Product sustainability

Soda ash makes an important contribution to sustainable development, particularly through the products it helps make. It is the tenth most consumed inorganic industrial ingredient and it is essential to a wide range of everyday items.

Life's "invisible ingredient" in a sustainable world

Despite not being a household name, soda ash serves as an essential enabler of everyday modern life.

Beyond its importance in daily consumer products, soda ash is a fundamental input into a wide range of industries that directly and indirectly support sustainability. It underpins cleaner technologies and supports resource efficiency and, in doing so, contributes to environmental, economic and social progress.

Lower carbon natural soda ash

Our products, especially those produced in Türkiye, already enjoy significant sustainability advantages over other production methods due to the use of primary solution mining in their manufacturing process.

Use of them lowers the carbon footprint of the glass bottle you are drinking from, the glass screen you are looking at or the battery of the car you drive. The numbers for our Turkish products versus synthetic alternatives are clear:

Carbon: Up to 80% lower product carbon footprint
Energy: Up to 60% lower energy use
Water: Up to 80% lower water intensity

While our production sites in the US have a higher and more varied range of carbon footprints due to the range of production methods employed, we can still clearly demonstrate that natural soda ash is the more sustainable choice.

Not all soda ash is equal

Sustainability as a Service

Since we produce natural soda ash with the lowest carbon and water footprint on the planet and, as the world’s largest producer, we do this at scale, we believe that we are uniquely placed to help our customers reduce their Scope 3 emissions.

Around 90% of our largest global customers have ambitious carbon reduction targets and we have engaged with all of them on this subject. That’s why we called our Sustainability Plan "Sustainability as a Service" because we believe that by working with our customers we can help them achieve their sustainability goals whilst also achieving ours.

We plan to work with our customers (and, in some cases, their customers) to develop more sustainable applications for our products. We aim to set the standard that will help others improve, by facilitating change throughout the supply chains we serve.

Instead of a transactional “you order, we deliver” approach, we are now looking along the entire value chain for our products, and offering partnership with each participant to help meet our shared environmental and social objectives.

We will co-develop products and solutions for specific requirements, be that for batteries, solar or within the glass producer’s “batch house”, and collaborate with our customers and others across adjacent industries, to drive innovation, and to create real, workable solutions to shared sustainability challenges. If we are serious about decarbonising the value chain, that’s the only way forward: together.

Setting new standards – ResponsibleGlass

Our largest customer segment by far is the glass industry; however, unlike other sectors, there is no sustainability standard for glass. We are firm believers in the benefits of multi-stakeholder standards as we believe that they enable the development of sector-specific best practice and collaboration between diverse stakeholders.

That’s why we are in the process of helping establish the first independent sustainability standard for the glass sector – ResponsibleGlass. This is a global initiative that already has dozens of members, supporters and other interested parties. It involves major players along the whole glass value chain – from raw material suppliers to glassmakers and their customers.

This initiative will include all types of glass including flat, container and more specialist varieties. It will be accessible to a wide variety of end use industries including automotive, construction, food and beverage and solar energy. It will include the raw materials suppliers and the recyclers alongside civil society groups.

responsibleglass.org