Sustainable Business magazine - essential reading for sustainability professionals
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/137958
Innovation Adidas 2/4 the company has established a sound platform on which to test such product innovation and address environmental issues at the same time. Better Place started out in 2007 as an in-house initiative to help guide and encourage the creation of more sustainable products without compromising function and quality performance. It has been instrumental in developing a series of environmental performance benchmarks for Adidas branded products, in the absence of a single global standard or set of guidelines. The goal for Adidas is simple – to demand product sustainability at the same level as product performance. Leading on this work is Alexis Olans, senior global programme manager for Better Place. In her view, where true sustainability kicks off is at the design stage – how the product is made and what materials are used. It's a strategy that involves taking a lifecycle approach and determining where the biggest impacts are along the value chain – once these hotspots are identified, they can be targeted. And, says Olans, there is often an unintended benefit to this type of lifecycle analysis – an array of positive 'spillover' effects. "When we focus on one particular area because so many different environmental factors are interlinked, you end up discovering better processes around, for example, waste savings, even though your original focus was on improving energy efficiency in manufacturing," she says. Lightweighting is currently a big theme at Adidas – the use of less fabric to not only create less material waste, but to