Philips Lighting and Maersk Line were awarded the “Business to Business Partnership of the Year” at the Responsible Business Awards 2017.
Maersk Line has won a responsible business award for its Carbon Pact partnership with Philips Lighting, which was praised as a “scalable solution addressing the significant challenge with carbon emissions in the supply chain”.
On October 16, the collaboration received recognition at the annual Responsible Business Awards ceremony in London, taking home the award for “Business to Business Partnership of the Year” within the category of “Supply Chain Sustainability”.
The Carbon Pact is a partnership in which Maersk Line is helping Philips Lighting realise its ambition of making the planet more sustainable.
Changing the way business is done
For Philips Lighting, being sustainable is not just about selling low-carbon technology. It is about changing the way business is done entirely. Last year the company introduced strict targets for its operations and has publicly committed to become carbon neutral by 2020.
The Carbon Pact supports this ambition, as Maersk Line expects to reduce carbon emissions related to containers shipped for Philips Lighting by 20% before 2020.
“The Carbon Pact commits both companies to be transparent around carbon emissions,” says Kaisa Helena Tikk, Global Sustainability Advisor in Transport & Logistics.
“We discuss customers’ sustainability challenges and identify actions to jointly work on, as well as look at trading patterns and developments in our fleet to suggest how to reduce carbon footprint five years from now.”
Since the Pact was signed in 2016, Philips Lighting has saved around 1,200 metric tonnes of CO2 compared to the industry average by shipping with Maersk Line.
Achieving sustainable growth
The ambition of the initiative is to engage and collaborate with leading customers and industries on mutual ambitions to achieve sustainable growth. Kaisa Helena Tikk believes that the collaboration sets an example for other global players to join forces as means to address systemic sustainability challenges:
“By committing to reducing our emissions, we’re not only demonstrating our long-term commitment to the environment, we’re also supporting our customers’ supply chain reductions and showing that responsible business is good business.”
Both companies are part of the Clean Cargo Working Group (CCWG), which supports the initiative by providing a standard methodology for calculating CO2 emissions.
In 2016, Philips Lighting and Maersk Line also hosted a joint workshop at The New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference on the de-carbonisation of the supply chain – and they intend to share more learnings from the collaboration with the industry in the future.