Think Differently. Think Sustainably. Ultimately, It Is a Business Imperative.
Sustainability has become mainstream. As more and more people (consumers) have pushed companies to focus on the health, safety, and environmental impact of the products they sell, companies in turn have begun to incorporate sustainability principles as a way of doing business, and as a way of reducing the environmental impact from the manufacture and use of their products. Sustainability is now a business imperative.
That’s why at Olive & Branch M&D we’ve made sustainability integral to our strategy. Driven by innovation, the use of safer materials, the safety of people (employees, consumers), and the communities we operate in. We are doing our best to embrace circularity as an economic model, and thus, currently, our aim is to use sustainable materials and chemicals as best we can in our product development initiatives. While we are a specialty chemicals company, and the core of what we do is produce specialty chemicals, we want the chemicals we make to improve the lives of people and be better for the environment, in a measurable way.
The below cornerstones make up our sustainable initiative:
- We are Committed: our commitment to responsible consumption and production is what drives our research and development efforts. Using sustainable raw materials is a key focus area of our R&D strategy, enabling us to deliver safer products to our customers, in turn helping them provide solutions to the market through our portfolio of greener technologies.
- We are Focused: we are focused on delivering eco-friendly solutions and have processes in place that encourage as much as possible, green-focused product development. Our talented R&D team is dedicated to delivering new products to our customers that improve performance, increase productivity, and provide a more sustainable solution.
- We Provide Fit for Purpose Solutions: We assess options in the context of the market and geographies we operate in, and we offer a fit-for-purpose solution that (1) gets the job done, and (2) drives the change to the use of more environmentally- friendly options. We know that a key part of delivering innovative products is to understand and respond to our customers’ needs and challenges. We do this by listening to our customers and understanding the specifics of their challenges, then we make sure that we are undertaking development activities that deliver commercially viable solutions.
- We are Environmentally Conscious: We continuously improve our business practices and align operations to responsibly deliver solutions designed to reinforce our customers’ commitments to sustainability. We do what we can to minimize our impact on the environment.
- Renewable Sourcing: We aim to use renewable alternatives for raw materials whenever we can and minimize the impact to the environment by limiting the use of finite resources.
- Use of Safer Materials: One strategic commitment and priority is the substitution of potentially harmful chemicals with safer options in our product formulations. We are constantly surveying the market for safer materials to use.
- Sustainable Product Innovations: We aim to deliver breakthrough sustainable chemistry innovations in the pursuit of a cleaner and healthier world. This starts with ensuring that sustainability is a core design criterion in the earliest phase of innovation. Our R&D team is continually looking for incremental improvements to our existing products, reducing the impact and increasing recyclability. They are also thinking about new products that enable us to be healthy and clean in a more sustainable way.
- Adopting a Circular Thinking: We want to contribute to a cleaner world by making circular thinking a core part of how we do business. We aim to achieve this by designing products with enhanced longevity or intended for multiple uses, increasing resources’ productivity as well as reducing the use of finite sources, and by enhancing the recyclability or biodegradability of final products in the early stages of product design.
Our R&D team at every opportunity, tries to develop or improve our products using the principles of green chemistry. Many of our customers are intent on delivering greener products to the marketplace, and we’ve responded to support their efforts by developing high quality sustainable solutions. Often, this means making the right connections between your requirements, evolving industry standards, the strengths of our partner companies, and our expertise as a specialty chemicals pioneer to deliver a unique, environmentally friendly solution that’s catered to your needs, high performing, and cost effective.
We look across the life cycle of our products to ensure our innovations continue to improve, creating a world that is better because of our products. We are focused on increasing the net positive impact of our products, based upon knowledge of where our raw materials come from, our processes, how our products are used by customers, and how they are treated at end-of-life.
Innovation is foundational to everything we do. We are a specialty chemicals / materials company, but more than that, we’re a people company. Our employees and customers drive innovation to continually solve the world’s most critical problems and to further our Circular Thinking strategy.
Olive & Branch M&D also uses life cycle assessment (LCA) to analyze the potential environmental impacts of our products throughout their life cycles, from raw material and resource extraction to manufacture, retail, consumer use, and end of life.
The men and women of Olive & Branch M&D take environmental stewardship to heart. People are the most significant contributors to the sustainability and success of our company. We believe that building and maintaining sound relationships with our communities makes us a better, stronger company, and good community relations are built on trust, respect, and responsibility. We also value the importance of collaboration to drive change. By engaging our employees, communities, customers, academia, environmental agencies/organizations, we’re focused on advancing sustainable solutions, building inclusive communities, and developing tomorrow’s innovators.
The setup of Olive & Branch M&D from an infrastructure perspective is unique. We use a collection of chemical blending, distribution, and partnered companies to bring our product innovations to market. Thus, while we are a small company, our network is big. This allows us to maintain a small footprint, and to foster a healthy environment for our employees and the communities in which we operate.
We continue to actively seek ways to reduce our footprint.