation wanting to address your carbon emissions.
Roger Singleton: Yeah, so I think we’ll probably look at the first two terms that I think are used fairly interchangeably, and I think incorrectly.
One is net zero and one is carbon neutrality. They’re both kind of working towards the same equation, it’s on a bit of an equation. If I reference back to what you’re saying about Earth Overshoot Day, that’s quite good context.
Because what you’re saying there is that we’re taking something from the environment for our own uses, and there’s a limit to that resource and we’ve extracted that at that point, and we’ve gone over that limit.
All the issues around greenhouse gases and climate change is that we’re emitting back something to the environment there. Greenhouse gases or CO2 is the principal one, but there are about five or six other key ones.
And really net zero and carbon neutrality are about that balance, really.
There are elements that emit CO2, or CO2 based activities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and there are aspects of the earth that withdraw it. The trees, sea, other forms of biomass there. Net zero is where the amount you’re emitting is matching against what is being withdrawn from the environment, viewing it as a system perspective.
The same is true for carbon neutrality, where you’ve invested in more of those aspects that are removing CO2 from the environment, but you’ve not really made any commitment to reduce what you’re doing.
So they’re both about a balance, as in the amount we’re emitting is also being removed from the atmosphere so that we don’t cause this layer in terms of greenhouse gases up in the atmosphere. But really net zero, as a definition, moves towards reducing what you’re emitting first, and using those forms of sequestration, or removal, as a last measure when you’ve done your main efforts.
Yeah, so those are the two principles, sort of differences on it.
Jen Hunt: So that’s really clear. So from a practical point of view, What might that look like let’s say it’s an organisation that has committed to be carbon neutral versus carbon net zero. Practically, what might that look like?
Roger Singleton: Let’s take a common factory space that maybe uses, let’s just stick with scope 1 and 2 for now, that uses gas and normal grid electricity that has a CO2 emitting aspect to using that energy, that fuel.
Carbon neutral would be – “We’re not going to change our operations, we’re going to continue operating, perhaps growing as usual. We’re going to buy x amount of trees in this area as a carbon sink. We are carbon neutral.”
A lot of the big companies, the big tech ones, talk about being net zero in scope 1 and 2, and we’ve achieved carbon neutrality in scope 3. They’ve bought their way around in many ways. If you wanted to be net zero, you might switch everything to electric, invest in solar, go to a green, electricity certificate from the grid, at the same time as trying to reduce your consumption.
If you’re still then emitting, you would look at the sequestration, or the options to remove from there.
Part two:
Jen Hunt: But practically, going back to where do I start with this? Life cycle carbon analysis is a process that can be followed. There’s an ISO standard that you can accredit to in terms of saying, “Here’s my product. How do I figure out the lifecycle carbon impact of that?” so LCA is what it’s referred to in the field.
Roger Singleton: Yeah. Yeah. And, you can even go one step before that. If you dive into the technical guidance for scope 3, you could dive in at categories 10 through 12, which is about post-processing use and end of life of the product.
And in category 11, on the use, you’ll find the classic example where it’s like a washing machine that is built and, actually, the guidance isn’t bad and it says, “Our product is rated at this power, we think it will be used three times a week, in an average household, over five years,” and you can make a pretty good go at looking what that’s like.
What I think that the more interesting bit that comes out of it is, by just doing that, you can get a great understanding of, is that 90 percent of our emissions of the product life cycle? Is it 50? Is it 10? from there, and compare it back to maybe scope 1 and 2.
The first big win is to have a perspective of how much is the use of product as a percentage of you know of the overall life cycle.
You look at gas turbines in aircraft. They aren’t over 95 percent of the emissions is because the thing’s up in the air for 25 years.
Jen Hunt: Because that’s the thing it links back to the initial footprint in the first place, it’s once you’ve got a rough idea of what it looks like the question then is, and then what? You know, if I take experience from Unipart we’re on a journey of understanding the lifecycle carbon impact for all of the products that we manufacture and design and you know, that’s a journey and we’ve got that for a large number of our products. But then it’s and then what?
So you right you understand the heat maps of where your hotspots are, to your aeroplane example.
Have either of you got examples of where you’ve taken a product, you understand the carbon impact of it, and then this has been tweaked, or this has been tweaked, and it’s created an improvement?
Roger Singleton: I have.
Sensitivity analysis is a technique in LCA where you tweak parameters that are the most emitting and it gives you new scenarios. It’s meant to be done with the largest emitting material or energy, whichever drops out really you’re meant to tweak the highest emitting factor.
The only ones that I’ve done is tweaked, is in the processes and the use of energy and things like that. Which drops back a bit to that scope 1-2 thing of that’s what we can affect at the minute.
We’ve discussed this a lot around design change and some of the more complex, vertical supply chains. I don’t think yet, we’ve really got nailed the feedback mechanism into the design process, really, not to a huge degree. Yeah, that’s my general thoughts.
Chris Dixon: I just want to answer that question completely differently. Where it comes to what can companies do? Particularly around life cycle assessments, what we’ve been able to do is create a tool that makes the information available to businesses that need to make a difference really easy and quick.
And, I come back to the point that we said earlier on around continuous improvement. I think the whole topic sometimes can be a little bit over-complicated. And actually, what people can do with a life cycle assessment is to understand the resource material impact that, they’ve created by putting this product together, or a service, and by seeing the output of that process, whether it be a highly emitting process step, or some material that is sourced from far away that could be reconsidered, then they can make some really practical steps around, just changing one or two things.
And, sometimes, in the last few years, we’ve talked about, topics like the aggregation of marginal gains, which essentially means, make lots of small changes and you make a big difference. Actually, businesses that have got the ability of changing small parts of their process can make a big difference.
Yeah, and I think that what we’re trying to do in the supply chain is to be able to show businesses in a really practical way, where they can make some difference. Potentially without them really understanding some of the really complex elements of greenhouse gas emissions and the policies that sit behind it, but just to know to focus on this thing, you will make a, you will make a difference.
If you start with, understand it, measure it, do something about it in terms of improvement, then I think most people in businesses will understand that. By bringing into effect things like the life cycle assessment that we’ve been working on, that just helps organisations understand more, right?
And, you can start to make better decisions about the changes that you need to make.
Roger Singleton: You’re absolutely right. I think the reason that we’re probably not, we’ve not answered the reduction element bit yet is that if we follow the path that we’re taking on as a joint offering, when we talk about the complexity of scope three and getting data from that, actually, one of the biggest entry routes to that is to trace your product through the supply chain. And I think that is quite a welcome relief to a lot of business leaders or production leaders because that’s what they understand.
They don’t want to have to go and read about all the 15 categories and try and figure it out. What they do know is their process flow and their value stream, to actually get it there. And all we do is tag environmental impact onto that. The thing that’s held it back though, has been that life cycle assessment it’s a wonderful tool, but it is, in its traditional form, very time consuming and does require quite a high level of expertise.
The solution that we’ve provided, that we’re working on with Chris, we use new technology, AI, to massively reduce the time on that and, we’re talking very significantly down to minutes or hours of doing that. Traditionally, it’s a 5 to 10 day process. And, at the minute, as we’re doing this, we’re in the phase of trying to scale that reporting.
But what we’re trying to do is reduce down the intensity of that reporting, so that people are spending more time and effort on the reduction thing afterwards, once they’ve got their hotspotting. I think that the brutal reality of life cycle assessment is that I think a lot of people are quite exhausted in the manual terms after they’ve done one.
So they’ve spent like 90 percent of their energy to do it. By bringing that down, and looking at the volume scale of what we want to do LCA at, we’re aiming to build more of that evidence base around all those products, but also we’ve not crushed their will on the way. They’ve got their information quickly, “oh, let’s use that extra time and budget to make improvements on it really.”
Part three:
Jen Hunt: So firstly, what’s your view on circularity principles really in terms of supply chain and is that something you see often and is really good? Or actually is it quite an alien thing that as an industry in the inner sectors, certainly we touch, needs a lot of work?
Chris Dixon: I think the maturity of that topic by sector is quite different.
I’ve spoken to businesses in the last week or so where they’re actually focused with industrial equipment to almost break down the idea of a product. Which might be a vehicle with an engine and tyres and some recovery equipment on it or something like that, to break it down into those component parts. And it’s actually okay to have quite an old chassis with a brand new engine in it, as an example, because that is the best approach for that industry to keep their service running in the in the best way possible from an environmental perspective.
I think the other example that I’m really familiar with is the repair of sort of consumer electronics. Increasingly, in our journey here at Unipart with the mobile phone, we’ve started a journey back in 2005, 2006, where, we spent a lot of time repairing phones and keeping them going.
But they were a consumable item, and actually, that we were repairing a phone whilst it was in warranty, but as soon as it came out of warranty, you went and picked a new one up.
I think what people see these days is that they pick up their iPhone or whatever device that they’re using. And the aim is to keep it longer. It’s part of your life, isn’t it?
You get used to it and, to maintain those sorts of devices by replacing screens, batteries, and things like that, then I think that’s probably where businesses should go.
But I think there are other areas that are still really throw away in terms of the consumer. And I think that it’s those industries that really need to focus on what is the right thing to do?
Jen Hunt: The fashion industry often gets a bad rep in, in that sense, doesn’t it?
Roger Singleton: And it’s cost that’s the driver there, right? For the majority of those circumstances, cost has been the one there. Yeah, you go into circularity and then you look at reuse, refurbish, recycle, which are all ways of extending out the life cycle.
We’ve spoken a bit there about reuse and refurbish. Recycling is often the one that’s hardest because you are having to do processes again on a material or something to make it fit for purpose again in its new, it’s new life cycle, basically.
And that’s often where cost comes in quite a lot. So that’s always the point at the minute, where people choose between going with the old traditional route of raw material extraction or, or new.
And, I think it’s, cost that’s been a result of maybe lack of adoption in a number of other industries. There’s probably technical arguments around that as well, you know around quality materials for very complex supply chains and things. But, I think cost is a big driver.
The interesting one will be, I think, greenhouse gas emission – CO2 – is a potential entry point of a metric that will influence cost and value in a different way. I think it’s the first environmental indicator that might play in that market space. Because, again, not going to the technical details of it, you can reduce the allocated emissions to certain products, if you reuse it in others.
And that could be a driver, if we get emissions trading schemes going in a big way, where CBAM’s coming in, EU and things like that. It may then be worth the investment in the recycling processes of it to make it reuse.
Chris Dixon: With CBAM and, which is essentially a carbon tax going across the border, if that’s the start of something that you’ve like just explained there, where it becomes much more valuable to reuse components and materials within future products, or have your product designed in a way that allows interchangeability. Then I think that is probably, there is a little bit, compliance drives behaviour change, doesn’t it? In the right way.
If compliance changes and behaviour to do things in the right way for the environment, rather than to duck underneath a bar to keep the cost as low as it possibly can be, then I think that there is some real opportunity and a different way of designing products and services and providing them.
But it’s a societal thing, right? The other big driver to consumerism is brand, isn’t it? And, when your version five gets replaced by a version six, and that’s the whiz bang that’s going out there on adverts and marketing campaigns and things like that, then corporations are encouraging people to take that type of product.
If the emphasis was more around circular economy and being able to reuse and enhance products that are already in place, then you know, that’s quite a big step. That would be a game changer. I don’t see any steps forward in that area at the moment. I think, we’re in a world of making good in the environment that we’re in.
Part four:
Jen Hunt: In terms of the challenges here, this one’s kind of a, more touches on the sort of the cultural piece really, that says you’re an organisation that has set an ambition, you want to do something, to reduce the environmental impact of what you do as an organisation.
Then it’s about, to a large extent, sort of hearts and minds, really, that says you’ve got an organisation, say in the instance of Unipart with 12,000 people in it, how do you pivot that sort of ship to get everybody that is making a decision every single day, that on the face of it, probably doesn’t feel like it’s having a carbon impact, but actually it does most often that every decision we make has a carbon impact.
I refer to it at Unipart as trying to improve the carbon consciousness of the organisation. And, you’ve got leaders at the very top of the organisation to take, our CEO, for example, who is absolutely behind our decision to do absolutely everything we can do to reduce carbon in what we do.
So really this last sort of challenge is to reflect on, what are those key components in trying to improve the carbon consciousness of an organisation and as a society, really, and some ideas around that?
Chris Dixon: I think, for me, a lot of this culture change, we’ve talked about the top down element, the compliance element, and the governmental changes that just have to turbocharge everything.
But then when you think about leadership within an organisation, just to set the tone around what is important. We’ve already set the tone to say, we’re going to be safe at work, we’re going to be respectful to the individuals that we work alongside, we expect to have certain working conditions as a result of how culture is developed over time.
And, you, go around the world and that’s slightly different, but nevertheless, there is a norm.
We just have to bring that, I think your term around like carbon consciousness is really important that, we’ve got, we’ve just got another, we’ve got another sort of paradigm to work with.
We talk about, KPI measures in terms of quality, cost, delivery, safety, these days. To have an environmental element to that in the mix of the decision making that we do, I think is is really important.
And I come back to culture and behaviour. Leadership creates behaviour within an organisation. And a leader will ultimately influence the people that are around them. So this isn’t really somebody writing down on a piece of paper at a board level here’s what we are going to do in the next 20 years. It’s about how people work in their teams.
And that level of teamwork, I think is essential to start making those small behavior changes that start to become a norm. Because, the circular bit of, whether this is a top down or a bottom up journey, is that, the levels of acceptance and the norms at the lower level, at the people level of our whole organisation, whether it’s a business or a community, start to set an expectation about what we are instructed to do by government and, those policy makers that help society.
And therefore I think you can accelerate a change, if everybody wants to go down that journey. And when I was much younger, I can remember switching, it seemed to me like we switched from leaded to unleaded fuel overnight, it just seemed to be like that. And –
Jen Hunt: You’re showing your age there, Chris!
Roger Singleton: The horse to what?
Chris Dixon: There are changes that can happen really quickly. This is a complex, it’s a complex topic. And I think we have to simplify the topic. We have to make sure that people understand that at the end of the day, there are some things that it’s just the right thing to do.
And, to have the, in inverted commas, the right thing to do, that’s all about, people follow leaders, I think. And, the agendas that are set at the level of the influence that you see every day, is the most, is a really important way of starting to get some behaviour change.
And therefore, and that pyramid, if you like, cascades up through organisational levels. And, I don’t think we can wait for somebody to tell us what to do. In the end, a lot of the conversation we had at the beginning of this discussion was about rules and measures and, really complex topics that seem alien to most people.
And actually it’s about what am I doing today? And, I think there is just something around, what is acceptable at work? Because we’re, I think we’re talking in a work context. What’s acceptable in work? And then how does that sort of leach out into how we operate, how we work in our communities? How we expect people to behave? And then what we’d expect from our own leaders to push the boundaries of what’s possible for us. I think it’s great that we’ve set a net zero target which is more aggressive than the governmental compliance that’s telling us what to do.
That’s the sort of behaviour that I’d hope to see everywhere. But that then relentless discussion about the environmental elements of everything that we do, alongside all the other things that we can’t forget, cause this is almost like a complex normal.
I guess that’s the best term for me is, what becomes normal and, we, I think that it’s down to everybody to find their own way of contributing. But, every, everybody needs to be influenced and shown the way, a little bit, whether it’s a father leading his son, whether it’s a in a business environment leading their team. Whether it’s team working in terms of just finding the way forward under a, say, problem solving event or something like that. Just has to be in the consciousness, I think that’s, the best, term, that I can put it to.