December 2024

December brings a close to our 40th anniversary year as a global leader in third-party certification, auditing, and standards development. In 2024, we have achieved significant milestones that have further solidified our commitment to excellence in sustainability.

As we work to build more sustainable sourcing practices throughout our supply chain at Bath & Body Works, an ingredient of immediate focus is palm oil. This is an ingredient we identified through our sustainable sourcing risk assessment, a tool that allows us to better understand the social and environmental implications of the materials used in the most critical areas of our business. One of the sustainability challenges with palm oil is deforestation caused by palm oil plantations that can have negative impacts to wildlife and biodiversity.

In this latest blog Cascale’s Executive Vice President, Andrew Martin, shares reflections from Cascale's Brand & Retail Forum in Brussels, where brands, manufacturers, and policymakers tackled the challenges of compliance, transparency, and harmonized action. With a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape, Martin highlights the importance of alignment across the supply chain, the evolving role of tools like the Higg Index, and how EU policies such as CS3D and CSRD are shaping a more sustainable future.

Saint-Gobain North America, through its building products subsidiary CertainTeed, has reduced natural gas consumption and saved nearly 1,000 metric tons of CO2 in the last year at its roofing facility in Oxford, North Carolina. These reductions represent the equivalent of CO2 emissions from nearly 112,000 gallons of gasoline consumed.¹