Sustainability Drives Smarter Innovation and Profitable Growth at UPL Ltd

Embedding sustainability into the corporate governance framework is considered a key driver to ensure companies focus on long-term sustainable value creation rather than short-term benefits. Dr. Mritunjay Chaubey, Global Vice President - Environment & Sustainability, UPL shares with Pro MFGmedia UPL’s best practices to achieve sustainability for profitable growth.

UPL believes sustainability provides the best opportunity to drive smarter innovation & profitable growth. Sustainability offers organizations an opportunity to embed green sustainable technologies in many ways, which lead to smarter innovation and profitable growth. It can also lead to significant cost savings on various fronts, such as energy, water, and waste conservation.

The organization has introduced green cells to capture sustainability. The green cell includes numerous engineers, biologists, technologists, & chemists who are developing clean and sustainable technology. These clean technologies can help the organization to bring down the environmental footprint of the operations. UPL has introduced numerous technologies such as SCALEBAN - a mechanical, static, and non-chemical water treatment equipment, which reduces the freshwater consumption in cooling towers by recycling the effluents. The organization has piloted and developed technology that helps in wastewater treatment. UPL is the first organization among the global agrochemical organizations to pilot and embed Forward Osmosis technology that is useful in treating wastewater. They are one of the chemical companies in the world to implement OH radical technology, which is useful in treating & recycling high total dissolved solids (TDS) wastewater.

The organization believes that sustainability provides profitable business growth. Since 2016, UPL has been passionately implementing sustainable technologies and models through which they are able to reduce environmental footprint by 30%. This has also helped them in saving approximately $45 million worth of water bills, energy bills, and waste disposal cost. With the UN's announcement for Sustainable development goals (SDG) & Paris Agreement on climate change, the sustainability aspect has become more relevant in the industries. The organization believes that the cost of inaction on sustainable development goals & the Paris agreement is higher than the cost of action on sustainability.

UPL has captured the essence of sustainability by implementing the triple - bottom approach in sustainability strategy. Through the triple- bottom approach, the organization has implemented environmental, social, and governance dimensions in its sustainability strategy. With respect to environmental dimensions, the organization has embraced a better water management system and eco-efficient operations. In the social dimensions, the organizations have implemented finer HR policies, effective HSE practices, and methods to achieve sustainable development goals. Under the governance aspect, UPL has introduced good policies for governance, customer care, quality, and tax strategy.

Apart from the triple - bottom approach, UPL introduced various other policies such as climate & environment management, tax, and human policies to achieve sustainability. The organization has commenced a sustainability report, which is assured by a third-party assurance agency, is a testimony of the organization’s commitment to Sustainability. The report is based on the GRI principles - a globally accepted standard for Sustainability Reporting. To further reinforce our Sustainability agenda, we got various certifications such as Responsible Care and participated in various forums organized rating agencies such as Dow Jones and Sustainalytics. The various steps taken and initiatives executed by UPL has led to a very high ESG rating by many reputed ESG rating agencies. Recently, Sustainalytics – a premium ESG rating agency from Netherlands have ranked UPL No.1 AgChem company for Environmental, Social and Governance risk management in the world. Corporate image and public perception is a real economic force that businesses must deal with and manage. Embedding Sustainability into business is the best way to change the perception of the public & build a good corporate image. DJSI is helping many corporates around the world to integrate Sustainability into their business.

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