CEO David Taylor dives into the details. 

How Procter & Gamble plans to be more sustainable 

Conferences

How Procter & Gamble plans to be more sustainable 


let's pivot to uh, supply chain here. Uh, there's been a lot of conversation over the last two days about highly publicized problems with supply chains, area areas where prices, you know, lumber is the spectacular example where prices have skyrocketed north semiconductors going into automobiles, where the supply just simply isn't there, you have to be feeling that across the board in your suite of products, uh, is that gonna put pressure on profits? Is it going to put pressure on prices? How is the supply chain tightness going to affect your company and our economy first, alan, yes, it's very real. It's real across the number of different commodities and we're seeing it whether it's pope for paper products or whether it's anything, uh, that uses a variety of different products that come from oil, so that, you know, plastic packaging obviously has gone up and as we and others work to move out of plastic and it's, it's very important. From a sustainability standpoint, we want to make sure that we have the supply chains that can ensure we can at least make the products and ship them. Uh, trucking costs have gone up significantly, ocean freight has gone up significantly. So yes, you can look across a wide range of, of cost areas. Now, what we're doing to try to deal with that is in some cases we may have to take price increases. We talked about a few publicly, in most cases we're trying to do everything we can to keep our costs in control, recognizing that it's very difficult right now for consumers to pay more for brands where we can earn it and it's appropriate in terms of the input costs going up. You know, we'll consider price increases and and have talked that in some categories, do you think we're headed for a higher rate of inflation? I think it's inevitable. What's happened? We'll see sequential increases in inflation. How much, I don't know what is clear is across many different input goods costs are up and and that's going to have to be reflected in overtime uh throughout the economy. So yes I do believe we will see an increase in inflation. Are you seeing it in wages as well as input costs? You're seeing in some places? I think it's widely been reported what's happened in the US the difficulty and some people get an entry level jobs in that area were more fortunate in that we have higher paying jobs with very good benefits. So we haven't had an issue accessing generally good employees. We have an outstanding workforce and when we have a need to hire we've been able to do it. But I think if I look across the U. S. Economy especially I think there's a lot of pressure. Especially on uh lower wage jobs, service jobs, other areas where people are entering uh first jobs. Uh Yes I am seeing some pressure there and certainly we're seeing in things like trucking uh tremendous uh tension and pressure within trucking in the U. S. And and part of a coalition called the Alliance to in plastic waste which is over 50 companies across the whole supply chain that are working together to find solutions to create circular scalable solutions to eliminate plastic waste in the environment. There are many applications where plastic is the best solution, has the best life cycle impact. Having said that there's no reason we want any plastic not to have a 2nd 3rd and 4th life. So we're working together to address that consumers more and more want sustainable solutions they want are supposed to have sustainable products, sustainable packaging and we want to help them use the product in the most sustainable way. And a great example is that the biggest sustainability impact of things like washing clothes is heating water. So we've designed formulas that clean very well in cold water, which has a meaningful difference in reducing the carbon footprint of the use of part of our brands. So yes, I think consumers demand it. I think all stakeholders, including us want to see meaningful improvement across uh both the area of climate, water, energy. All of those areas in plastic waste is an area were very involved in. People look at your products and then look at you heading the alliance in plastic waste and say, hey, wait a minute, you know, how can you talk about ending plastic waste there? Everything is packaged in in plastic. How do you how do you balance the interests of the business with the desire to deal with this plastic waste problem? I think you hit it. The challenges we have to do both. We have to have products that delight consumers and we need to find solutions that minimized the carbon Impact. And we want to find sustainable solutions. So in many cases were able to design out of plastic packaging, where we've done that in many areas, were using post consumer use plastic more and more and we've made commitments to increase our levels in 2025 and 2030. And for areas or applications for plastic is the best solution. We want to eliminate plastic waste and there you want circular scalable solutions working on both technologies and business models that allow the any recyclable item to be collected. And then we used one of the biggest challenges is there's many things that are recyclable that aren't recycled. So what we want to do is find business models that work and that's where having a group of companies work across the value chain and invest their own money. We're going to invest in five years. There were billion and a half dollars of the company's money, the Alliances money to to fund scalable circular solutions to eliminate plastic waste. I think that will really make a difference to delight consumers and find sustainable solutions.