Sustainable Innovation at DuPont

Delivering solutions for global challenges

At DuPont, our most significant impact as an innovation leader is rooted in our experience and ability to deploy scientific solutions that catalyze a more sustainable world. For inspiration on what that future world could be, DuPont is aligning with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to better understand global challenges that need to be solved now. Then, we dig deeper and ask, “How can DuPont contribute?”

We set a goal to align 100% of our innovation portfolio to meaningfully advance the UN SDGs and create value for our customers.

Within the 17 SDGs, we identified seven with the strongest connection to our science and markets and where we are confident we have the ability to impact change at scale. Even as our business and product portfolio evolves, these SDGs will continue to be used as a source of worldwide consensus on sustainability priorities for our scientists and engineers to work toward innovative solutions.

DuPont’s 2030 Sustainability Goals are helping to shape our innovation agenda and processes—how we innovate, which markets we prioritize, and how we collaborate internally and externally to fulfil our purpose. We designed the goals to be challenging—to provoke technological breakthroughs and new ideas for addressing society’s biggest challenges. Now our innovation teams are working to determine how we will do it.

Innovating safer by design

We set a goal to design 100% of our products and processes using sustainability criteria, including the principles of green chemistry, by 2030.

As innovation leaders, our commitment is to find and develop the discoveries that will make the world thrive in a safer and more sustainable way, and that requires careful choices at every step of the process. It means making sure innovators throughout our company understand the principles of green chemistry and cultivating a product stewardship mindset in everything we do.

Right now, we’re establishing partnerships with NGOs and seeking collaborations across industries to review, develop and champion the science and practices that will define what it means to be safer. Each DuPont business is working to strengthen its processes and portfolio to address key areas of concern and to stay relevant and aware as the field of green chemistry develops.

Creating a safer future

Innovating to advance a safer world also includes our commitment to transparency and sustainability in our policies and protocols. Over the past year, we established a set of bold commitments to manage per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).  We’ve made significant progress on delivering goals we made in 2019. Specifically, we eliminated the use of long-chain PFAS from our processes, including recently integrated operations. 

To further our PFAS commitments, we are also providing $6 million of unrestricted research funding over the next 3 years to the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund innovative PFAS remediation technologies. The NSF recently requested proposals for novel PFAS research as part of this initiative – you can learn more about that work here.

Also in line with DuPont’s PFAS commitments, we made the DuPont Chemical Awareness toolkit (CAt) freely available to the public online – so that anyone who is developing a new product or investigating a substance can use it to quickly remove much of the guesswork around environmental, safety and other potential impacts from the process.

A simple review provides relevant up-to-date data on human and environmental toxicological hazards, public perception issues, bio-persistence and bio-accumulation status, occupational exposure limits, and other product related risks. The data is presented as interpretable graphs that can easily be converted into a downloadable table. With that, you have just performed an important step in a robust product stewardship review.

CAt provides clear, actionable information by aggregating toxicological and regulatory data from free, public databases. This facilitates good decision-making and supports human safety and environmental stewardship across the product lifecycle. We hope to see increasingly safer and more transparently labelled products brought to all markets, starting with the ones we create.

Learn More

Want to learn more about sustainable innovation at DuPont? Get in touch with your business sustainability leader or email the Corporate Sustainability Team at sustainability@dupont.com.