23 Jun 2026

How Businesses are Driving Decarbonisation and Real-World Sustainable Growth

"there’s no one checking and there’s no one checking the checkers"

Susan Taylor Martin, CEO, British Standards Institution

Funder disclosure: Chiesi Ltd is a joint funder of this session. Reset Connect had no input into the session content other than the views of the Chiesi speaker during the session.

🏠 | Blog | How Businesses are Driving Decarbonisation and Real-World Sustainable Growth

Event: Reset Connect London 2026

Date: Tuesday 23 June 2026

Speakers: James Murray, Editor-in-Chief - BusinessGreen (moderator). Susan Taylor Martin, CEO - British Standards Institution. Nancy Powell, Sustainability Lead EMEA Markets - HP. Neil Ross Russell, Managing Director - Ecologi. Harriet Lewis, Senior Director, Public Affairs and Communications - Chiesi UK.

Estimated read time: 10 minutes

Quick Read Summary

The ESG backlash is loud in the media and largely absent from the data. This Reset Connect London 2026 panel brought together a standards body, a global manufacturer, a climate action platform and a pharmaceutical company, and all four reported the same thing: commitment has held, but the language around it has changed to resilience and commercial value.

What has replaced voluntary ambition is infrastructure. At the time of the session, a new ISO net zero standard was out for public consultation, procurement teams are attaching real weightings to sustainability criteria, and large buyers such as the NHS are making improvement a condition of contract rather than a preference.

You will come away with the survey data behind the claim that commitment has held, an explanation of what the ISO net zero standard is designed to fix, and worked examples of decarbonisation being delivered inside supply chains, product design and a full pharmaceutical portfolio.

The ESG Backlash Has Changed the Language, Not the Commitment

Susan Taylor Martin, Chief Executive of the British Standards Institution, brought numbers to a question usually answered with anecdote. BSI’s net zero barometer surveyed around 1,000 senior UK business leaders early this year. Just under 80 per cent said they remain committed to their net zero trajectory and 60 per cent were confident of meeting their 2050 targets, up five points on the previous year. About half, though, said they had changed how they talk about it, moving away from climate and sustainability language towards business resilience.

Neil Ross Russell, Managing Director of Ecologi, reported the same pattern from a survey of around 1,600 businesses run with BusinessGreen. Of those respondents, 84 per cent had experienced climate-related disruption, 70 per cent had seen it hit turnover and for 40 per cent that impact exceeded 6 per cent of annual revenue. Firms taking climate action reported benefits averaging around a 15 per cent uplift across revenue, talent and cost.

Nancy Powell, Sustainability Lead for EMEA Markets at HP, described the same shift commercially. Sustainability has stopped being a programme running parallel to the business and is now central to procurement conversations.

For a commercial reader, this matters because it separates narrative from behaviour. Boards going quiet in public are not boards changing course, and the requirements they face have not softened.

Standards Are Becoming the Plumbing of the Net Zero Market

BSI is the UK’s national standards body and a founding member of ISO, one of 170 countries shaping standards that Taylor Martin said underpin 80 per cent of global trade. The new ISO net zero standard, which was out for public consultation at the time of the session, is designed to consolidate a crowded field: an organisation complying with it would effectively be complying with 33 other frameworks folded into it.

Its more significant feature is verifiability. It is the first international net zero standard with an accredited assurance system behind it, drawing on the global quality infrastructure that already certifies organisations for quality and safety. Taylor Martin was blunt about the gap it fills: "there’s no one checking and there’s no one checking the checkers", which is precisely where greenwashing takes hold.

Ross Russell welcomed it in market terms. "Standards provide the liquidity, if you like, in this market," he said, because they let buyers compare like with like. Harriet Lewis, Senior Director of Public Affairs and Communications at Chiesi UK, made the point from a supplier’s side: the NHS wants comparable data for prescribers, and until recently that meant comparing apples with oranges.

For a commercial reader, this matters because standards convert a reporting burden into a recognisable credential. A C-suite that already understands ISO certification understands what this one asks of it.

Procurement Is Where Decarbonisation Stops Being Voluntary

Powell put the commercial case first. Sustainability weightings in tenders now typically run between 5 and 25 per cent, and she cited a colleague working on one in Australia weighted at 60 per cent. Meeting supply chain expectations, she said, "is simply market access in the field in which we’re working".

Lewis described the same pressure from inside a regulated supply chain. The NHS Evergreen framework covers far more than carbon, extending into business practices in a way she compared to a B Corp assessment. Chiesi assumed it would pass comfortably and ended up revising its modern slavery policy. The framework gives smaller suppliers latitude to improve; larger ones are told to meet the bar or lose the contract.

Ross Russell argued the stick only works alongside support. Large buyers cannot set expectations and leave suppliers to work it out alone, and where several act collectively, smaller suppliers stop reporting different data in different formats to each of them.

For a commercial reader, this matters because it changes who owns the problem internally. When a fifth of a tender score depends on sustainability data, it belongs to the sales pipeline as much as to the sustainability team.

Chiesi Is Replacing Its Entire Inhaler Portfolio Because Climate Is a Health Issue

"The climate crisis is a health crisis," Lewis said, and for a respiratory business the connection is direct: rising temperatures are showing up as increased respiratory disease.

The scale of the problem is not widely understood. Over 70 million inhalers are prescribed and dispensed in the UK each year, and a large proportion contain a propellant with a high global warming potential. Chiesi committed in 2019 to transition its entire global portfolio, across more than 30 countries, to what it calls a carbon minimal inhaler, rather than converting individual devices. The products are with regulators now. Lewis put the effect at a 22 per cent reduction in the carbon impact of inhalers in the NHS, and the company has invested in UK manufacturing with a partner in the north of England.

There is precedent: the industry moved off ozone-depleting propellants around 20 years ago. What Lewis was firm about is who carries the effort. Patients will notice no difference, and the company is deliberately not shifting the decision onto them.

For a commercial reader, this matters because it is a worked example of a hard-to-abate product being redesigned rather than offset, with the regulatory pathway as the constraint rather than the technology.

Circularity Pays Only When It Starts at the Design Table

Around 75 per cent of HP’s footprint sits in its supply chain, and Powell described circularity as the route to both lower cost and new revenue. HP has closed the loop on some plastics, copper and other materials, building on cartridge recycling programmes running since 1992.

The refurbished market turns out not to cannibalise the new one. It is a separate market, as already happened with mobile handsets. Powell noted that 10,000 of HP’s 55,000 employees, herself included, use a refurbished device, and that telemetry lets organisations direct new high-performance hardware to the people who need the compute.

None of that works without design decisions taken years earlier. Laptop design has moved back towards modularity, with more screws and fewer soldered components, so batteries, drives and motherboards can be replaced without specialist tools. Refurbishment partners now feed observations back into design.

For a commercial reader, this matters because circular revenue is designed in rather than bolted on. Regulation is pulling the same way, with public sector buyers in some European markets specifying a proportion of refurbished hardware.

Progress Is Happening Despite Policy, and Collective Action Is the Hedge

James Murray, Editor-in-Chief of BusinessGreen, pressed the panel on political volatility and whether businesses are factoring in the risk of a sharp change in the UK policy framework. Ross Russell’s answer was measured: "it’s happening more despite rather than because of the policy", though it would move considerably faster with supportive policy in place.

The panel’s hedge was consistency from somewhere other than politics. Taylor Martin pointed out that the standards system keeps functioning globally regardless of national mood, and that governments engage with it through their national standards bodies. Powell added a commercial version: where an ambitious market regulates first, the solution built to comply there becomes a product advantage elsewhere.

The other hedge is acting together. Ecologi runs industry-wide certification with BAFTA albert across television and film production and has just launched a collective carbon and nature fund with techUK. Chiesi works through a pre-competitive pharmaceutical consortium at the Sustainable Markets Initiative.

For a commercial reader, this matters because it shows where durable requirements come from. Standards bodies, large buyers and industry consortia change more slowly than governments, and they are increasingly the ones setting the bar.

Practical Application, How to Turn Standards and Procurement Pressure Into Decisions

This panel described a market in which the requirements are hardening even as the rhetoric softens. That combination is easy to misread.

Questions to ask

What proportion of our tender scores now depends on sustainability data, and who owns that data internally?
Could we evidence our claims to an accredited assurer today, or only to a sympathetic reader?
Are we asking our suppliers for data without giving them any support to produce it?

Signals to watch

The ISO net zero standard moving through consultation and into certification
Sustainability weightings rising in tender documents, particularly in public sector buying
Industry consortia setting sector-specific expectations ahead of regulation

Traps to avoid

Reading quieter public communication as evidence that buyers have relaxed their requirements
Treating circularity as an end-of-life programme when the decisions that enable it happen at design
Making claims that no accredited third party could verify

What good looks like here is unglamorous and checkable: verifiable data, a credential a procurement team recognises, and a supply chain given the tools to meet the standard being asked of it.

Key Takeaways

Four organisations with very different business models described the same market shift. Voluntary ambition is being replaced by verifiable requirements, and the enforcement is arriving through standards bodies and procurement teams rather than through public commitments.

BSI’s barometer found just under 80 per cent of UK senior leaders still committed to their net zero trajectory, with about half changing how they describe it
The ISO net zero standard consolidates 33 existing frameworks and is the first international net zero standard with accredited assurance behind it
Sustainability weightings in tenders commonly run between 5 and 25 per cent, which makes decarbonisation data a sales asset
Large buyers including the NHS now treat improvement as a condition of contract for major suppliers rather than a preference
Circular revenue depends on design decisions taken years earlier, including modularity and repairability

Final Thoughts

The most useful thing this panel did was separate two things that usually get discussed together. Public enthusiasm for climate language has fallen. The commercial requirements attached to decarbonisation have not, and on the evidence presented they are tightening through procurement and assurance rather than through announcements.

What is at stake is credibility. A market where anyone can claim anything and nobody verifies it is one where the businesses doing the expensive, unglamorous work compete against those doing none of it. That was the panel’s real argument for standards, and it is a competitive argument rather than an environmental one.

Speakers

James Murray, Editor-in-Chief - BusinessGreen (moderator). James is the founding editor of BusinessGreen, the UK’s leading source of news and analysis for the green economy, and appears frequently on broadcast media discussing climate change, clean technology and green politics.

Susan Taylor Martin, CEO - British Standards Institution. Susan has led and transformed large information and software businesses in London and New York, including as President of Thomson Reuters Legal, and serves as a Non-Executive Director of a FTSE 100 hospitality company.

Nancy Powell, Sustainability Lead EMEA Markets - HP. Nancy has more than 20 years of experience across sustainability, growth strategy and communications, spanning FTSE 100 businesses, consultancies and start-ups, including five years advising organisations on sustainability in Singapore.

Neil Ross Russell, Managing Director - Ecologi. Neil co-founded Net Zero Now, acquired by Ecologi, and has over 25 years of experience advising and managing businesses, including as Managing Director of BBC Worldwide’s Licensing Division and Partnerships Director at Virgin Galactic.

Harriet Lewis, Senior Director, Public Affairs and Communications - Chiesi UK. Harriet leads national policy, NHS engagement, communications and sustainability strategy at Chiesi UK, and began her career as an NHS pharmacist before moving into national policy roles.

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