In episode 9, the latest in our ongoing series of guest-centric features, we’re pleased to welcome Al Iannuzzi to the podcast. Al is Vice President of Sustainability at Esteé Lauder Companies.

Al has made his career as an Environmental, Health, Safety and Sustainability Executive and author, and has over 30 years of experience as a subject matter expert in the EHS&S field. His 2017 book ‘Greener Products’ is a must-read – insightful, engaging and a fitting accumulation of the wealth of knowledge Al has picked up in his career.

In this episode, Al, Neil and Jim discuss what product managers should be paying attention to right now, how they can cut through the noise and get to the route of the matter at hand – and what the true goal of ‘greener’ products should be.

In this Episode

Shelley: Al, as you know, our listeners are product managers and others who have a role developing sustainable products. You're active in this space; you teach, you write, and you work in this space. Right now, what do you think is the most relevant thing for our listeners to know? [01:00 ]

• Al: I have done quite a bit of research on making products more sustainable or greener. Whenever I speak, I like to say this: There's no such thing as a green product. And the reason I say that is if you think about a product, like think of the greenest product in your mind right now, and what I typically tend to think about are, like 7th generation products or Method products, because I think of household laundry detergent or dish detergent, those type of things. And those products are very sustainably minded when it came to bringing them to be. But even those products can be improved. If you think about the raw materials it takes to extract from the earth and the manufacturing of those raw materials and then further manufacturing and then transportation to distribution centers and then from there to the place where it's being sold, the use phase of the product, and then the end of life of the product and the packaging, there are improvements that still could be made for a product that some people would call green. [01:15 ]


• What does green mean anyway? There's no obvious definition for green, so that's why I say there's no such thing as a green product, because every product can be improved. That's why in the book that I wrote called Greener Products: The Making and Marketing of Sustainable Brands. I call it greener. It's a journey. And you can always make a product or a process more efficient, better.


• The other thing I like to focus in on is when it comes to product developers, is that a lot of people are in different places when it comes to thinking how important sustainability is to bring a product to market. But perhaps the strongest case for product developers to get their mind around is future trends. And there is a study by the consulting firm McKinsey. They actually wrote this book called Resource Revolution. I cite that in my book. Some of the things that they are stating will happen is by 2030 there will be 3 billion more people in the middle class and primarily that will be coming from India and China. Anybody who's visited those countries, you see tremendous growth. And if you think about the growth of the middle class, so what does that mean? People coming into more prosperity, so they have more availability, more income to spend on things besides just basic living needs, right? So that means that these 3 billion people moving into the middle class are going to want the same thing that the listeners have. They're going to want cars, they're going to want cell phones, they're going to want iPads, TVs, you name it, new clothing and home goods. With all of that, it's more difficult to extract materials from the earth. So new mining discoveries have flattened; it cost like twice as much for an oil well that it did over a decade ago. All these come from that study. So no matter what you believe or think about sustainability and about the biggest issues in sustainability when it comes to climate, or even what I call the war on plastics, because there's pressure on single use, disposable plastics, whatever you think about those things and how dire you think they are or not, everybody can agree on, these are trends that are really happening. And it's going to put more pressure on raw materials. So raw materials are going to cost more in the future, they're going to be less available. Therefore, what we have to do is design products in a more efficient, better way. And that's to me one of the most important things for product developers to be thinking about.

Neil: Al, I think the idea of a greener product, it resonates with me. At the end of the day, even when you design new products, it's always an iteration. There are very few products that are just fundamentally new. What is the goal? Is the goal the continuous improvement in your view and in the context of this future - the demographics where we will have to do a lot more with less - do you think that's the equation to use? Which is if we keep cutting out inefficiencies in the process of how we take raw materials and make products out of it, we will hopefully, maybe not decouple, but increase our ability to serve this broader mass with the limited resources that we have or the decreasing availability of resources that we have. [04:58 ]

• Al: Like with anything from a sustainability perspective, there's multiple things to be concerned about and to be thinking about. Just look at your cell phone nowadays. How many devices you go back 10, 15, 20 years ago had to be made with more materials for all the functionality of that cell phone. It's not only just communication device, it's a camera. Sometimes we forget about all these advances, and technology is always advancing and getting better and better. That's one of the things, yes, we have to make things more efficient, and efficiency is one of the lenses we should be looking at. But when we do sustainable innovation of new products, what we want to do is look at various lenses. [05:40 ]


• Another really interesting concept that has cropped up over the last ten years or so is the whole idea of circular economy. And this ties into original design for the environment thinking like design for disassembly. We talked about those things for years, but now it's becoming more and more imperative and more and more people are looking for this. And designing products that have greater functionality with less materials, less resources, is really one of the things. And then always keep in mind the shelf life of this product. At the end of its life, what's going to happen to the packaging? What's going to happen to the product? Can it be like that whole cradle to cradle thinking? Can that end of life of that product and packaging be raw material into another?


• Anytime you can mimic nature, and that's a whole other great concept too, biomimicry, it's a win. Because you're following things that are more efficient and that's the way the world operates. I think when we violate that type of thinking, that's when problems happen. When we just have single use disposable plastics, for example, and when you're not doing things that can break down anymore or put back into commerce, then you're not designing things very efficiently and you're not doing the best you can as a product developer.

Neil: The challenge we have is as sustainability experts, we have all of these ideas; and you talked about circularity, biomimicry, dematerialization. But for product managers that are, I don't know, building the next laptop, what would you ask them to use as primary design parameters? Because there could be secondary things that you want to look at to make sure you're not creating harm. But is there something that you see, given the market today, given the environment today, given the societal apprehension to a lot of, I think the anti ESG wave that you've seen recently could be simplified for product managers and say, pick these three things and they will be a great primary design parameters when you're designing new products. [07:34 ]

• Al: You hit on a lot of good things there and let me quickly address the whole anti ESG thing. To me, anti ESG isn't relevant to manufacturing companies or companies. It's really more for those people selling stock and managing stock funds. And that's where I think a lot of this anti ESG thing came from and it's not a understanding who you're working for and who the consumer is or the customer is. So that doesn't affect Estee Lauder, where we're making prestige beauty products and making them more sustainable and thinking about the packaging at the end of its life and making it more recyclable. Matter of fact, our consumers, our customers are looking for us to be paying attention to these things. And we always see these surveys. Now more and more people are interested in buying products from companies that are good corporate citizens that are doing things the right way. So if you're stepping away from these things and you're not paying attention to these things and your competitors are, you're going to lose. [08:17 ]


• Now, one of the other things that you hit on that I think is super important, and I worked with Jim when he was working as a consultant when I was at Johnson and Johnson, is anything you do for a product developer or a marketer to help them to make a product more sustainable has to be something simple. If you make something complicated, like, oh, we want everybody to do lifecycle assessments,