For a long time, sustainability in this industry has felt a bit like a concept car – sleek, impressive and full of flashy ambition. The renderings have been rolled out at just the right moments to signal where things are headed.
Also – since we value transparency – it’s not something most people were actually driving. But what shows up in this year’s PPAI 100 responses suggests this is starting to change.
Elizabeth Wimbush, CAS`
Director, Sustainability & Responsibility, PPAI
Nearly half of distributors are still managing sustainability through a mix of roles and outside support, and a small but notable group still doesn’t have it formally assigned at all. The shift is not complete, but it’s taking hold in some interesting ways.
Responsibility is moving off the stage and into the garage. And now the engine has to start every morning.
You see it first in where companies are putting real money: energy efficiency upgrades, solar installations, LED retrofits and heat pumps. These aren’t being framed as sustainability wins, even if they are. They’re being described as operational improvements that happen to lower emissions.
It’s subtle, but important. The fastest way to stall out a sustainability effort is to treat it like something separate from how the business already runs. The companies seeing returns aren’t carving out special budgets for impact – instead, they are making decisions they already needed to make and doing them in a way that holds up under a different set of expectations.
Put less politely: If it can’t survive a conversation with your CFO, it probably doesn’t survive very long at all. Roughly 40% of companies still haven’t established a greenhouse gas baseline. This isn’t being driven by climate strategy alone. It’s being driven by decisions that make operational sense first and then deliver climate benefits alongside them.
Then there’s transparency, such as EcoVadis scores, SMETA audits, lifecycle assessments and supply chain documentation. Those used to be things you highlighted. Now they’re things you need.
What’s interesting in the responses isn’t just that companies are investing in them, but how they’re talking about the returns: Faster responses to customer requests. Easier access to accounts. Less internal scrambling to pull together documentation.
And it’s not fringe. Nearly half of both distributors and suppliers now have some form of third-party verification or audit process in place.
At the same time, responsibility is starting to show up in the products themselves. More companies are building recycled materials, traceability and environmental attributes directly into their core assortments. On average, suppliers report that roughly half of the products they sell now carry some form of verifiable environmental or social attribute. That’s not a niche category. That’s a portfolio-level change.
No one is suggesting customers will accept less. The product still has to perform. It still has to be priced competitively. It still has to move. “Sustainable” has stopped being a selling point on its own. It’s a condition.
One of the quieter shifts (but probably one of the more important ones) is how often compliance shows up as the investment delivering the most value. PPAI 100-caliber firms are hiring people to manage it, formalizing processes, investing in audits and cleaning up documentation that’s existed informally for years but couldn’t be easily verified.
This is what it looks like when responsibility stops being a signal and starts being infrastructure. Most PPAI 100 companies are now either building internal systems or actively advising customers on regulatory requirements, with very few saying it’s not on their radar. The return isn’t always growth. Sometimes it’s simply staying in the game.
There’s also progress happening in places that don’t always get labeled as sustainability at all, like better inventory planning or precise production. Waste reduction is happening, but it’s not being driven by campaigns. It’s happening because the systems are improving.
It’s a useful reminder that the most effective sustainability strategies tend to look a lot like well-run operations, because when I look closer, some of the more visible impact areas are still inconsistent. Fewer than 1 in 5 distributors have formal packaging guidelines in place, and even fewer are actively measuring reductions.
Progress is real. It’s just not always happening where we talk about it most.
Not everything in the data shows a clear win. Some investments are hard to measure. Some are expensive. Some don’t generate new revenue at all – they just reduce risk or meet expectations. That’s part of the picture, too.
If the concept car phase was about showing what’s possible, the daily driver phase is about what holds up over time. And what holds up isn’t always the most exciting. It’s the things that make the business run better, make it easier to say yes to customers and make it harder to get caught off guard.
Responsibility isn’t an initiative anymore. It’s how the business runs.
Vroom vroom!
