Electrolux has been reinventing taste, care and wellbeing experiences for over 100 years, helping their customers make more sustainable life choices along the way. Here, Derek Haley tells us what the company ethos of “shape living for the better” means in practice, why partnerships are crucial to building a better future – and why education continues to be one of the cornerstones of the company’s sustainability agenda.
What is your background and what does your current role in the business entail?
I'm trained as an engineer but through the years I have worked across a few different facets of the organisations. I started as a design engineer, then I moved into sales, and even worked in IT.
Currently, as Director Growth and Operations, a lot of my work centres around sustainability, operations and looking at how we can be more efficient as an organisation, grow as a business, and how we deliver on our purpose of shape living for the better. That means not only looking at our own organisation but also influencing others, and working together to build a more sustainable industry. To accelerate this collective growth, we share all of our knowledge with competitors, partners and retailers, and that's a really important part of my role, too.
Has focus on sustainability always been a part of your career trajectory?
As an engineer, I've always been passionate about science, technology and making things more efficient. In that sense, I come from a background which conditions you to always be looking at ways to better whatever it is that you’re working on. Sustainability just naturally fits into it. So whilst I have never held a Sustainability Officer role, for instance, the idea of sustainability has always naturally fit in with the way I think.
And what does sustainability mean for you?
It's much more than just emissions and waste – it’s about a sustainable organisation. Electrolux has been around for 100 years. To me, sustainability answers the question of how do we create a company that’s going to last another century? Elements like integrity, safety of the employees, being an active part of a community, looking after the environment, and, of course, being profitable, are all crucial to creating a sustainable business.
How important is sustainability to your organisation? How does this commitment manifest through various stages of product development and company operations?
Sustainability has been a part of Electrolux as a Swedish organisation for many years, and so in that sense, it’s deeply ingrained in our organisational ethos. However, for quite a long time the focus has been on product development and our factories because these are the two single biggest things that you can change, and that will have a big impact. Now, the notion of sustainability is shifting to a more comprehensive agenda that encompasses the whole organisation.
And that touches on every aspect of the company. How can you make your clothes last longer? How can you make your food last longer with our refrigerators? And how can you use less energy or less water? How do you get rid of EPS from your packaging, and how do you recycle and reuse it in a sustainable way? Alongside these product-centric considerations, we’re getting started on the electrification of the forklift fleet around the world, which is very exciting. Australia doesn't have a very good infrastructure for this yet, but we’re getting ready, and are planning on electrifying the forklift fleet by February with an emphasis on utilising solar electricity wherever possible .
What are the company’s current priorities from a sustainability point of view?
Building partnerships is the absolute key for us. We are also working on sustainable operations, including solar and water reticulation, and focusing on advancing our way towards zero waste certification on all of our sites by 2025. Ensuring that our products are recyclable and fully circular to the best of our abilities is an important point of focus. We want to be able to strip them apart at the end of their life and turn these parts into new appliances, or other objects.
And then education is another important priority for us. We strive to make an impact on our community by helping our consumers with things like how to make their clothes last longer, or how they can make better and more sustainable food choices – how to make better life choices in general. One of our competitors mentioned the other day that all of our appliances have an ECO button, but nobody ever presses it, so there is an important aspect to helping consumers move beyond the default and make better, more conscious decisions.
What are the company’s aspirations, goals and ambitions for the future from a sustainability point of view?
Alongside the important focus on fostering meaningful partnerships, we are working towards carbon neutrality across all of our Australian facilities by 2025, and then across the entire operations by 2030. Our factory in Adelaide is already zero waste certified and has 2000 solar cells which means it’s 80% carbon neutral; an incredible achievement for a factory with such high energy use. And of course, shaping living for the better will continue underpinning all our efforts in this space.