Product and Materials Stewardship

Product and Materials Stewardship: A Getting Started Guide

We are consuming more than ever before, generating more waste than ever before, and failing to recover materials for re-use. Many companies realise that they need to integrate product and material stewardship into their strategy, but lack clarity on the work needed to develop and achieve their goals. Anchored in research, our Product and Materials Stewardship: A Getting Started Guide aims to support your company as it begins or revisits an embedded product and materials strategy. It helps build a foundational understanding of the issue and provides clarity on the work ahead.

Life Cycle Thinking

This guide explains how life cycle thinking and mapping help you identify and better understand the potential impacts of your products and services on people and the environment. By exploring environmental and social impacts from your raw materials, through manufacturing and distribution, to customer use, and end of life, you can identify hot spots and leverage points to take action on.

Case Study: StemCell Technologies uses lifecycle conceptual mapping

The Global Circularity Protocol for Business (GCP)

Co-developed by WBCSD and One Planet Network with input from over 150 experts across 80 organisations, the Global Circularity Protocol for Business (GCP) provides a practical, global framework for measuring, managing, improving, and communicating an organisation's circular performance, using standardised steps and metrics to drive credible, scalable impact across value chains. The GCP is built on WBCSD’s Circular Transition Indicators (CTI) and aligned with GRI, ISO 59020, ESRS, IFRS S1/S2, and the GHG Protocol to ensure consistency across sustainability reporting.

Version 1.0 provides a step-by-step application journey for users, and enables a progressive approach that allows organisations to evolve through increasing levers of maturity in their circular performance assessment. It also provides core concepts, methodologies, and indicators that can help your organisation to start assessing and improving circular performance with clarity, transparency, and confidence, such as tracking material flows; assessing impacts across climate, nature, equity and business performance; and communicating results through comparable, decision-useful information.

CTI Tool

This free tool was developed to help businesses accelerate their transition towards a circular economy. Using a simple, objective, quantitative framework, the CTI Tool structures data, calculates outcomes, and generates reports, enabling you to improve your understanding of circularity and set more ambitious targets.

Biomimicry Toolbox

The Biomimicry Institute can help you to understand how to solve problems in line with nature by using insights from nature. Dedicated to sharing the lessons of nature to create a healthier planet, the Institute's platform features several resources, including its flagship resource the Biomimicry Toolbox. This toolbox introduces the foundational concepts of biomimicry and outlines a six-step biomimicry design process. Learning from nature and applying those lessons will be broadly applicable to all those working to address sustainability challenges, from product design to marketing.

The Supply Chain Solutions Center

Launched by the Environmental Defense Fund, the Supply Chain Solutions Center is a “crowdsourced” knowledge resource hub. The library’s current focus is on agriculture, energy, chemicals, waste, forests, and freight, and provides sustainability resources, best practices, case studies, reports, executive interviews, strategy templates, webcasts, and news that can support you in learning about these issues, assessing risk, setting goals, measuring, and reporting. The Solutions Center also brings together sustainability and supply chain professionals, creating a space where platform users can connect and collaborate with other experts.