Sherri Gentry, Senior Manager, Nissan North America

Over the last several years Cleargreen Advisors has been an invaluable partner to Nice-Pak.  By outsourcing much of our sustainability management to CGA, we’ve improved our sustainability performance while keeping key internal resources focused on other business priorities. CGA helped us design a sustainability platform that supports our priorities while complementing our corporate strategy and existing systems. This partnership keeps us responsive to changing customer sustainability demands, drives innovation, enhances our reputation, and improves our bottom line.

As Nissan’s main North American passenger vehicle manufacturing facility, we have 7000 employees making up to 550,000 cars a year in 5.4 million square feet of manufacturing space. We wanted to make our plant landfill free, and we wanted to engage all the people in our factory. We knew we could set up some standards but were stuck on getting the people on the shop floor to really care about this, get all their arms and legs engaged, and give us ideas.

That’s when we found Cleargreen Advisors. They showed us how to make sustainability personal in our factory, like our safety program. Instead of just putting out rules, Cleargreen taught us the ‘whys’ behind the rules and made the situation real and relevant to our people so they’d all want to do the right thing.  Now that we’ve made it personal, our people are coming up with new ideas because now they’re thinking differently. 

Cleargreen also helped us focus on small things as well as big things because the small things really do add up.  And they showed us how to track our impacts better.  We’ve embedded this information and more sustainable thinking in all of our processes. With this new approach we’ve documented $14 million of savings from waste reduction alone in the last 3 years. And we know we’re still not perfect, but not a day goes by that we don’t get a little better.

Wilbert Platzer, VP and MD of EMEA, Quaker Chemical

“Sustainability is complex and multi-dimensional. Thinking through the full range of challenges and opportunities associated with sustainability is an important step towards better understanding this emerging business trend.

In order to ground ourselves in the subject of sustainability we approached Cleargreen Advisors to help channel initial efforts towards developing a vision and a philosophy from which to start our journey.

Through the 3 day workshop with Cleargreen Advisors, the Quaker Team learned about the different facets of sustainability and its value to the business, conducted a rudimentary materiality analysis by reviewing customer expectations, competitor actions, and Quaker’s progress to date, brain stormed specific actions and projects that Quaker could leverage sustainability to create value, and finally developed a vision-map for sustainability leadership.

Thanks to the Cleargreen Advisors team, today we better understand that sustainability is a journey that has no end. It is the right thing to do. And we have the ability to make a difference and leave a legacy through our efforts around sustainability.”

Delfina Anderson, VP of Quality, Compliance and Product Safety, Goldbug   

Our partnership with Cleargreen Advisors has evolved over the past several years. Initially, we worked with them to establish our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and identify objectives in order to meet our customer’s sustainability initiatives. Not only have we seen our sustainability scores improve, but we now have the tools necessary to calculate our GHG emissions ourselves and the information has been useful in meeting these same initiatives for our other customers. CGA’s support helped us improve our score on the Kohl’s sustainability scorecard by 41%.

Recently, we have received support from Cleargreen Advisors in mapping departmental processes. This recent project has enabled us to identify redundancies across departments. Eliminating redundancies will enable our teams to be more efficient and eliminate some of the overlap that we previously experienced.

Cleargreen Advisors has been a great resource for Goldbug.

Gretchen Digby, Director, Global Education Initiatives, Ingersoll Rand

When we needed to embed sustainability more deeply into our company, we turned to Cleargreen Advisors (CGA). We’re a global corporation with numerous diverse manufacturing divisions and needed sustainable business experts who could help us build and deliver a program to inform, excite and engage our 50,000 employees around the world. We wanted both managers and workers on the factory floor to understand the importance of sustainability and get them committed to take action.

In selecting Cleargreen Advisors we did a lot of benchmarking to learn what worked across multiple types of environments, from manufacturing to sales and service.  CGA worked with us to create a program that was right for us—creating sustainability champions within our organization to lead improvement projects and help transform our organization from the inside.  What we built together is informative, engaging, relevant, really resonates with our employees, and can be applied around the world.

CleargreenAdvisors’ strategic thinking and program delivery expertise, combined with deep sustainability knowledge, made them a uniquely valuable partner.  We were very pleased with their creative, hands on and responsive approach.  The results to date are outstanding—we’ve had excellent participant reviews, our annual employee surveys show an impact, and we’ve generated more than 500 project ideas across five business units on two continents. 

Joseph Blumberg, Director of Sales and Merchandising, Grupo M

As a global apparel supplier, we face many often competing pressures in the sustainability arena. Because of this, our many social and environmental sustainability initiatives were ineffective because they lacked focus and spread our resources too thin. We hired Cleargreen Advisors (CGA) to help us craft a winning sustainability strategy that prioritizes our initiatives and resonates with our stakeholders to cost-effectively drive meaningful results that get noticed. 

CGA’s sustainability expertise, blend of strategic and tactical execution, and commitment to working with us as a partner rather than customer have been a great resource to our company. This strategic advisory relationship has been invaluable to us as we develop our sustainability program. CGA is working with sustainability leaders across our company to build out a robust system of metrics to track our sustainability progress and transparently communicate this path to customers. We recognize that our journey is ongoing and that there is a lot we still have to do to fully operationalize sustainability within our organization; CGA’s Outsourced Sustainability Management will help us get there. 

Ruth Levy, Vice President of Research and Development, Nice-Pak Products Inc.

Over the last several years Cleargreen Advisors has been an invaluable partner to Nice-Pak.  By outsourcing much of our sustainability management to CGA, we’ve improved our sustainability performance while keeping key internal resources focused on other business priorities. CGA helped us design a sustainability platform that supports our priorities while complementing our corporate strategy and existing systems. This partnership keeps us responsive to changing customer sustainability demands, drives innovation, enhances our reputation, and improves our bottom line.

Nice-Pak OSM Case Study

In May 2010 a $1 billion international CPG manufacturer contracted with Cleargreen Advisors (CGA) to receive our comprehensive Outsourced Sustainability Management service. Through an ongoing advisory relationship with CGA, the client avoided having to build out significant internal capacity to manage an in-house sustainability program and instead grew the program by leveraging existing resources with strategic, operational, and subject expertise support from CGA.

Outsourced Sustainability Management (OSM) gave the client a one-stop solution to developing and managing its sustainability program along with direct, embedded access to subject matter experts with broad cross-industry perspectives and knowledge of the rapidly evolving sustainability expectations of its diverse stakeholders. Unlike typical advisory services which lay out a plan but require the company to manage implementation on its own, CGA’s OSM service continues to support project execution. As a result, this client surpassed its 3-year sustainability goals by wide margins, improved brand perception, and has saved over $3,000,000 so far.

Benefits delivered to this client

*—Values from 2012 Nice-Pak Facility Tracker and 2012 Nice-Pak Project Tracker