Lyreco is a B2B distributor with a large offer range from office supplies, cleaning supplies, pantry items to personal protection equipment for industrial workshops. Lyreco was founded in 1926 and has been in operation ever since, with our headquarters being in France. In Asia, we are located in South Korea, Hongkong, Malaysia, Thailand and here in Singapore.

Our initiative to strengthen the company's sustainability has several origins. Lyreco has a long history of embracing Corporate Social Responsibility. To name a few, we have a green product methodology assessment and a CO2 monitoring policy that have been in place for nearly ten years.

In 2020, our newly appointed CEO signed off a pledge with all managing directors: The Lyreco Circular Economy Pledge, towards zero-waste workplaces. This pledge is built on five pillars:

- Be the 1st company in our industry with a full range of recycle-ready items

- Provide end-of-life collection and process back used-materials into the manufacturing chain

- Remove all non-circular packaging from the products we sell

- Ban single-use or non-circular plastics from all our offices

- Develop a circular economy standard for the workplace industry with the European stakeholders

This year, the group's executive team and CEO developed a new strategy, with one of the strategy's enablers being sustainability. One strong "backbone" is how we can ensure that in 5 years, in 2026, we will have developed sustainability offers for the market, particularly in compliance with our carbon neutrality target. There is unquestionably a strong commitment and leadership from the Top management.

When it comes to the Asia sustainability roadmap, it is a combination of Lyreco’s worldwide strategy as well as our local input. Both my colleague, Karine Pennetier, and I are driving the Asia Sustainability roadmap based on concrete internal and external actions. She is bringing along not only her deep knowledge of sustainability but also her financial experience which is critical to launch innovative solutions in the region. Our different profiles are blending in nicely to support project management, the GoToMarket as well as the internal communication.  

The role of our Zone Managing Director for Asia is key as he provides his utmost support and focuses on fully anchoring sustainability in the company, through communicating our actions both internally & externally to quicken the shift in mindset on sustainability.

We are part of an exciting journey as first, we are acting concretely for a change and we all know that, once regulations are in place, Asia can go faster than the Eurozone. This means that all efforts made now will be massively amplified, putting the company at the forefront of the topic.

In order to infuse the Sustainability strategy within our team, we wanted to empower them by having local representation. As a result, Lyreco Asia has a Green Team at regional level, which is quite unique in the global organisation. This Green team is composed of local team members from Human Resources team and also Quality Safety and Sustainability. This is our Core Asia Green Team.

This team uses the Asia Strategy roadmap as a backbone of its initiative. We exchanged regularly, at least a month for updates and ideas to share. We also have some ideation sessions to work on new projects or also push boundaries in terms of employee engagement.

This does not prevent us to work with Satellite teams. For instance, our green tree product assessment is done in collaboration with the Marketing team and the QSS team.

With this way of working, we really make sure that Sustainability is dealt across the board. It also makes everyone responsible of his own topic shift. This means that everybody has a chance to the impact his actions can have into the day to day operation, the customer satisfaction and the company sustainable strategy.

It is our customized methodology, and there are variations per category. We have 16-18 categories and sections, which represent different products, and, according to the category, we assign different weights to each criterion.

Every year, we re-evaluate specific SKUs using this internal scoring system.

We are currently reviewing the methodology internally for Asia with each country's Product Manager. It is a lengthy process with approximately 5000 SKUs per country. We usually begin with the simplest category such as paper and then progress to general office products before moving on to other categories. We do not scan everything at once, we do it category by category.

What is complicated is we do have suppliers that carry many different labels, typically FSC, CFC, the European ecolabel... along with their own claims. A self-claimed characteristic is the most difficult to evaluate because we have to carefully look at the composition of products and score them accordingly. We build trust with our suppliers and we try to be as thorough as we can on what they mention to us. This detailed exercise enables us to provide a range of eco-friendly products to our customers that they can buy with full confidence.

As for the challenges, Singapore and Asia as a whole have a competitive advantage in terms of agility and quickness. However, there are some drawbacks.

The objective of the majority of companies in the region has clearly shifted to go greener, but most decisions in companies are still centralized based on pricing and convenience, especially with such products as office supplies.

Asia is still on its way to sustainability, therefore we need to have a lot of discussions and meetings and we must persuade and educate people, not only from our sales teams and within our company, but also with our customers and their management.

The other point is more related to the ecosystem itself. There is a desperate lack of recycling facilities in many Asian countries. The current situation provides very few possibilities in terms of end of life product management. As a result, it becomes a major challenge for our circular economy strategy.