Where to start on your sustainability journey

A simple guide on the UK chemical and pharmaceutical sector, focused on companies with limited resources.

Here at the Chemical Industries Association, we began our formal work on sustainability nearly 20 years ago in 2004, publishing our first sustainability programme, based around guiding principles and key metrics. Our longer-standing and continued efforts on driving health, safety, security and environmental performance improvement – enshrined within our Responsible Care programme – provided us with the essential building blocks to give tangible meaning to sustainable development at the time and today that programme remains a powerful vehicle for delivering on our wider sustainability objectives.

Since 2004, the prominence given to sustainability across politics and society has changed considerably and CIA’s membership has responded accordingly. That response continues to evolve and this specific guidance has been written by CIA’s Sustainability Steering Group in order to broaden the visibility of some of the best practice undertaken and shared within that group. We want to use this guide as a platform for engagement with businesses that are at earlier stages of their sustainability journeys.

Each and every stakeholder has a role in transitioning to and building a more sustainable society. Collaboration and, in particular, peer support and learning are central to that and many of the companies involved in the drafting of this document have benefited directly from sharing experiences – good and bad – with one another. In this guidance, we provide some suggestions for those first and subsequent steps towards building a sustainability programme – steps which we appreciate can be daunting for smaller businesses in particular, given resource constraints.