ASL Global

ASL GLOBAL

STARTING SOURCE

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS MAGAZINE

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INTERVIEW: ASL GLOBAL

STARTING AT THE SOURCE Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Emma Pomeroy, CSR Director at ASL Global about the launch of company’s One World initiative, measuring impacts, and maintaining a culture of sustainability.

ASL Global is a Hong Kong-headquartered global marketing services business. Founded in 2005, ASL Global originally specialized in sourcing promotional materials, including gifts with purchase, textiles, and other giveaway items, for brands across Europe and Asia-Pacific region. Today, ASL Global has built a global supply network, with more than 300 employees in 51 countries working with some of the world’s best-known brands to develop and execute marketing campaigns which reach over 200 markets around the world.

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Over the last decade, ASL became a signatory to the UN Global Compact and engaged with sustainability assessment platform EcoVadis to benchmark and improve sustainability performance across the business. “Historically, we’ve been driven by client-specific requirements or initiatives,” explains Emma Pomeroy, CSR Director at ASL Global. “The customer would say to us: ‘We need to make this more sustainable – how?’ It was a responsive strategy. But as sustainability has risen up the agenda, becoming a bigger issue for everybody both

personally and professionally, ASL felt we were well-placed to become more proactive in our journey. We reviewed our own operations and those of our key stakeholder groups, and identified priorities in terms of social, environmental, and economic sustainability. We then developed our targets aligned with those issues.”

By embedding sustainability at the core of their operations and processes, ASL Global’s EcoVadis assessment scores have steadily risen. For 2021, ASL Global is set to be awarded an EcoVadis Gold medal, which is given to the top-performing 1% of companies across all industries in the key theme areas of Environment, Labor and Human Rights, Ethics, and Sustainable Procurement.

“Lots of companies think of CSR as a side-project,” says Ms. Pomeroy. “We want sustainability to sit at the heart of our strategy, and for it to have a positive effect on all of our operations, our customers, our own people, and the communities in which we were operating. It isn’t a bolt-on for us.

We believe there’s no point in taking an ‘off the shelf’ sustainability strategy that doesn’t work for your business. It’s got to be relevant for what we do, and specifically designed for where we can make a difference.”

ONE WORLD January 2020 saw the launch of ASL Global’s ‘One World’ initiative, a brand-new sustainability strategy formed of three principal commitments: Reduce Our Impact, Inspire Our Partners, and Help Communities Flourish. “We wanted to give the strategy its own identity, so that we could talk about it more coherently and help build momentum,” says Ms. Pomeroy. “’Reduce Our Impact’ focuses on our own impact as a business, our emissions and energy consumption.

‘Inspire Our Partners’ looks at how we can work with our customers to facilitate better product sustainability, use innovation to create more sustainable marketing campaigns, and grow a more sustainable supply chain.

‘Help Communities Flourish’ asks how we can be a responsible employer, an ethical customer to our own suppliers, and how we can help our employees develop and grow.

Because we work with suppliers all over the world, our strategy also considers how we can support global and local communities.

For example, we can offer smaller suppliers a platform to undertake work for our global clients. Encouraging these local suppliers gives them a unique opportunity to grow

their business and gives our global brand clients the chance to support local, sustainable suppliers that are otherwise difficult for them to reach through more conventional, global supply chains.

Despite the complications of COVID-19, the company’s new strategy is already taking effect. “We are committed to reporting on progress,” says Ms. Pomeroy. “So far, it’s been about setting up new systems and processes so that we can report a full year in 2020. As we move into 2021, we will begin to set ourselves targets for reduction. We’ve already done a lot of work in terms of setting up reporting for key areas such as energy consumption, waste and business travel. In 2020, our business air miles were down over 80% compared to 2019, for obvious reasons, but we’re aiming to keep that reduction in place, as far as possible, moving forward”.

EDUCATING PARTNERS ASL Global works closely with clients as they adopt new, innovative ways to measure their impacts. “We’ve worked with Heineken this year, doing a lot of work on creating more sustainable marketing materials for their campaign activity,” says Ms. Pomeroy. “They wanted more visibility around the carbon footprint of their marketing products, which is a big challenge, given the complexity of the processes involved in creating a myriad of different products. We have developed a carbon footprint calculator which helps to show the impact of each product. For example, we produce plastic ice buckets for them. They wanted to know the carbon footprint of that ice bucket, and how it can be reduced. To do that, we looked at the whole product lifecycle from raw materials, production methods, packaging, shipping SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS MAGAZINE

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INTERVIEW: ASL GLOBAL

WASTE 2 WEAR The Flipflopi is the world's first sailing boat made entirely from waste plastic washed up on beaches in Kenya and covered in 30,000 discarded flip-flops. It is an African circular economy project whose expeditions are supported by the United Nations Environment Programme #CleanSeas Initiative. Waste2Wear are the pioneers in recycling plastic into textiles and are providing the fabric for the 62-meter sail for Flipflopi’s upcoming expedition around Lake Victoria in March. Using material made entirely from recycled plastic bottles not only prevents those bottles ending up in landfills or the ocean, it uses 70% less energy, 75% less CO2 and 86% less water than traditional fabrics. Follow the story on waste2wear.com and @theflipflopi

SCAN TO SEE HOW IT WAS MADE INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS FROM RECYCLED PLASTICS

logistics, to product use and end-of-life. By breaking each product down in this way, we can analyse the lifecycle stages separately and begin to identify opportunities to reduce its overall carbon footprint”.

Another of ASL Global’s client-led projects is with L’Oréal. “They have a Solidarity Sourcing supplier initiative, where they encourage sourcing from smaller suppliers to help facilitate access to work and sustainable incomes,” says Ms. Pomeroy. “We’re supporting this by driving the indirect spend we manage for L’Oreal through our sustainable supply chain. For example, we use suppliers who might be community-led, run by women, or located in vulnerable communities. We’re also collaborating with Mars, helping to develop a supplier sustainability scorecard and running workshops, so they can learn from our own sustainability journey.”

“Another way we can help is by encouraging collaboration across our clients’ marketing teams,” says Ms. Pomeroy. “Often, if a company’s marketing operations are based across different countries, they won’t necessarily share information with each other about what they’re doing. Because 4 | SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS MAGAZINE

we often work with all the marketing teams, regionally and globally, we’re in an ideal position to pull all that together. For example, if we’re doing a big textile production in Asia Pacific, we can create an order window and invite other markets to join a grouped production run. Our customers benefit from economies of scale, but from a sustainability perspective, it also means we’re optimizing the whole process from production, pack-

aging, logistics and every other stage of the lifecycle, rather than just handling lots of different orders from different places.”

BUILDING A CULTURE “Like many companies, we’re a complex and diverse business. When you’re talking sustainability, there’s a danger that the message gets lost or diluted across the piece,” says Ms. Pomeroy. “We’re mindful

“WE WANT SUSTAINABILITY TO SIT AT THE HEART OF OUR STRATEGY, AND FOR IT TO HAVE A POSITIVE EFFECT ON ALL OF OUR OPERATIONS”

of that, which is why the One World identity is so important. It’s also crucial to be open and honest with all our stakeholders about our progress. To help keep connected, we have around 30-35 volunteer CSR ‘Champions’ representing all the different regions where we operate, across the full range of seniority. For example, we have Champions at board level, and others working in the finance team, processing invoices. They are all passionate about the One World initiative, and they have a tangible role to play, whether it’s helping with collating emissions tracking information, feeding in ideas from the marketplace, or working with customers to develop more sustainable products”.

“Right through the business, people understand what it is we’re trying to achieve and feel like they are a part of it,” says Ms. Pomeroy. “For that, things like team-building days are really important to keep people on board with the journey. If you don’t maintain that engagement, people will drift away. An important initiative we run is to give people time off - a day where they can leave the office and engage in charity work within their own communities, either as individuals or

as a team. For example, in Portugal, we’re looking to partner with a famous surfer on a major beach-cleaning initiative in 2021.

“One World helps us to stay focused on what is important and identify how we can make a practical impact through our day-to-day operations. Ultimately, it’s driving us to make real progress towards becoming a more sustainable business. For 2021, we’re setting ourselves new goals,

including making further progress towards plastic free packaging, growing our sustainable supply chain and introducing firm carbon reduction targets for ourselves & our customers. We know these are ambitious goals, but we have already started to create a powerful roadmap for ourselves.

2020 was about establishing a baseline; 2021 and beyond will be about making real progress towards these targets”. c

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