VIDEO: TOOLING UP – An Easy Solution to Hit Your Sustainability Goals

PETER LEAHY: We also have the objective of improving the lives of 1 billion people in underserved communities. So in ways that we can help with water, we can help with womens' products, we can help reduce our environmental impact around paper, plastic and water. All of these things, Toilets Change Lives is a global program that we have. All of these ways that we're helping people and again, a leading company puts out a big number like 1 billion. We're not sure how we're going to get there yet, but we're going to get there because that's what we do.

Narrator: This video is brought to you by Kimberly-Clark Professional. Committed to product innovation and the planet. If you're looking for real world insights, tips from leading industry experts, the latest trends in products and technology. You've come to the right place. From MSC Industrial Supply, this is Tooling Up.

TONI NEARY: Hello and welcome to Tooling Up. I'm your host, Toni Neary, and I'm so glad that you've joined us here today. Before we get started with today's guest, I want you to go ahead and click that like and subscribe button. And that way you're sure to catch every amazing episode that we have of Tooling Up. All right. Everybody subscribed? Perfect.

Today I'm so excited to talk about sustainability and the RightCycle program with Peter Leahy. He's the Senior Marketing Manager at Kimberly-Clark Professional. Peter, thanks so much for joining us. And welcome to Tooling Up.

PETER LEAHY: Thanks, Toni. It's great to be here.

TONI NEARY: All right, so before we dive in, I want to learn a little bit about you and how you came to work at KCP.

PETER LEAHY: Well you know Toni I've always been a good steward of the environment. And I feel like I made a good choice with Kimberly-Clark. And in many ways we've also become a great company about having strong sustainability values, really it's a core tenet to how we go to business. And, you know, part of my background also, I've worked for nice companies, and I kind of feel like I'm still continuing that. Now, I've been here 18 years, so we must be, both of us must be doing something right.

TONI NEARY: I love that, and I know that there's a couple of little fun facts about you. The first being you're a triplet, which is really cool.

PETER LEAHY: I am the baby of the family. Baby of the triplets. So Paul, Patrice and Peter. I'm the youngest, but I'm also the tallest.

TONI NEARY: And are you also a published author?

PETER LEAHY: I recently published a memoir about a year ago. You can find it on Amazon. I'm not going to try to sell it here, but it's a great sense of accomplishment to be able to share a story about a personal journey that I went through and then hopefully inspire others to live their best lives.

TONI NEARY: The last fun fact I want to cover, which is really going to take us into what we're going to talk about today, is your nickname at work is the “ideas machine”. Tell us a little bit about that.

PETER LEAHY: It's a little bit of a self-own, but I think at the same time it also is paramount to how I sit in with Kimberly-Clark and how Kimberly-Clark Professional really views itself as an innovator in the marketplace. You know, we evolve our business strategy on a semi-regular basis. So we're always looking for new ways from, especially from a marketing innovation, but also even from how to reach customers, how to gain insights, how do we better answer and solve problems in conjunction with partners like MSC?

TONI NEARY: I love that, and I know that my parents always taught me to leave things better than we found them, and we teach our own kids that. So I love learning about what industry is doing to really leave the world better than we found it. Tell us a little bit about KCP sustainability efforts.

PETER LEAHY: Well KCP sustainability, you know, we primarily focus on two different ways, ways that we can divert things from landfill, and ways that we can lower our collective footprint. And I'll talk about both of those programs today. The first one is called RightCycle, the second one is called Responsible Partners. And if we have enough time I'll even talk about the Kimberly-Clark Corporation 2030 sustainability story, which has a really strong goal in place about how we reduce our, again, carbon footprint and our scope one, two and three emissions.

TONI NEARY: I love that, and I love the fact that you're really trying to make it easy for your customers. So tell me a little bit specifically about RightCycle.

PETER LEAHY: Well, Toni, it is actually pretty simple. It's been in place for almost 10 years, and it's a simple program in which customers from KCP and MSC that purchase apparel, eye protection, gloves, masks, respirators, even booties and hairnets. Spoiler alert I don't use a hairnet. We actually help them divert from the landfill. So more or less they collect them, we take them to a facility, we separate them, and then we finally melt them down into plastic and they're remade into hard goods. Things like shelving, totes and Adirondack chairs.

TONI NEARY: I absolutely love that. So the RightCycle is one way. How else are you making sustainability just easy breezy for your customers?

PETER LEAHY: Easy peasy lemon squeezy. No, all kidding aside, we have something called the Responsible Partners Program, and then in that case, we take products that most of our customers buy already, things like paper towels, soap, and other forms of health and wellness products. And we have actually been using compression technology, taking a lot of air, or shipping things that are lighter.

Now when things ship lighter or have a smaller footprint, you can put more items on a truck. Why is that important? More items on a truck, fewer trucks on the road. Fewer trucks on the road means fewer CO² emissions. Those are other ways that we are demonstrating impact. And by the way, that's another program that is free to use for customers.

But we want to be able to demonstrate that by partnering with MSC and Kimberly-Clark Professional, the products you're getting have a lower environmental impact than other things that you might get.

TONI NEARY: And I think one of the most shocking things to me about this is that your customers are reaping all of these sustainability efforts just from buying products that they'd already be buying. So this could be a really easy conversion for somebody who might not be using KCP products right now.

PETER LEAHY: It is actually these that I would call them almost traditional products. I think a lot of times you expect that a company wants you to buy innovation or pay for the potential for the environmental benefit. These are products that have been in place for a long time that you may be buying already. We may be able to give you credit for sustainability decisions that you don't even know about.

TONI NEARY: And I have to say, when we talk about sustainability, I feel like I know a decent amount, but I still feel like there's a lot that I can learn, and I keep hearing references to emissions and scope, and I'm guessing that's not the mouthwash. Could you talk a little bit about emissions and scope and the impact that that has?

PETER LEAHY: Kimberly-Clark again, as a leading organization, we have 2030 sustainability goals where we will reduce our scope one and scope two emissions by 50% and our scope three emissions by 20%. Now, in a nutshell, scope one emissions is anything that's in a manufacturing facility. So what are all the environmental impacts associated with making a product? Scope two would be anything in the power grid associated with powering that facility.

So the electricity that goes out and then finally, you know, transportation. And finally the scope three is all the way lifecycle. So from the procurement of the product all the way to the end user, so obviously that is the biggest number. So a 20% reduction is meaningful and actually pretty significant out there from a leading company perspective to reach. As of 2022, we're already at 40 plus percent on both scope one and scope two emissions.

We've got all the way to 2030 to get that 20% reduction for our scope three.

TONI NEARY: Absolutely amazing. And it must make you feel good to know you're doing this good work while making amazing products and having a bigger impact on the world.

PETER LEAHY: You know, one of the things I didn't mention about Toni, Kimberly-Clark's 2030 sustainability goals, we had those scoped emissions. We also have the objective of improving the lives of 1 billion people in underserved communities. So in ways that we can help with water, we can help with womens' products. We can help reduce our environmental impact around paper, plastic, and water.

All of these things. Toilets Change Lives is a global program that we have all of these ways that we're helping people. And again, a leading company puts out a big number like 1 billion. We're not sure how we're going to get there yet, but we're going to get there because that's what we do.

TONI NEARY: Absolutely amazing. So inspiring. And I can't thank you enough for your time today.

PETER LEAHY: Toni, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much.

TONI NEARY: It was so great hanging out with Peter today. I hope you learned as much as me and enjoyed our conversation as much as I did. If you'd like to see more discussions just like this one, make sure to click that subscribe button and to find out more about the RightCycle and Responsible Partners program, visit www.mscdirect.com/kimberlyclark.

Thanks so much and we'll see you next time on Tooling Up.

Narrator:  Want more insights and ideas to improve the efficiency and productivity of your operations? Check out the Tooling Up video playlist to hear tips that can take your company to the next level. And subscribe to our channel so you won't miss out.