Sustainability Uncovered: In the Green Room with P&G’s Chief Sustainability Officer Virginie Helias

The green room is the only place where you can hear full, uninterrupted interviews with some of the world’s most renowned sustainability professionals and experts, and find out exactly what makes a modern-day green business leader.

Back by popular demand, this is the first in a new series of Green Room interviews that will be hosted on edie’s Sustainability Uncovered podcast.

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On the same day that P&G invited edie to explore its “Vault”, designed to inform product designs based on consumers trends and preferences, edie’s content editor Matt Mace sits down with the company’s chief sustainability officer Virginie Helias for an in-depth discussion on corporate leadership.

Helias reflects on her career in corporate sustainability to date, looking back at how her role evolved from a position in marketing to leading one of the most respected and long-standing corporate sustainability strategies at P&G.

During the episode, Helias discusses the evolution of corporate sustainability from a standalone agenda to something that can now be – and needs to be – truly embedded into corporate culture.

“We visualise our business strategy as this house,” Helias says. “It shows the four pillars that we have, climate waste, water and nature and we have targets for all those aspects, but the most important to me is the roof because the roof is how you create value by advancing your sustainability goals.

“The way we articulate it is by saying we can improve lives for now and generations to come, which is P&G’s purpose.”

As the conversation concludes, Helias looks forward to the future to see what goals she would like to achieve in the realm of corporate sustainability.

“For my career and for me now, it’s not about meeting the goals we have because I know we have enough people who are trying to figure it out,” Helias says. “It’ really going to be about the next generation of leaders and how they are going to take these tasks on and be much better than what we are.

“So it’s about spending a lot of time with my team and the younger people who we hire, who are obviously very eager. They have very high expectations. So how can I equip them so that they can grow the business and reduce their footprints?”.

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Sustainability Uncovered makes the big climate issues bite-sized, featuring live-in-the-studio guests, leader interviews, need-to-know round-ups, listener quizzes and more – all wrapped up into monthly episodes. The podcast is hosted in association with Lloyds Bank, which has partnered with edie to showcase and support business leadership on sustainability and climate action.

Sustainability Uncovered is available to listen to on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts and Soundcloud – or bookmark this page to see the full list of podcast episodes as they appear.

Have a question about this podcast or a suggestion for future episodes? Get in touch at podcast@fav-house.com. Please note: podcast interview slots are now full until September 2023.