Guest bio
Scott Tew is the Vice President of Sustainability and co-founder of the Center for Energy Efficiency & Sustainability at Trane Technologies. He is responsible for forward-looking sustainability initiatives aimed at transitioning to more efficient and climate-friendly solutions and minimizing resource use within company facilities.
Episode Summary
Host Vic Marinich, global marketing director for air conditioning at Danfoss, is joined by Scott Tew of Trane Technologies to discuss circularity, sustainability, and how companies can work together to reduce waste and lower carbon emissions.
Main Points
- Trane Technologies saw from the early days that roughly 25% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions could be solved by better solutions.
- Bold commitments help create a better enterprise and help build a different culture inside the company. They also reduce risk in the marketplace with stakeholders, delivering a different level of value around how you engage your employees, customers, and suppliers.
- Outside stakeholders, investors, and non-governmental organizations, even employees inside the company, are watching for actions and behaviors that are tied to a company’s mission.
- Trane established three commitment themes. One is the Gigaton Challenge to reduce a billion metric tons of emissions from their products by 2030. The second theme is leading by example through sustainable operations in their supply chain and how they manufacture products. The third theme is focused on creating a diverse workforce.
- Circularity itself is a concept that a company is responsible for every stage of its products’ life cycle. That means being responsible for the materials selected to go into the product, the design of the product, and what happens during the product’s life, including at the end of its useful life.
- Companies need to think about the impact of the production, distribution and disposal of their products, and consider recycled or renewable materials.
- Lifecycle assessments help companies understand not just the impact of a given product, but how they can extend the life of a product or reduce the waste in manufacturing and can the product be serviced over its lifetime in a way that’s less impactful.
- Trane has committed to reducing waste across the product life cycle, from material design to manufacturing to maintenance. They envision repurposing their products in the future to lower waste. They have had their Scope 1, 2, and 3 science-based targets validated by SBTi.
- Sustainable thinking is about continuous improvement, so any company can look for ways they can improve in the future. Companies are moving away from incremental thinking and are looking at how they can have a positive impact in all the areas in which they operate and how they can work with their partners on the supplier side.
- Focus on the things that are most important for the company, and that’s where companies can set bold commitments, no matter the size of the company.
- Collaboration with suppliers and customers is key to making progress in these areas, whether it’s reducing waste in the shipment of supplies or working together on innovation for product outcomes.
- Commitments around reducing greenhouse gases means that we need to be calculating as specifically as possible where the reductions are occurring when we install a product. We need to collaborate to gather the right data from the right entities to have a full picture of the impact of a product’s life.
- Look outside your company to understand best practices. Talk to customers, investors, and others to get started.
Links
To learn more about circularity, visit https://buildingcircularity.org/
To learn more about the Science Based Targets Initiative, visit https://sciencebasedtargets.org/
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For more information and additional episodes of the EnVisioneering Exchange podcast, visit https://www.danfoss.com/en-us/about-danfoss/insights-for-tomorrow/envisioneering-exchange/