Cleveland sustainability summit draws business leaders, protestors

CLEVELAND—Participation doubled for the second Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP) Sustainability Summit, compared with 2023, a sign that the 800 attendees at the Jan. 23 event in Cleveland recognized the importance.

"Sustainability is a business imperative," said Baiju Shah, CEO of GCP. "We know it's right for our people and your people, and it's right for our planet. And we know the momentum behind it continues to grow."

The event included discussions from a range of companies, including consumer brands and supply chain stalwarts such as materials suppliers.

The event saw more than double the registrations—even if some of the attendees came for the sole purpose of walking out on the keynote speaker, Kaitlin Bergan, BlackRock’s head of sustainable client solutions.

Dozens of attendees left after Shah introduced Bergan who, in her remarks, talked about the role of environmental, sustainability and governance (ESG) in asset management and investing.

The protesters left the talk and held a “teach-in” in response, saying the event was “sullied by the keynote spokesperson from BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm” and “one of the largest investors in fossil fuels,” according to a statement from the organizers.

In her discussion, Bergan talked about sustainability as part of the broader economy and as a trend with investors and consumers. She also stressed that ESG considerations when looking at corporate investment were not entirely new.

“For decades as investors, industry-wide, we have thought about issues like corporate governance, thought about how does a company's particular placement geographically affect its risk of extreme weather events? Thought about how compensation and employee retention ultimately affect a company's performance?” she said.

Those considerations are not new but as a financial fiduciary and investor, she added, the firm always takes into account how those ESG factors drive company performance. “What we're thinking about is value, not values,” she added.

Touching upon a survey of 200 of BlackRock’s biggest global clients about the importance of ESG initiatives.

Bergan pointed out 56 percent of those surveyed responded that they are focused on investing in companies that have a good or service involved with the transition to a low-carbon economy.

The report also found that 46 percent said that navigating the transition is actually the most important investment priority over the next one to three years.

“This is such an economic opportunity right now for companies and investors alike because of some mega forces that we're seeing in the economy, including climate tech and other huge advances, creating opportunity,” Bergan said.

She did warn that not all decarbonization strategies are sustainable, particularly when it comes to the need for the critical minerals required to create electric vehicle batteries. Something like that is necessary in many ways for the transition to a low-carbon economy.

“We have products that are necessary in many ways for the transition to a low carbon economy, but we have to be very clear for clients who have these (decarbonization) objectives,” Bergan said. 

Other summit speakers drilled down into how their companies deal with creating and selling their own sustainability programs, both internally and externally.

“It's not really about winning just for your company,” Chastity McLeod, Nestle's vice president of sustainability in North America, told the audience. “If you want to do the right thing for the planet, you cannot do it without working with others to scale and drive initiatives forward.”

McLeod said that it is becoming apparent that any company, regardless of the sector, will have to absorb some of the initial costs around sustainable innovation in order to scale up those technologies and drive product costs down.

Often, she said, that means competitors need to work together.

“We have to collaborate. We have to get this right. It's bigger than our company. It's bigger than our competition with each other,” McLeod said.

Another panelist, Walter Ripple, Avient Corp.’s vice president of sustainability, said that with four business units, more than 100 plants and lots of sub-business units, he found that the company’s sustainability efforts were going unnoticed and underappreciated.

The specialty polymer manufacturer, headquartered in Avon Lake, was making strides in launching sustainable products as part of the larger supply chain, but the message was getting lost.

“It was a real mess for our employees who knew all these great things you're doing around sustainability,” Ripple said about efforts to get buy-in from such a large and diverse company.

"The other thing is that we weren't sharing best practices throughout the organization,” he said.

Avient in 2019 established a sustainability council populated with leaders from all of the company’s business units from different departments and regions, he explained.

“It created not only communication but full engagement throughout the organization, all the way to our executive team and across all our functions. It really helped to accelerate all of our efforts around sustainability,” Ripple said.