Using sustainability principles to guide investment decisions

Understanding the meaning of sustainable development for any industrial company is essential, both to minimise the potential negative impact on the bottom line and to enable appropriate allocation of resources to capture opportunities in the marketplace. Investors need then to consider sustainability as much as political stability, market growth, potential returns. This necessity has driven the development of two in-house methodologies. The first one, the Sustainability Portfolio Management (SPM) methodology aims at materializing and subsequently implementing strategic decisions to move to a portfolio of businesses which is balanced from a sustainability perspective. The second one, the Solvay Sustainability Screening Sites (called S3-Site), answers the challenge of improving the long-term viability of existing industrial platforms, by assessing to what extent a given industrial site is well positioned in terms of sustainable performance and so to better define the needed investments.