How One Company Added Carbon Estimates to Its Customer Invoices

May 20, 2024

Soprema is an international building materials supplier, producing millions of square meters of waterproofing, insulating, and roofing products each year. In 2022, Pierre-Etienne Bindschedler, the company’s president and third-generation owner, committed to reporting the carbon footprint of each product on every customer invoice, and to help customers reduce the embedded GHG emissions in the products they purchased. Paper co-author Melotte, an experienced operations director, was selected to lead a pilot project to measure and subsequently lower the carbon embedded in its products. Melotte decided to follow the E-Liability Pilot Playbook, which divides a pilot project into four stages: Project Design, Data Collection; Data Analysis, and Action. This article describes how the pilot, which focused on the company’s bitumen waterproofing systems, unfolded at Soprema. The company estimates a potential carbon footprint reduction of 34% from the project.

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  Robert S. Kaplan is a senior fellow and the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development emeritus at Harvard Business School. He coauthored the McKinsey Award–winning HBR article “Accounting for Climate Change” (November–December 2021).
  

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  Timmy Melotte is an Operational Excellence Director for Soprema International, a building materials supplier based in Limburg, Belgium