Our Fundamentals
Our social licence to operate is built on trust and is the foundation of everything we do. We consider all stakeholders in our ecosystem and strive to adopt best practices with regard to the environment, labour and human rights, ethics and sustainable procurement. Through our Fundamentals, we will directly contribute towards the following UN SDG targets:
SDG 3.4, SDG 3.9, SDG 4.3, SDG 6.3, SDG 6.4, SDG 8.5, SDG 8.8, SDG 12.2, SDG 12.5, SDG 12.6, SDG 12.7, SDG 14.1
By being a responsible business, we are contributing to a wide range of SDGs, as determined by our specific actions and projects.
Our targets
Safety
Factsheets
Our progress
Living Wage employer globally
In 2018, we gained accreditation in the UK as a Living Wage Employer from the Living Wage Foundation. We extended our work to be a Living Wage Employer globally, completing an assessment of all employees worldwide in 2021. This was done in partnership with the Fair Wage Network, establishing a Living Wage in each of the countries in which we operate and ensuring all employees receive this as a minimum, even more important in light of the global cost of living crisis. We are now working with the Fair Wage Network to gain accreditation for our work and to ensure our progress stands up to external scrutiny. In 2022, we also began the process of ensuring all our regular contractors are paid a Living Wage and plan to achieve this milestone before the end of 2024.
During 2022, we enhanced benefits according to regional needs and provided financial support to counter the increase in employees' cost of living. This included introducing free private healthcare for all UK employees, deciding not to increase employee contributions into our defined benefit pension scheme, and giving one-off cost-of-living payments that benefitted our lower paid employees the most.
We will take a leadership role in life cycle assessment of our ingredients and their impact on the life cycle of our customers’ products.
Full life cycle assessment (LCA) of our ingredients is critical to understand how to reduce our footprint and maximise our positive impact, and enable the transition to sustainable ingredients through customer collaboration and innovation. Examining environmental impacts holistically, beyond carbon, also supports understanding of our impacts and dependencies on nature.
Following the development of our externally verified in-house LCA tool in 2021, in 2023 we completed two full ‘cradle-to-grave’ product LCAs and 33 ‘cradle-to-gate’ LCAs in response to customer demand. Examining the environmental impacts of key ingredients from our Consumer Care and Life Sciences sectors, these studies allowed us to investigate the downstream impacts and benefits of our ingredients in use, the effect of the transition from petrochemical to bio-based raw materials, plus many more insights.
Read more about sustainability being at the heart of what we do:
11th Most Sustainable International Company
Croda joins the World Business Council for Sustainable Development
