The REP Wrap: GHG Protocol expert resigns over ‘secret, industry-led working group’
Your weekly summary of corporate sustainability news.
DuPont announced on Wednesday that 100% of the electricity used by its US-based healthcare manufacturing operations is now backed by Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). The firm matched around 30,000MWh with RECs, for 12 sites. In a statement, chief sustainability officer Scott Collick said that more than half of DuPont’s global electricity is now “sourced from renewables”.
Procter & Gamble’s head of sustainability is retiring this month. Virginie Helias confirmed she was stepping down in a LinkedIn post this week. She’ll be replaced by the firm’s vice president of integrated sustainable growth, Michele Baeten.
A new report claims businesses can face significant financial losses if they don’t engage sufficiently with indigenous and local communities on nature-related issues. Non-profit Shift analysed more than 1,200 cases in which companies impacted local communities through their treatment of land, water or other natural resources. It found that “poor or non-existent engagement often led to community opposition that resulted in significant financial losses for companies from operational delays, reputational damage and legal or regulatory challenges”.
Leading forest carbon accounting expert Danny Cullenward wrote a resignation letter to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s board this week, accusing it of flouting its own rules and handing its forestry standards to “a secret, industry-led working group”. In the public statement he said “industry stakeholders” were pushing for forest harvests and wood consumption to count as carbon removals even though “forest harvests cause emissions, not removals”. He claimed to have “spent more than a year inside the process trying to get the Protocol to follow its own rules” but had given up.
Meanwhile, the European Commission’s expert group for its Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming Regulation met this week to discuss “challenges and perspectives” around the development of a certification methodology for forest management, with a view to present the methodology next year.
The OECD has calculated that, in the first half of 2025, green steel projects corresponding to 19% of the total expected capacity by 2027 were shelved amid global excess capacity, high energy prices and regulatory uncertainty. “Suspended projects concerned BFBOF to EAF conversions (27%), H2-DRI projects (18%), as well as carbon capture, utilisation and storage projects (15%),” it said in its OECD Outlook for 2026.