A Sustainability Academic Externship Pilot: A Unique Collaborative Project

Roundtable

A Sustainability Academic Externship Pilot: A Unique Collaborative Project An academic externship is an experiential learning program designed to provide students with a taste of their field of study through work in the real world. For the blossoming field of sustainability, this can be a time to see theory in action—including all of the real-life hitches that go along with it. The Sustainability Collaborative—a growing organization of business, academic, government, and NGO members— piloted an externship project for students at Rutgers University in New Jersey as well as Dublin City University in Ireland, coupling them with Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Vistakon, a major contact lens manufacturer based in Limerick, Ireland. In this discussion, the leaders from all sides of the externship project discuss its core values, obstacles, and what comes next. Jamie Devereaux: Margaret, as the Environmental, Health, and Safety Manager at Vistakon, you have been the primary leader from the corporate side of this project. Could you discuss your experience? Margaret Stokes: It has been a great project for us. We have always had a very strong focus on sustainability within the Vistakon manufacturing process, but I suppose, like so much of business, the focus over the past number of years has been very much on the manufacturing side. We have done major work in areas like energy reduction and water use reduction, and so on. We were evolving along a path of sustainability and our next focus was supply chain. We also wanted to work in the sustainability sphere within the supply chain, but also add value to our customers. When the offer of this project came along, we jumped onboard immediately. Jamie Devereaux: What attracted you to this project, in particular?

Margaret Stokes: There were lots of things that attracted us to it. We were going to get the perspective of these very bright students from both Rutgers and Dublin City Universities. The students also represented the age group that actually uses and wears our products, so that was very interesting, as we want to get an understanding of what our customers’ thoughts and views are in the sustainability space. The end result and the end product proved very interesting to us. We shared a lot of information with the students. They did a lot of very interesting work, and they gave us a very motivating perspective on how we would relate the sustainability story and challenge to our customers. Jamie Devereaux: Pierre and Kevin, could you discuss the project from the university side? Pierre McDonagh: In November 2011, I proposed the externship idea to the Sustainability Collaborative. I was delighted that Kevin Lyons and I met and were able to put our student cohorts together to work on what we saw as the competencies that students would need for sustainability challenges in business. Essentially, our aim was to give students the chance to work on a live sustainability challenge in industry and bring sustainability to life in terms of seeing the practical implications of what they were learning in the classroom. It was a great opportunity, and Vistakon provided a wonderful chance for us to share the experiences of a real-world example. Nobody has perfect knowledge, so it is good for students to be aware that sustainability challenges are nebulous and seen from different perspectives. We had both engineering students’ and marketing students’ perspectives on the Vistakon challenge. It was a really worthwhile project for the students to engage in; they got a lot out of it. They had wonderful interaction and guidance from Margaret, from Vistakon, as well as Ann Lee-Jeffs. One of the inter-

MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. • Vol. 5 No. 5 • October 2012 • DOI: 10.1089/sus.2012.9928

Participants

Moderator

Jamie Devereaux Editor Sustainability: The Journal of Record

John M. Gould Associate Clinical Professor, Director of Ed.D. Educational Leadership and Change Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA Ann Lee-Jeffs Product Stewardship Leader Johnson & Johnson, New Brunswick, NJ Robert L. Lattimer Senior Fellow, Diversity Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey New Brunswick, NJ Kevin Lyons Supply Chain Environmental Archaeology Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey New Brunswick, NJ Pierre McDonagh Group Head Marketing Module leader: Sustainability Marketing Dublin City University Business School Margaret Stokes Environmental, Health & Safety Manager Product Stewardship Manager Vistakon, Plassey, Ireland

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esting things is they had to reconcile different stakeholder views. I am sure Kevin will speak to this as his students had different takes on the data that we had to work with, which was quite interesting. Maybe Kevin you might pick up on that issue.

The global supply chain in this particular case was of interest to us because of the amount of data and detail we had access to. —Kevin Lyons

Kevin Lyons: Sure. Everything Pierre has said is valid. My students were M.B.A. supply-chain students and our perspective was slightly different. Looking at the supply-chain side of this, it offered us a challenge, and I think you can look at that in a negative and a positive way. The global supply chain in this particular case was of interest to us because of the amount of data and detail we had access to. The only major issue we could really point to is that we felt like it should have gone on a little bit longer. I think we just needed more time on our side because any supply chain is very complex. Rolling up our sleeves and being able to get into it from end to end, I think, requires a lot more time than we actually had. Even though it was a challenge, the challenge also brings experience. Jamie Devereaux: What was the timeline on the pilot project? Kevin Lyons: It was one semester. For us that would be January to early May, but our M.B.A. class only meets once a week for that period of time. This was just one of several projects that the students were working on, so it was kind of jam-packed. Pierre McDonagh: At Dublin City University the timeline was from middle of February through to early May, but it was a dedicated project that the students were working on as a focal point of the work. Jamie Devereaux: Margaret, what were some of the business drivers for studying the life cycle impact of the contact lenses, and how are these findings going to be leveraged in the future?

As the world grows more and more sustainable, we are finding certainly in Europe that we now have more opportunities to reuse what was previously considered waste. —Margaret Stokes

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Margaret Stokes: We had been very focused in the whole sustainability area. Being within J&J, we have strong goals and objectives in this area. We have done a lot of work, but a lot of our work was based on making the manufacturing process more sustainable, be it reducing energy, or water use, or recycling our waste. So we needed now to start focusing on our supply chain. Hence, we began studying the carbon footprint of contact lenses with our consulting partner, Source 44. That was a very interesting process in that we had a lot of data collection to do. We had a lot of supplier engagement and then we had a lot of work in assessing the supplier’s contribution—or the raw materials contribution—to the carbon footprint of the product.

At the end of that process, we had a lot of very valuable information on our supply chain and its influence on the sustainability of our products. The end result allows us to refocus some of our sustainability projects on specific raw materials that are most influential from a sustainability perspective. So it has been very valuable and certainly has opened our eyes to a new focus in the sustainability sphere. We also wanted to share this type of sustainability information with our customers and bring them on that journey with us as we continuously strive to develop more and more sustainable products. Ann Lee-Jeffs: Initially, Margaret and I thought transportation was probably one of the highest influences on the life-cycle impact of contact lenses just because the Vistakon contact lens facility is the world’s largest contact lens manufacturing site in the world. In fact, they produce, I believe, two billion contact lenses a year, meaning that they make a couple of million contact lenses a day—a tremendous number of contact lenses. Then they are mostly shipped by air. So going into the assessment, Margaret and I thought transportation would have the biggest impact on the environmental profile of contact lenses. To our surprise, it was really the materials, the polymer and the plastic, which are part of the contact lens product that have the biggest impact on the contact lens life cycle. And while transportation was substantial, it did not compete with the influence of the materials. That was a key finding that reminded us of when PepsiCo evaluated the orange juice life cycle impact. They were totally surprised when they found out it was the fertilizer that had the biggest environmental impact on that product line. They have changed the whole supply chain, how they fertilize their orange groves, to really reduce their environmental impact. Similarly, I think Margaret is working across the value chain of Vistakon and looking at ways to reduce the environmental footprint, such as taking some of the plastic molds, which are part of the manufacturing process, for local recycling. They are currently recycled offshore in China. So she is looking at ways to further reduce the impact by looking at ways to locally recycle the contact lens mold. Margaret Stokes: Yes, this is actually very interesting. As the world grows more and more sustainable, we are finding certainly in Europe that we now have more opportunities to reuse what was previously considered waste, in a very effective and efficient way. It is all helping us to basically reduce our carbon footprint and be more sustainable. So it is not just Johnson & Johnson. It is all over. By working together we can continue to improve.

MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. • Vol. 5 No. 5 • October 2012 • DOI: 10.1089/sus.2012.9928

Ann Lee-Jeffs: As Margaret indicated, Vistakon, along with other Johnson & Johnson companies, is looking at ways to influence the supply chain, to collaborate with our external manufacturer and suppliers, and to look at innovative approaches to continuously improve our products, including their sustainability profiles. The supply side has one of the biggest impacts on our Johnson & Johnson carbon footprint. In 2011, Johnson & Johnson spent over $25 billion in buying services and materials. That amount and its associated environmental impact is one of the most significant areas where we can make a huge difference. One of the programs at Johnson & Johnson is a sustainability program for suppliers, so getting suppliers to engage in sustainability projects and telling us about it so that we can collaborate further on their initiative and learn from that and also share our best practices.

Ann Lee-Jeffs: We would like to first reflect on the pilot with Pierre and Kevin and the Sustainability Collaborative, and get together to reflect on the successes of the pilot and really develop more of a structural program for the global externship before we roll it out further. We certainly want to further the concept of bringing live business challenges into the classroom; how do we make that more effective by addressing some of the challenges that we face and also building on the successes? Jamie Devereaux: Pierre, from the Dublin City University side, is there anything else about this particular project that you would like to highlight?

Margaret Stokes: During our various communications with the suppliers, as we gathered the information for the life-cycle analysis, we found a huge interest and a huge positive vibe in regard to wanting to know more about this particular project and what they could do with the results. It was all extremely positive.

Pierre McDonagh: I am sure Kevin will come in on this, but I think one of the important learning outcomes from the students’ point of view is how to figure out and clarify any data that had been provided by organizations as trustworthy and not just greenwash. There was quite a lot of back and forth between the two institutions and the groups trying to figure out how they could verify the data and how they could cross-check with what they knew Johnson & Johnson was doing with the publicly available data on the website.

Jamie Devereaux: This was the pilot year for the externship project. Do you plan to continue it next year, or is there anything in the works as far as doing something like this again?

So there was a little bit of a disconnect, and one of the suggestions back from our students to Johnson & Johnson, for instance, was, “You guys could tell your story a little bit more clearly for different stake-

The supply side has one of the biggest impacts on our Johnson & Johnson carbon footprint. In 2011, Johnson & Johnson spent over $25 billion in buying services and materials. —Ann Lee-Jeffs

Externship students received the following Challenge Statement: Johnson & Johnson’s Vistakon is the market leader for the soft contact lens. As the market leader, Vistakon continues to make solid progress to reduce its environmental impact, and strategically looks for approaches and opportunities to support greener chemistry and technology in addition to relevant social causes and education. With the increased level of interest in understanding the impact of all products in a global society, the customers and consumers of contact lenses are interested in the carbon footprint of the contact lens. In addition to responding to customers’ and consumers’ questions about carbon footprint of the contact lens, Vistakon is very much interested in translating the depth and the breadth of life-cycle understanding to continue to support marketing strategies. Vistakon is working with one of the J&J corporate sustainability leaders, Ann Lee-Jeffs, Global Product Steward, and industry leading-edge carbon consultant, Jennifer Kraus of Source 44, to develop a carbon profile of one of the contact lens lines. In developing a triple-bottom-line strategy for the Acuvue contact lens, what are the challenges and opportunities to develop a strategy to enable sustainable growth? Project Objectives: 1. Complete market research within the context of how sustainability has and will continue to influence the contact lens market. 2. Research consumer use and end-of-life scenarios associated with the Acuvue contact lens. 3. Review and assess the appropriateness of life cycle and supply chain assumptions made in the contact lens carbon footprint project. 4. Review carbon footprint data and prepare recommendations for how to communicate this information to the J&J contact lens consumer. 5. Offer recommendations with respect to how Vistakon may continue to differentiate its products from a sustainability perspective.

MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. • Vol. 5 No. 5 • October 2012 • DOI: 10.1089/sus.2012.9928

I think one of the important learning outcomes from the students’ point of view is how to figure out and clarify any data that had been provided by organizations as trustworthy and not just greenwash. —Pierre McDonagh

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By the time many of our students come into the university level, they should already be immersed in these type of experiential learning experiences. —John Gould

holders.” That would be something that they would be learning in the classroom—about the process of sustainable communication, how all organizations are communicating what they are doing ecologically, and how complex it is.

ing component is such a major part of this field because it is really something that you cannot be totally immersed in from a classroom—you really have to get out in the field and do. John, could you discuss this idea further?

The fact that we had two different cohorts of students communicating on that—marketing students and M.B.A. students—was interesting because they had their own side conversations about what they were looking for and how they could cross-check. It was a very valuable learning experience. But I would not say it was in any way perfect. All of these things are real life.

John Gould: I have a lot of thoughts as I am listening to this as a development of a very good case study for the impact. I found the comments about how students were looking at this process very interesting and I also found it interesting how a company looks at this because you are dealing with the consumer of the product also. And that reciprocal relationship, I think is very important.

Kevin Lyons: I would definitely agree. The other thing, too, was it was just obviously very difficult to squeeze into one semester, and that would be if an entity or another company were to approach us with a similar project, I think the students would have liked to have started from the very beginning.

Ann, as you said, you were surprised about the assumptions that you had going into this and then what you found out later. Which brings up the point when the students were asking the question, “What do you want us to do with this?” I think that centers on the fact that by the time many of our students come into the university level—and I am working at the doctoral level with students who are practicing administrators at school districts and universities— they should already be immersed in these type of experiential learning experiences. Jamie, you asked the question about should this become part of the experience of learning and bringing people into the field. I definitely believe that it should. But it needs to be part of the total educational process from the beginning.

This project was very well-crafted, very well designed by Johnson & Johnson and the consultants that they used to do the life-cycle assessment, for instance. All the other key folks, Margaret over at Vistakon and others, were just on top of their game. Often, the students feedback was, “What do you want us to do?” Since there are so many great people and Johnson & Johnson is a great company, they have great people like Ann and others doing fabulous work and they have a consultant for data analysis. They really have their act together. The feedback I got from my students was more about, “Are we to challenge what data they are providing us or verify it?” So there was a lot of that going on. The last feedback I got was, “Next time, could you bring us in at the very beginning so this way we feel as though we are providing more sense of value?” They were on the one hand very excited to participate, but on the other hand they felt that they were not as significant. Ann Lee-Jeffs: I think Margaret and I share that sentiment with students. Going forward in any future projects, I think we need to get more of a firmer agreement between the stakeholders, the university, and the businesses, agreeing on what can be shared and what cannot be shared; clarifying so that students are more privy to the information that is being looked at. With this global pilot, we did not have time to put in a legal agreement, which would allow J&J to share some of the information that is considered confidential. Jamie Devereaux: Sustainability is still in relatively early stages of being shaped as a science within the academic realm, and the experiential learn-

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One of the problems that we are facing right now— and at the university level I see this when I talk to my colleagues—is that they are very surprised that these kids have a lot of information, but they do not know what to do with it. They do not know how to apply information. I think this externship, along with what Drexel does with their co-op program as another type of example, by having students be able to work within the environment with the data and with the information, really is what learning is about. What it will lead to, particularly in a global economy, because the global economy has so much interaction among countries and supply-chain roots that are not just localized, but they are across the planet, is that this is the serious discussion that we need to begin to have based upon examples of what this program is doing. It is interesting to look at the implications of this type of learning to general learning in a global economy. What do our kids need to know? What does an elementary kid need to know to begin to understand this? What does a middle-school kid or high-school kid need to know? The problem is if we are not addressing (sustainability education) at every level, by the time they come into the university level, they might be able to pass tests on all of this information,

MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. • Vol. 5 No. 5 • October 2012 • DOI: 10.1089/sus.2012.9928

but they are going to keep asking the teacher, “Really, what do you want from us?” In reality, what this program does is it says, “Our job is to help facilitate you as you experiment and learn with experts in the field so that you can develop an understanding of what the future is for you as an individual, but more importantly collectively as a society with these issues of sustainability.” These are just my general thoughts about this right now. There is a lot of rich information here from the experiences of this case study that I think are necessary to understand the relationship of learning to all of these concepts of sustainability. Margaret Stokes: I think learning from this, if it is to be repeated, we probably should offer a forum with the students somewhere after midway in the project where they can challenge us as J&J or the business, and we can challenge them more. When we got to the end in our case, in Dublin, the students presented to us. Obviously, it was the final stage of the project and we did not challenge too hard, and obviously they did not challenge us at all in that scenario because they were presenting. But there actually could be even richer learning for both parties if we had an opportunity maybe somewhere three quarters of the way through the project where we both challenged each other. Bob Lattimer: I would like to address the topic from a more strategic level, which brings into play the integrative mechanisms for ongoing learning. That is where we look at organizations and organizational structures like the Sustainability Collaborative, and not just the Collaborative but any collaborative and the integrative process that is involved there. The first actual externship project involved the Collaborative and Dublin City University where we asked Pierre’s students to do some external research to see what other collaboratives are doing, that’s the kind of thinking and the kind of work that we are doing at the Sustainability Collaborative under the rubric of universal sustainability. Universal sustainability sets the framework for the externship in terms of the ongoing learning process. But it does more. It sets the framework for how we as a society set the values that are either situational values or long-term sustainable values. Within that context then, we are shaping all aspects of our society from the conservation processes to the political systems to all mechanisms that drive an ongoing, sustainable society that is factoring in the human element. Within that context, we asked Pierre’s group to see what other organizations are addressing univer-

sal sustainability and what kinds of results they are getting. They came back and found that there were a couple of organizations that had kind of a rubric around universal sustainability, but that the precision was not as focused as the one that we are having at the Sustainability Collaborative. Now what does that mean? It means simply that the research we have found is that collaboration within organizations, such as Johnson & Johnson and other organizations, is the future of ongoing superior performance. So within that context, collaboration is the mechanism that drives results, and therein is the important element around what is the strategic focus and the structural elements that will drive results in the future. There is the process that I think was engaged in the externship in terms of the learning, but the learning then has to have form. It has to have structure. That structure and form is a collaborative approach. That is the strategic level. Jamie Devereaux: Do you all have a closing thought on the externship project? Ann Lee-Jeffs: I really appreciate everyone’s involvement and support on the externship pilot. As Bob said, we did a demonstration with Dublin City University and have gotten really good input. We made progress with the pilot and we are looking forward to reviewing the challenges we face and learning from the successes. Margaret Stokes: We found it an extremely positive experience. My own interactions with the Dublin City University and Rutgers’ students were extremely good. They all were very enthusiastic, very positive, very engaged in the project. They certainly helped us identify opportunities for our business, driving it forward in the sustainability space. All in all, an excellent experience.

Universal sustainability sets the framework for the externship in terms of the ongoing learning process. It sets the framework for how we as a society set the values. —Bob Lattimer

Pierre McDonagh: Our students found the engagement with Vistakon/Johnson & Johnson extremely exciting because they could see a real, live organization coping with the challenges we were talking about in the classroom. They also really got a lot out of the engagement with Rutgers in so far as they had different student perspectives to grapple with as well. So I would hope the relationship continues within the framework of the Collaborative for future projects because it is a great learning experience for our students. Kevin Lyons: Getting involved in a live project was enticing and exciting for the students. I think that this type of project needs to be expanded actually, maybe even more of our diverse business classes that

MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. • Vol. 5 No. 5 • October 2012 • DOI: 10.1089/sus.2012.9928

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need to have an integration with sustainability could get involved as well, other than just a supply chain. The students were very interested in collaborating with their Dublin City University counterparts. They all really looked forward to that type of interaction. Bob Lattimer: I would like to take my hat off to Margaret at J&J/Vistakon in Ireland and Pierre and Dublin City University, and Kevin, my colleague. John, thanks a lot for the great work that you are doing at Drexel University and for allowing us to be part of your university at the Sustainability Collaborative event, SustainNext East, which was a big success.

If we can engage the next generation, and they can understand the importance of that engagement as it affects the sustainability of their own lives, that this is a worthy cause to continue to develop and continue to expand in all directions of the learning process.

But I think that as it relates to the externship, it is an excellent program that is set within a strategic focus and a structural form, which is collaborative learning. I, like Kevin, am a member of the Rutgers University community. We find that kind of learning as transformative and as the way of the future.

John Gould: My take-away from this is that the students found it of value. It is important from that point of view. I think it does serve as a model. If we can engage the next generation, and they can understand the importance of that engagement as it affects the sustainability of their own lives, that this is a worthy cause to continue to develop and continue to expand in all directions of the learning process— with younger children, with teenagers, with collegeaged students, and I think, with adults. The more we can get communities involved in this and the relationship the community has with the economics of that community, the more that we engage all people collaboratively in understanding this will lead to a sustainable future for this planet. I think this is an excellent starting point. I hope that it becomes the baseline for continual work in this area and I hope all of us continue that work. Jamie Devereaux: Thank you so much everyone; this was a valuable discussion.

—John Gould

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MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. • Vol. 5 No. 5 • October 2012 • DOI: 10.1089/sus.2012.9928