Sustainability

Nature

Protect and restore biodiversity, with focus on forests, land and water, through more regenerative ingredients and resource stewardship:

• We are committed to sourcing our raw materials sustainably and not through deforestation. Our goal is to prevent the deforestation of primary and secondary forests with significant ecological value.
• One of our palm oil targets by 2025 is to cover 100 percent of our requirements with oils whose responsible sourcing is certified or externally confirmed. In fiscal year 2023, we sourced 96 percent of our total demand for palm oil and palm kernel oil as well as the derivatives, which are primarily used by Henkel, as certified raw materials in accordance with the RSPO mass balance model. 
• In addition, we have set ourselves the goal of reducing water consumption per ton of product by 35 percent by 2025. By the end of 2023, we had saved 24 percent.

Thriving Communities

We do everything we can to help people live better lives. Our social responsibility is to promote equity, strengthen diversity and respect human rights. We offer our employees lifelong learning opportunities, and an attractive and healthy working environment. We advocate for social progress and access to education worldwide, and we provide assistance in emergency situations.

Equity

Strengthen diversity, equity and inclusion, respect human rights and enhance the livelihoods of people:

• We are convinced that a diversified workforce, as well as an open and appreciative corporate culture, are important success factors in a globalized world.
• Our goal is to continuously increase the ratio of women in the company at all levels, and we have the ambition to achieve gender parity across all management levels by 2025. The share of women in management positions was at 39.5 percent in 2023.
• Additionally, we want to improve livelihoods of smallholder farmers. Since 2013, we have worked with the development organization Solidaridad on respective initiatives in Ghana, Honduras, Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua and Nigeria.

Education

Support lifelong learning and education, and motivate people to take action for sustainability:

• We want to further promote our employees' commitment to sustainability and offer extensive trainings as part of our holistic engagement program „Sustainability at Heart“.
• In addition, we are committed to further expand our community education programs and volunteering. We have already exceeded our overarching goal of reaching 30 million people by 2030 as part of this commitment ‏(base year 2010).

Wellbeing

Foster health and wellbeing and help drive social progress:

• We promote the health of our employees to help create an agile, high-performance organization. To do so, we rely on globally uniform health and safety standards, and provide health and preventive care programs. As a key objective of our sustainability strategy, we aim to reach more than 90 percent of our employees worldwide.
• We remain focused on our long-term objective of zero accidents and want to improve our occupational safety by 60 percent by the end of 2025 compared to 2010. In 2023, we recorded 0.7 occupational incidents per million hours worked by our employees. This is an improvement of 42 percent over the base year 2010.

Trusted Partner

We draw on our value-oriented corporate culture and our scientific and technological expertise to strengthen our performance while maintaining our integrity. We deliver safe and best-in-class product and technology solutions to our customers and consumers. We integrate sustainability in our portfolio and in our business processes, and provide transparent reporting on this to our stakeholders.

Performance

Reliably deliver best-in-class product performance and chemical safety as the foundation of our business success:

• Our ambition is for every new product to make a contribution to sustainability.
• Our goal for 2030 is to triple the value created relative to the environmental footprint of our operations.

Transparency

Integrate sustainability into our business governance with transparent reporting, disclosure and engagement:

• One of our palm oil targets for 2025 is full transparency and traceability for palm ‏(kernel) oil.  In 2023, we were able to maintain the traceability rate at 89 percent up to the mill and increase it to 52 percent up to the plantation as part of a survey on the transparency of our supply chains for palm-based ingredients.
• We strive to measure the sustainable transformation of our product portfolio. Our Adhesive Technologies business unit published audited results in 2023 to assess the sustainability of its product portfolio. Our Consumer Brands business sector is working on a similar process to assess the portfolio in the consumer goods area. 
• We also achieved excellent results in ESG ratings in 2023, including the Sustainalytics and EcoVadis ratings, in which Henkel is among the top 1 percent of rated companies.

Collaboration

Scale sustainability impact with our partners, leading to responsible business practices in our supply chains:

• 100 percent responsible sourcing together with our partners is our ongoing ambition. Around 97 percent of our purchasing volume in the areas of packaging, raw materials and contract manufacturers is covered by our responsible sourcing process.
• As a founding member of the industry initiative "Together for Sustainability" ‏(TfS), Henkel has contributed to the development of a Product Carbon Footprint ‏(PCF) guideline that enables suppliers and companies to jointly calculate their carbon footprint and thus contribute to the decarbonization of the chemical industry. In 2023, TfS piloted an IT platform that allows upstream PCFs to be shared.

_{*Excluding products where ingredients or residue may affect recyclability or pollute recycling streams.}