Shawn Hunter, global sustainability leader for DuPont's Shelter Solutions business, outlines the company's 2030 sustainability strategy built around climate, circularity and chemicals. He describes embodied carbon reductions in insulation and spray foam products, safer-by-design chemistry such as a replacement flame retardant for polystyrene foam, and people-focused goals including a long-running Habitat for Humanity partnership.
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Sara Gutterman: I'm here today with Shawn Hunter, global sustainability leader for DuPont's shelter solution. Can you talk about the evolution of your sustainability strategy within the Shelter Solutions business.
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Shawn Hunter: In 2019 as a new DuPont? We actually launched our 2030 sustainability goals. And so we kind of look at our beliefs and the 2030 goals for DuPont. And we look at the big problems that we think that we can help solve. We've really focused on a strategy that addresses what we've called the three seeds around climate circularity and chemicals.
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Shawn Hunter: Our business sustainability strategy is to partner with our customers and the industry to bring innovation to the market. That helps drive total carbon of buildings to zero, that helps advance material circularity in the industry and also that helps adopt safer chemistries. And earlier this year, we were excited to share our first sustainability progress report in the business that is a little bit more about our sustainability approach and provides a few highlights in terms of recent progress towards our goals.
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Sara Gutterman: Your company took a strong stand on eliminating waste landfill many years ago, and was really a leader in that segment. Can you talk a little bit about that, as well as just how you're reducing your embodied carbon?
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Shawn Hunter: You know, I'm just really excited about a lot of the work that our innovation teams have done over the past many years, but we're seeing some of that, that work come to fruition. So we've had some really major and just huge GHG reducing innovations come to life recently for both our styrofoam brand XTS installation products, as well as our Fraud Pack spray foam products.
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Shawn Hunter: We're enabling huge embodied carbon reductions there. And in the case of the low DWP Frost Pack spray foam, we're actually winning Sustainability and Innovation award. Over the past number of years. Really, we've just had a number of projects that have started up that are looking across the Valley chain at how do we drive circularity, so how can we use more circular raw materials, or how can we eliminate value chain place, or how can we look at the end of life of the product and find a circular solution there?
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Shawn Hunter: And then in the chemical side or our safer by design goal, which is really about using green chemistry to utilize safer chemistries. We just had a couple of really exciting things there. One is our blue edge polymer flame retardant technology, which is a technology that we developed specifically to replace a hazardous flame retardant that had been used in the industry in polystyrene foam insulation.
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Shawn Hunter: And we've got a team in China right now who's working really hard to bring that technology to the market. So I'm really excited about that and actually happening this month. I'm really excited about a new product offering that we're launching for our thermo NH product, where thermo NH is a safer by design reformulation of our thermo ISO board, and has been developed to be non.
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Sara Gutterman: Can you talk about s element in your best strategy?
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Shawn Hunter: So what I think about the the s aspect, I think about the pillar in our 2030 sustainability goals that has to do with people. So we've got three of our nine, 20, 30 goals at the company level focused on people. And so we've got a goal to accelerate diversity, equity and inclusion. We've got a goal to increase well-being and fulfillment for our folks, and we've got a goal to actually positively impact the lives of over 100 million people through our community impact programs in our business.
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Shawn Hunter: We've actually had a really long standing relationship with habitat for humanity, and so we'll continue to help provide safe, affordable, energy efficient shelter for folks. But another way that I think about the S element, it really has to do with our culture. And in the shelter, business culture is really important to us. We've spent a lot of time focusing on, you know, how do we make our culture one that is both results oriented and a fun place to be?
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Shawn Hunter: And, you know, we've always got work to do, but I think we've we've really set the right tone over the last year, really focus on both results and having fun when you come to work.
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Sara Gutterman: What is the sustainability roadmap ahead like for DuPont?
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Shawn Hunter: So one of the first things that we're working on is actually developing those roadmaps. So you know we've got our goals out there, but we don't yet know how we're going to get to 2030. So, you know, continuing to do the work kind of past the next couple of years to to fully plan out to 2030 is a big focus of ours right now.
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Shawn Hunter: And in our business, I think about continuing to activate our sustainability DNA. And what that means is really continuing to drive that broader organizational ownership for sustainability. So even over the last year, we've seen a really great progress. And in the business, we like to say that we will continue to use building science to innovate as if our future depends on it, because we really believe that it does.