Corporate Sustainability Made Easy with Matthew Yamatin, Thermo Fisher

So you just brought up, while we were speaking before the podcast, you brought up a very interesting topic.

So the question that you posed here was, how do we take a very, very complex topic like corporate sustainability and making our products, life science products, lab products, medical devices more sustainable? and break it down and make it easy to understand so that a buyer in the end will be able to understand and judge what's actually more sustainable.

So what's your take on this?

So I think it's really interesting.

So I mean, I'm an engineer by training, but now I've kind of gone into this semi-quasi kind of commercial base of where I am today.

And it all comes down to, if you think about the psychology of a buyer, you need to understand, what is the situation? Try to put yourself in the shoes of that buyer and then figure out how are they trying to make decisions? So let's think about it from, you know, the easiest example for everybody here quickly, and then we'll move into the healthcare space is say you're at a grocery store and, and you, you're like, you really want to buy something that's more sustainable.

So you're looking at all the shampoos example, everybody's buying shampoo and there's, you know, there's a hundred different options.

And this one, oh, this one has, free of all this stuff.

Oh, this one has 30% more concentrated.

Oh, but this one is made in the recycled content bottle.

It's very confusing.

Like, which one do you go for? I don't know.

It's like, and then there's this huge barrier, like, oh, I'll just go with the one I always get, because I don't know.

So let's translate that into the healthcare space.

So if you think about it, we're at universities, we're at hospitals, we're at healthcare providers.

Generally, you know, in some organizations, it'll be a centralized buyer, but in a lot of cases, it's going to be the individual buyer at a lab, bench, et cetera.

In a lot of those cases, those folks, they want to do the right thing.

Particularly in healthcare, we have this connection between health and climate where if we do good for the earth, really that's going to lead to better health outcomes.

So it's really ingrained in the whole concept.

So most, not all, but most practitioners, they want to do the right thing.

But if you think about lab supplies or med tech supplies, what you're going to see is, well, I have a badge and I have this green badge and I have this green badge.

And it's like 30% reduction of plastic and 30% reduction from packaging and bio-based, which As you rightly mentioned, some people just understand to be biodegradable.

And if you think about it, you're a buyer and you have all these other considerations.

At the end of the day, you need to buy a product that works, of course.

And you obviously have a budget.