Our Fundamentals
Our social licence to operate is built on trust and is the foundation of everything we do. We consider all stakeholders in our ecosystem and strive to adopt best practices with regard to the environment, labour and human rights, ethics and sustainable procurement. Through our Fundamentals, we will directly contribute towards the following UN SDG targets:
SDG 3.4, SDG 3.9, SDG 4.3, SDG 6.3, SDG 6.4, SDG 8.5, SDG 8.8, SDG 12.2, SDG 12.5, SDG 12.6, SDG 12.7, SDG 14.1
By being a responsible business, we are contributing to a wide range of SDGs, as determined by our specific actions and projects.
Factsheets
Health Safety and wellbeing
Responsible business
Quality assurance
Process safety
Fair income
Product stewardship
Environmental stewardship
Knowledge management
Supplier partnerships and sustainable sourcing
Our progress
Living Wage employer globally
In 2018, we gained accreditation in the UK as a Living Wage Employer from the Living Wage Foundation. We extended our work to be a Living Wage Employer globally, completing an assessment of all employees worldwide in 2021. This was done in partnership with the Fair Wage Network, establishing a Living Wage in each of the countries in which we operate and ensuring all employees receive this as a minimum, even more important in light of the global cost of living crisis. We are now working with the Fair Wage Network to gain accreditation for our work and to ensure our progress stands up to external scrutiny. In 2022, we also began the process of ensuring all our regular contractors are paid a Living Wage and plan to achieve this milestone before the end of 2024.
During 2022, we enhanced benefits according to regional needs and provided financial support to counter the increase in employees' cost of living. This included introducing free private healthcare for all UK employees, deciding not to increase employee contributions into our defined benefit pension scheme, and giving one-off cost-of-living payments that benefitted our lower paid employees the most.
We will take a leadership role in life cycle assessment of our ingredients and their impact on the life cycle of our customers’ products.
Full life cycle assessment (LCA) of our ingredients is critical to understand how to reduce our footprint and maximise our positive impact, and enable the transition to sustainable ingredients through customer collaboration and innovation. Examining environmental impacts holistically, beyond carbon, also supports understanding of our impacts and dependencies on nature.
Following the development of our externally verified in-house LCA tool last year, in 2022 we completed four cradle-to-grave LCAs and two cradle-to-gate LCAs. Examining the environmental impacts of key ingredients from our Consumer Care and Life Sciences sectors, these studies allowed us to investigate the downstream impacts and benefits of our ingredients in use, the effect of the transition from petrochemical to bio-based raw materials, plus many more insights. We also recruited an LCA specialist to progress our work towards developing an LCA Centre of Excellence.
Read more about sustainability being at the heart of what we do:
11th Most Sustainable International Company
We are celebrating being ranked the top of the chemicals sector for the sixth year running in Britain’s Most Admired Companies award
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UK Government to support expansion of Croda's lipid systems manufacturing facility
31 March 2022: This investment will significantly enhance the development of high-purity lipid systems, essential delivery systems for next generation nucleic acid drugs such as mRNA vaccines.
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