Business News

Sustainability Progress Report: Double R&D Investment

Friday 22. August 2008 - This is one in a series of articles on the DuPont 2008 Sustainability Progress Report that will appear in DuPont News.

The 2008 Sustainability Progress Report highlights the DuPont 2015 sustainability goals, the company’s progress against them, as well as examples of progress.
One goal is to double investment in R&D programs with direct, quantifiable environmental benefits for our customers and consumers along our value chains. The 2015 goal is USD 640 million.
The DuPont R&D program investment qualifies toward the 2015 goal when the potential new product’s environmental performance, as realized by the customer/consumer, is providing clearly superior benefit in one or more product sustainability categories. Simultaneously, the product needs to be on par with the current product in all other categories, including manufacturing/supply chain sustainability.
Using this conservative definition, our baseline is USD 320 million. This means that USD 320 million of the 2007 R&D new product/ application expenditures qualifies as enabling environmentally smarter market opportunities for our customers and consumers along the value chains in which we operate.