Colgate CSO: ‘It has to be a better consumer experience’

The Two Steps Forward podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and other platforms — and, of course, via Trellis. Episodes publish every other Tuesday.

How much circularity can one company squeeze out of a toothpaste tube?

That’s the mouthwatering challenge taken on by Colgate Palmolive, the iconic 220-year-old company whose chief sustainability officer, Ann Tracy, has been leading the charge to make Colgate toothpaste tubes not just recyclable, but potentially turned back into new tubes.

It’s not just toothpaste, as Tracy told my co-host, sustainability consultant Solitaire Townsend, and me in the latest episode of our Two Steps Forward podcast. If the process works with toothpaste it can work with other Colgate products, from household cleaners to skincare products and more.

Also in this episode, Soli and I assess this moment in the sustainability profession, including the critical need for telling new and better stories.

Consumers come first

“It has to be a better consumer experience, because the consumer has to want to use it,” Tracy, who came to her job after more than two decades working in supply chains at Colgate, said of the recyclable tubes. “We could talk about the consumer intention–action gap and that they want to do right by the planet. They want to lower their impact but they don’t want to compromise on price or quality or convenience. Our role as a consumer goods companies is to try to find the intersection of all three of those.”

After the first recyclable tube was implemented in 2019, Colgate open-sourced its technology. Today, 95 percent of toothpaste tubes in the U.S. and a significant portion in Europe have been converted to recyclable HDPE plastic. But that doesn’t mean they’re being recycled, at least not in large numbers. Tracy emphasized the role of consumer education to ensure that spent toothpaste tubes end up in the recycling bin, noting that bathroom recycling isn’t yet very common. Colgate is only beginning to engage in that type of education.

Systems-level thinking

Tracy highlighted the need for systems-level thinking, strategic roadmaps and value creation in sustainability initiatives. “We would have monthly steering committee meetings, and in those meetings there was not just supply chain but also marketing, engineering, procurement — several different functions. They all played a role along the way in the decision making because one thing impacts another.”

The goal, she said, is to embed sustainability across all business processes, aiming for a circular economy with reduced environmental impact.

She viewed her own sustainability team as playing a key but supporting role. “First and foremost, you have to be able to help the organization envision the transformation. That means building strategic roadmaps with a clear endpoint, a clear goal. And you have to influence everyone along the way. We have a broad-reaching, enterprise-wide sustainability and social impact strategy, and I’m the master of none, keeper of all. My role is to shepherd the thing along, influencing across the enterprise.”

So, she said, returning to the toothpaste tube, “As we rolled out in the supply chain, we needed to work with marketing to make sure we were doing it in a way that benefited the operation. How does it show up on shelf and to the consumer? There had to be an alignment there on how that happened.”

The key to success, she said, is that each new sustainability initiative becomes easier, until it’s simply part of the fabric. “The goal is to build those processes in.”

The Two Steps Forward podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and other platforms — and, of course, via Trellis. Episodes publish every other Tuesday.

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