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2030 Impact Goals
Being a company with a positive impact requires a collective effort — it is a mindset that propels our associates, customers and communities forward. Our 2030 Impact Goals reflect our ongoing dedication to a 100% positive future.
Our 2030 Impact Goals are focused on the change we aim to create for our company, communities, customers and environment. With these ambitious goals to achieve alongside customers and in our own operations, we are working to support a safe and healthy world with enough resources for all.
In the World
We’re Helping Our Customers Do More for People and the Planet
Water
Help customers save 300 billion gallons [1.1 billion m³] of water each year, equivalent to the annual drinking water needs of 1 billion people.
Food
Help customers provide enough high quality and safe food to feed 2 billion people for an entire year, preventing 11 million foodborne illnesses.
Health
Help clean 90 billion hands and provide safe medical care for 116 million people each year, reducing more than 1.7 million infections.
Climate
Help customers become carbon neutral by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 6 million metric tons, preventing almost 10 million pollution-related illnesses.
Measuring Our Impact
In Our Operations
Alongside the impact we make with our customers, we know we can make a difference through our own operations. We are making steady, measurable progress toward our 2030 goals around water, climate, diversity, equity and inclusion, and safety.
Achieving a Net Positive Water Impact
Achieving a Net Positive Water Impact
The World Resources Institute projects that, under a business-as-usual scenario, the world will face a 56% freshwater deficit by 2030, placing urgent pressure on businesses to rethink the way water resources are managed. Our vision of a water-resilient future relies on tangible action. For Ecolab, that means continuing to drive water management with our customers, while also identifying opportunities to implement water stewardship projects in our own operations. By 2030, we plan to:
- Reduce water impact by 40% per unit production across our enterprise, from our 2018 base year
- Restore greater than 50% of our absolute water withdrawal volume at high-risk sites
- Achieve Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) Standard certification in high-risk watersheds
To meet our commitments, Ecolab is:
Working with 16 sites to restore a 50% positive water impact in high-risk basins:
- Developing a process improvement project to streamline AWS implementation at sites in high-risk watersheds over the next 10 years, which will include corporate guidance to drive site-level accountability, standardized tools and a detailed timeline
Working towards our 40% positive water impact goal across our portfolio by:
- Developing site-level tools that will help our partners develop water management best practices and act as a leading indicator for quarterly reviews
- Introducing our newest technologies and services to help manage water in our plants
- Creating a horizontal process network to share expertise and best practices throughout our global supply chain
- Establishing site-level annual goals to give sites attainable checkpoints
- Collaborating with the Water Resilience Coalition, which we co-founded with the UN Global Compact CEO Water Mandate, to bring together multi-national corporations in an industry-led movement to combat the global water crisis through ambitious, quantifiable commitments and collective action
Tackling Carbon Emissions
Tackling Carbon Emissions
Ecolab joined the UN Global Compact’s Business Ambition for 1.5˚C, committing to reduce our absolute Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 50% by 2030 and achieve net-zero across our value chain by 2050. We have also committed to achieving 100% renewable electricity by 2030 through the RE100 initiative, a global initiative bringing together the world’s most influential businesses committed to 100% renewable energy, and have set a science-based target (SBT) addressing our Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, which was approved by the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi).
To help meet our ambitious goals, we use a combination of tactics supported by science-based strategies. In 2022, we:
- Reduced absolute Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 48%, from our 2018 base year, by focusing on process improvement projects that reduced total energy consumption by almost 21.4 billion BTUs
- Sourced 61% of our total electricity from renewable sources
- Built momentum in vehicle fleet electrification projects in Europe, particularly in the Nordic region, United Kingdom, Netherlands and Belgium
Supporting a Diverse and Inclusive Workforce
Supporting a Diverse and Inclusive Workforce
We believe that a diverse, inclusive and purpose-driven team is critical to the success of our individual associates, company, customers and communities. These goals are an intentional step to drive significant change to advance diversity, equity and inclusion within our organization as we seek to be as, or more, diverse as the markets in which we operate. We continue to focus on:
- Maintaining Ecolab’s pay equity in the U.S. and expanding globally
- Increasing management level gender diversity to 35%, with the ultimate goal of gender parity
- Increasing management level ethnic/racial diversity to 25%, as we seek to meet full representation of the U.S. workforce at all levels
We use a combination of strategies to help us on our path to meet our 2030 Impact Goals around diversity including:
- Demonstrating leadership from the top levels of our organization
- Creating more diverse candidate pools
- Fostering a culture of inclusivity and belonging through education and engagement in Employee Resource Groups
- Investing in processes and systems that drive accountability against DEI metrics
As a result of these efforts, in 2022:
- 37% of all new management-level hires globally were women and 37% of all new management-level hires in the U.S. were people of color
- More than one third of our global workforce has completed an Allyship in Action training course
- We grew management-level gender diversity to 25.5% and management-level ethnic/racial diversity in the U.S. to 19.5%.