MilliporeSigma’s 40-person sustainability team reports to the chief strategy and transformation officer of parent company, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany.

That means environmental considerations are automatically included in product design and packaging decisions, and the lead sustainability executive for the life sciences company often accompanies sales representatives to meetings with strategic accounts.

“I see firsthand where it’s creating a more attractive environment for our customers to choose us more often because of what we’re doing related to sustainability,” said Jeffrey Whitford, vice president of sustainability and social business innovation at MilliporeSigma, the operating name for Merck KGaA’s U.S. and Canadian life science business. “We’re changing the narrative that it’s costs, costs, costs. We’re finding the connection points to make the financial picture much clearer and, I would say, much more attractive for the business.” 

Clear results

Even when Whitford isn’t in the room, MilliporeSigma’s climate agenda is a component of how the company pitches new accounts and wins new business. It considers both potential savings and sales upsides during the product design process, something it has been doing since 2021 when sustainability started reporting to the strategy team. (Whitford started in environmental, health and safety 20 years ago with Sigma-Aldrich, which was acquired by Merck KGaA in 2015.)  

That reorganization has served the company well.

Merck KGaA’s company-wide commitment, validated by the Science Based Targets initiative, calls for a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions related to its operations and purchased electricity by 2030 (Scope 1 and 2, respectively) compared with 2020. It has cut Scope 1 by 53 percent and reduced Scope 2 by 30 percent. Merck KGaA has an emissions intensity goal that calls for it to cut emissions to 230 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per 1 million euros of gross profit; the result for 2024 was 359 metric tons of CO2e.

Sales for MilliporeSigma’s Greener Alternatives Portfolio — more than 2,500 products that contain bio-based solvents or chemicals, were repackaged with fewer plastics and more renewable materials or have some other preferable sustainability attribute — doubled in the past year. 

MilliporeSigma sells more than 300,000 products. The company doesn’t disclose what percentage of its annual sales for 2024 were attributable to Greener Alternatives. It added more than 880 products to the portfolio in 2024 including mPredict, an artificial intelligence tool that uses green chemistry concepts to help scientists eliminate thousands of physical screening experiments, and Cellvento, a feed solution that doesn’t need to be refrigerated, saving energy. 

Source: MilliporeSigma

Dedicated packaging plan

One place where sustainability goals win over MilliporeSigma customers is packaging, which contributes 10 percent of the company’s emissions. Merck KGaA has committed to reducing packaging weight per unit sales by 10 percent by 2030, ensuring that all fiber materials are deforestation-free, and designing packages to be recovered, recycled or reused.

The more than 100 projects the company has completed under its SMASH Packaging 2.0 initiative have cut emissions by more than 400 metric tons on an annual basis. Many products are distributed in glass, because it doesn’t react with certain chemicals, but the company is taking steps to reduce plastic-derived and fiber-based materials where possible.

One example is the bulk packaging option MilliporeSigma adopted for several filter product lines, including Millstak (which removes particulates and clarified liquids during biopharmaceutical manufacturing) and Clarisolve (used with cell cultures). The approach reduces waste by 33-53 percent and also cuts the time it takes customers to unbox them in half.

“So, they have a reduction in the CO₂ footprint, they have a reduction in operator time, and they have a reduction in the amount of waste they have to deal with,” Whitford said.  

MilliporeSigma also stands out for its Green Cooler initiative, replacing the styrofoam typically used to transport refrigerated items such as blood products or antibodies with an insulated starch and paper-based option that can accommodate dry ice and disposed of in curbside recycling systems. Recycling instructions are printed directly on the cooler’s inside flap. 

MilliporeSigma handled 60,000 shipments using the Green Coolers in 2025 in Australia, Germany, Korea and the U.S. The new coolers will be introduced to all U.S. distribution centers in 2026, eliminating an estimated 60 metric tons of styrofoam annually — six jumbo jets’ worth of material. 

Two challenges in rolling out the new format was satisfying quality control teams and training distribution employees how to handle the coolers. For example, a distribution center in Phoenix, where summer temperatures can soar above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, must have confidence that a shipment arriving late on a Friday will stay cold over the weekend.  

“These are the things you uncover when you’re encouraging change, and you have to figure out how you have the resilience to navigate them and not get thrown off by the hurdles,” Whitford said.

Hybrid funding approach

Because sustainability considerations are part of MilliporeSigma’s commercial plan, the investments for supporting programs such as the Green Cooler initiative come from two main sources: product development budgets and strategic development funds that are meant for longer-range projects. 

The chief technology officer has also dedicated a portion of the corporate research and development budget to sustainability-related innovation, further demonstrating the company’s high-level commitment. 

“The biggest constraint is time, to be honest, because we are really fortunate to be in an organization where I have been given freedom to go and run,” Whitford said.  

The post Why MilliporeSigma’s sustainability lead sits in on sales pitches appeared first on Trellis.

We’ve just concluded our 25th year since the website GreenBiz.com — now Trellis.net — debuted: “The Resource Center on Business, the Environment and the Bottom Line,” read its tagline at the time. We’ve now been covering sustainable business for a quarter century — not quite since the beginning of the era, but still from its earliest days.

The journalists and analysts at Trellis — complemented handily by a sizable community of practitioners willing to share their ideas, perspectives and insights — have produced more than 25,000 articles during that time. And throughout, we’ve continually assessed the scope, veracity and impact of what we do and how we do it.

In many ways, just like our readers.

It hasn’t been easy. Sustainable business journalists have long struggled to get it right — the right mix of stories, of course, but also the right tone, balance and level of depth. There were no halcyon days when sustainable business journalism was easy, popular or uncontroversial. Nearly everything has been subject to punishing scrutiny, whether from activists, companies, investors, political point-scorers, watchdog groups, regulators or a corps of self-appointed sentinels.

If you get it mostly right, you find yourself as we have: scrutinized and criticized but generally respected by all sides.

At this 25-year juncture, I’ve been reviewing the trajectory of sustainable business reporting, including revisiting some of our earliest stories. It’s a bit like looking at an old picture of yourself and wondering what that “you” was really like back then. And how different things might be to have known then what you know now.

Capturing eyeballs and clicks

The evolution of sustainable business journalism roughly paralleled that of the internet, where “content” became cheap and ubiquitous, and where capturing “eyeballs” and clickthroughs required ever-spicier headlines and lede sentences.

More recent years saw the emergence of social media where, um, content needed to be bite-sized and sometimes salacious. Then came the tsunami of narrative podcasts, live online interviews, carousel storytelling, video explainers, micro-series and “snackable reports” (trust me, they’re a thing), among other novel formats.

Each added new opportunities and challenges for reporters and editors, requiring “journos” — shorthand for journalists in an era of bite-sized attention spans — and their publications to adjust their reporting and publishing strategies.

Now, in the era of AI, many such strategies are being cast aside as algorithm-based technology radically transforms how information is created and consumed, and who creates it and their agendas, if any.

It’s enough for an old-school journo like me to pine for the simpler world of blue pencils and bulldog editions.

Meanwhile, the business of sustainability has evolved from a largely engineering-centric profession into one confronting an atmospheric river of trends and terms: triple bottom line, eco-efficiency, stakeholder engagement, corporate citizenship, corporate social responsibility, shared value, carbon neutrality, double materiality, ESG, decarbonization, nature-positive, carbon-negative, circular economy, just transition and many others.

All in just the past 25 years.

Three eras of coverage

Amidst all this, how has media coverage changed? I view the past quarter century in three eras, which parallel the trajectory of sustainable business itself.

2000-2005: Shallow but earnest. Early reporting focused on mostly small, self-reported activities: a company phasing out polystyrene foam packaging “peanuts” from its shipping department, for instance. A name-brand company publishing its first-ever environmental report could become a headline-grabbing moment.

There was relatively little effort by reporters to peel back the covers to understand what was behind these stories. Sustainable business (it wasn’t even called that yet) was sufficiently novel that nearly everything seemed worthy of covering, if not cheerleading.

2005-2015: Less shallow, more serious. Reporting grew deeper, with more-experienced journalists examining meaningful changes in companies’ products, processes and operations. We started to focus not just on the “what” but also the “how” and “why” of company initiatives.

There was more effort taken to explain the nuts and bolts of what’s needed to nudge a company in a more sustainable direction: how increased transparency and disclosure, for example, could improve company operations; the challenges of accurately measuring and reporting a firm’s carbon footprint; the use of biotechnology and biomimicry to find less-problematic ingredients for everything from biofuels to blue jeans.

How we looked in 2020.

2015-2025: Serious and deeper. Heightened scrutiny and politicalization, in tandem with more ambitious corporate initiatives, pushed reporters to ask more probing questions: Can companies truly offset their way to carbon neutrality? Is hydrogen a viable transportation fuel? Does ESG investing actually move companies and markets?

Trellis’s Chasing Net Zero series represents a prime example of reporters digging deep to answer a seemingly simple question: What does it take for a company to dramatically reduce or eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions? The answer turns out to be far from simple. Trellis reporters use a detailed methodology to assess how specific companies across multiple sectors are faring. The complexity of these stories reflects the growing sophistication of sustainable business journalism overall.

Four challenges ahead

Today, we face both new and continuing challenges, among them:

• An evolving media landscape. Journalism now straddles two worlds: traditional balanced reportage and a digital, AI-enabled free-for-all, where a story dismissed as “fake news” might actually be accurate and where seemingly authoritative stories can turn out to be anything but. Publishing today requires balancing the consequential with the click-worthy, not to mention pairing context with clarity.
• Nuanced stories. As coverage goes deeper into company operations, the risk grows that complexity becomes oversimplified. For example, a story about a company restoring forests and protecting Amazonian biodiversity requires knowledge of land use; measurement, reporting and verification; and development finance, not to mention supply chains and Indigenous rights — but may be reduced by inexperienced writers and editors to merely “planting trees.”
• An uneven playing field. Some companies gush a steady stream of announcements and proactively court reporters and editors. As a result, such well-known brands as Amazon, Google, IKEA, Microsoft, Nike, Salesforce, Unilever and Walmart seem to appear disproportionately more frequently in stories, including ours (according to my unscientific survey). They can receive an outsized share of coverage even though their more circumspect peers may be doing as much or more.
• Finding balance. An evergreen challenge is determining the appropriate point of view for a given story: Do we criticize the leaders, always imperfect, or cheer them on? Do we lambaste the laggards or write encouragingly about their baby steps? Is an even-handed approach always fair to readers? We continue to strive to tell stories in a way that meets readers’ growing sophistication — and their perpetually shrinking attention spans. 

For today’s journalists and editors, there is no unified theory of how to cover sustainable business — only our instincts, experience, expertise and the abiding conventions of journalism. That’s what’s carried us for the past 25 years and what will propel us forward.

The post After 25 years of covering corporate sustainability, it’s more complicated than ever appeared first on Trellis.

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.​

As managing partner of At One Ventures, I get a unique and broad perspective at how the climate venture landscape is evolving. In 2025, we made progress but didn’t move in a straight line: some long-standing technical and economic constraints finally gave way, while other parts of the system showed how easily momentum can be disrupted by market demand, price volatility and policy swings. Here are some of the lows and highs of this year in climate. For corporate sustainability professionals, these are signals of what’s to come.

Lowlights

• Low lithium carbonate prices created headwinds for lithium battery recycling, meaning only the teams with the absolute best recycling economics can continue to compete. This drove some notable pivots and threatened to have us lose momentum in a capability we will ultimately need.

• Large, arbitrary tariffs were and are terrible for U.S. manufacturing. Efforts located in the U.S. were significantly harmed by chaotic trade policy. Elected officials showing almost no ability to push back to harmful policies. This is how you lose an economic race.

• As we approach near-perfect deepfakes, we’re entering a world where any narrative can be spoofed, adding jet fuel to an environment already rife with dangerous misinformation. Media consolidation into fewer hands that are acting progressively more carelessly to meet the 24-hour news cycle means we will be making stupid decisions faster.

• It was 36 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than historical highs in the arctic in February, and we had record heat wave 122 degrees Fahrenheit in South Asia in April, which put it on the verge of a major wet bulb fatality event. This event did lead to major productivity losses in the mango crop, an early example of how extreme temperatures disrupt stomata function — a mechanism that could drive major losses in the future.

• Bill Gates suggested that maybe climate change won’t be so bad, and we should focus on adaptation. While adaptation will absolutely be needed, this is no way to be a leader, and it will likely have some negative reverberations in the market. That said, the physics of planetary atmospheres marches on regardless of what people write or believe. It is not a field of study that is decided by passing comments from billionaires, a fact the media seems to keep forgetting based on where the coverage is focused.

The lowlights of 2025 point less to failure than to fragility. The warning here is that many capabilities we will depend on, such as battery recycling, resilient supply chains, trustworthy information systems and heat-tolerant agricultural and labor practices, are being treated as optional when short-term economics or political noise turn unfavorable. 

Commodity price swings, trade volatility and media distortion can thwart short-term progress, but the real physical and operational needs don’t disappear when markets wobble. Letting critical sectors lapse because prices are temporarily low is not prudence; it is deferred risk. The task now is to design strategies that assume volatility rather than being derailed by it, and to invest in capabilities that remain necessary regardless of sentiment, cycles or headlines.

Highlights

In 2025, we were able to experimentally verify that by using asparagopsis seaweed as a feed additive, we can dramatically reduce the amount of methane a cow generates (90 to 95 percent), while substantially improving the feed conversion ratio. This means that the global reduction in enteric methane could be an actively profitable activity instead of one that needs to be regulated into practice.

• 2025 also saw geothermal nearing a new phase, with oil and gas majors building real expertise on how their subsurface operational skills can be used to unlock a new generation of geothermal baseload. This is in no small part due to startups that are helping to prospect and secure promising sites in less time and higher success probability.  

• On the mobility front, BYD pulled ahead of Tesla as the largest global EV maker and is building an EV megafactory larger than the city of San Francisco. Waymo made big inroads into American cities, and real self-driving is about to transform much of mobility and transportation and supply chain infrastructure in the next decade.

• Data center build-outs created a mini climatetech ecosystem that supported investments in lower-power chips, decarbonized baseload, and storage for backup and generation intermittency. All the capital going into new generation and better power infrastructure should ultimately ramp U.S. ability to build, as well as lowering energy costs in the long run.

• Related to the data center construction boom, fission and fusion efforts received massive funding in 2025, with the reopening of a decommissioned part of Three Mile Island coming back online. While fusion efforts will challenge the classic 10-year venture fund life, substantial investment from U.S. private sector and Chinese public sector suggest that we will at least make significant advances in this cycle, regardless whether we crack the code on financeable facility-level gain.

• Total generation from renewables surpassed generation from coal for the first time in modern history in the first half of 2025 — a huge milestone, for which there is no reason to reverse (unless society collapses to the point where we can’t produce panels and wind turbines).

Even in a year marked by slower capital flows, 2025 made clear that the underlying machinery of climate progress is still turning and there is amazing work being done. Methane abatement that pays for itself, baseload clean power that looks operationally familiar, autonomous mobility that is moving from novelty to infrastructure, and energy systems scaling to meet demand all point to where cost, reliability and emissions reduction are beginning to align. 

This is the moment to translate awareness into preparedness: reassessing supply chains; facilities; logistics; and workforce mobility with these shifts in mind. Every business moves people, goods or electrons. The companies that start planning now, before these technologies are fully mainstream, will have more options, lower transition risk and a clearer path through the next cycle.

The post From cow burps to data centers, it’s been a year appeared first on Trellis.

Patagonia’s top sustainability strategist is a materials scientist. Colgate-Palmolive’s chief sustainability officer reports to the growth and strategy team, and PepsiCo’s CSO has managed profit-and-loss statements for billion-dollar commercial businesses.

The 13 leaders I interviewed in 2025 for the Climate Pioneers series come from diverse industries and backgrounds but share a common priority: a mission to create new business value with their sustainability agendas — in the form of better products, new revenue opportunities, improved operations, stronger corporate cultures and more. 

They are exemplars of an accelerating shift in the profession, one centered on quiet execution and practical results. “The new era we’re entering into for sustainability is really doubling down now on the business case, on the value creation aspect,” Colgate-Palmolive Ann Tracy told me in May.

The business value theme is explored in a series of interviews I conducted during Trellis Impact 25 with sustainability leaders from Atlassian, Cox, Workday and more. It will also permeate forthcoming full-length Climate Pioneers episodes, including my interview coming up Jan. 8 with Hawaiian Airlines’ new CEO, Diana Birkett Rakow, who also leads climate strategy and low-carbon technology investments for parent company Alaska Air Group. Sign up for Trellis Briefing to be among the first to watch that conversation.

Meanwhile, I encourage you to revisit how eight of this year’s Climate Pioneers are redefining corporate sustainability.

Why Patagonia picked a materials scientist to lead sustainability

Matt Dwyer, vice president of global product footprint, previously led materials innovation and development.

Career advice from the farmer’s son leading sustainability at KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell

Yum!’s sustainability chief Jon Hixson meets with the board every quarter, which helps keep his strategy front of mind.

For PepsiCo’s sustainability chief, it helps to think like a CEO

Jim Andrew’s experience managing corporate budgets is a big reason he was tapped for the role in August 2020.

Google’s Kate Brandt plays a central role in its AI strategy

The company’s sustainability lead is dreaming up ways to use the technology to help companies, cities and individuals cut emissions by at least 1 gigaton a year by 2030.

How Colgate-Palmolive’s CSO links sustainability to value creation

Ann Tracy, in her sixth year on the job, reports into the growth and strategy organization of the consumer products giant.

How Crocs’ CSO uses change management to cut emissions

Former Danone sustainability veteran Deanna Bratter is driving the footwear company toward net-zero status by rethinking plastics.

Hard-learned lessons from L’Oreal’s chief of U.S. sustainability

Marissa McGowan leaves few aspects of the cosmetics giant’s business unexamined on the way to eco-designing 100 percent of its products by 2030.

How real estate giant CBRE is deploying this Microsoft alum as its first chief sustainability officer

Microsoft’s first environmental strategist, Rob Bernard, brings a customer’s point of view to CBRE’s emissions reduction strategy in the newly created C-suite role.

[You can mingle with past Climate Pioneers — including Bratter, McGowan and Dwyer — during GreenBiz 26, the premier event for sustainability professionals happening Feb. 17-19, 2026, in Phoenix.]

The post From Patagonia to Colgate-Palmolive, what climate pioneers have in common appeared first on Trellis.

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.​

It’s no surprise that 2025 has been a year of fluctuation for corporate sustainability. The era of “by 2025” commitments is coming to an end, without clear consensus on what will come next. And for sustainable packaging, the shifting winds of state-by-state Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws paired with a stalled global plastics treaty have left many wondering what exactly it will take to keep up, let alone get ahead.  

Uncertainty: A large roadblock for sustainable packaging

The list of unknowns for the packaging industry is long. Looming largest on the horizon is the EU’s comprehensive and ambitious packaging law, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR). The PPWR will standardize EPR (policies that shift the cost of material recovery from consumers to producers) and its fees, recyclability, recycled content, material minimization (also known as source reduction) and conformity with design guidance. Although the first legally binding PPWR measures are set to go online in August 2026, many companies doubt this will happen without major compliance shifts or evolving targets for sustainable packaging, and a “wait-and-see” mindset is taking hold. 

In the U.S., the seven states with EPR laws for packaging are all in varying stages of rulemaking and early implementation. It remains unclear how significant the required fees will be, whether these laws will face legal challenges and whether states will succeed in harmonizing their targets and requirements.

And regardless of geography, everyone is grappling with questions about the performance capabilities of materials such as bioplastics or paper options, the cost of recycled content, the stability of recycling end markets and which materials, ultimately, are “better.”  

Navigating future unknowns

What are leading global companies doing in the face of all this uncertainty? At the Sustainable Packaging Summit in November, Europe’s largest sustainable packaging conference, they showed they’re taking clear positions — building robust, comprehensive strategies that move them closer to their circularity objectives.  

Take Mars, with its large portfolio of pet food in currently unrecyclable plastic packaging. Under the PPWR, state EPR laws and possible global plastics restrictions, the challenges with recyclability in their portfolio are a clear liability. That’s why the global giant has taken a leading role working towards better collection of plastic with initiatives such as the U.S. Flexible Film Initiative, the Sustainability Investment Fund, and the Flexible Plastic Fund, to advance the collection and circularity of packaging across the U.K. Through these efforts, the company is walking the walk — investing in a future where flexible plastic packaging and films are widely recycled.  

Avery Dennison, a global materials science and manufacturing company specializing in labels, RFID solutions and tapes, is also taking proactive steps to be an industry leader in sustainable packaging. Its sustainably optimized labels are key to improving the quality of recycled plastics. That’s because when labels such as Avery Dennison’s “cleanly” separate from packaging during normal recycling processes, they reduce contamination and ensure that recycled packaging materials make it to their next life. Additionally, the company’s other packaging technologies enable reusable packaging solutions by ensuring packaging and labels either separate cleanly or stay intact through dozens of washes.

3 things your organization can do

What can other companies learn from these efforts? Both Mars and Avery Dennison are addressing the uncertainty head-on, driving the innovation and infrastructure solutions they’ll need to navigate the next decade of packaging sustainability. Here’s how others can start to do the same:  

• Calculate the risk of the status quo: While analysis paralysis can trap organizations in their current position, doing nothing can actually be the riskiest choice of all. Consider the costs to your business if nothing changes. For example, what it would mean financially if your flexible film packaging continues to go uncollected and unrecycled and is ultimately prohibited from sale in several U.S. states or even across the entire EU? With the risks clearly outlined, failing to take major action becomes increasingly untenable.  
• Make packaging a board-level discussion: With calculated risks in hand, it’s time to bring these costs to the highest level of relevant leadership within your organization. Packaging is no longer just an environmental issue and EPR laws are overhauling business as usual. A board of directors or C-suite leaders needs to understand the EPR fees they’ll pay for their packaging portfolios, see the size of opportunity to cut fees by moving towards different materials and talk through the short-term challenge of unstable recycling markets or higher recycled content costs.  
• Set your own certainty: Perhaps the most powerful way to move through external uncertainty is to commit fully to a path forward that sets you up for success, no matter the variables. Start by assuming that all packaging regulations will remain as strict as, if not stricter than, they’re written today. Plan for a significant ratcheting-up of packaging fees, particularly for difficult-to-recycle packaging, as well as penalties for inaction or compliance. Assume a sizable investment in recycling infrastructure will be needed, and that your company will be part of the group paying for it. By setting your own certainty, you’ll be building a strategy that puts you in the driver’s seat. 

Uncertainty cast a shadow over the sustainable packaging landscape of 2025. Yet the smartest global companies are dropping the wait-and-see approach for an anticipate-and-act strategy, building new business models, material innovations and infrastructure solutions. 

The post How companies can thrive amid sustainability packaging uncertainty appeared first on Trellis.