Lyreco is a B2B distributor with a large offer range from office supplies, cleaning supplies, pantry items to personal protection equipment for industrial workshops. Lyreco was founded in 1926 and has been in operation ever since, with its headquarters being in France. In Asia, Lyreco is located in South Korea, Hongkong, Malaysia, Thailand and here in Singapore.

The initiative to strengthen the company's sustainability has several origins. Lyreco has a long history of embracing Corporate Social Responsibility. To name a few, Lyreco has a green product methodology assessment and a CO2 monitoring policy that have been in place for nearly ten years.

The Lyreco corporate responsibility and sustainability is built on five pillars:

• Provide products that contribute to protecting the planet and its people
• Ensure ethics and compliance requirements are met wherever suppliers, manufacturers, and partners operate
• Minimise packaging
• Develop sustainable processes, from ordering and delivery to product end-of-life
• Provide employee excellence wherever Lyreco operates
• Support education around the world

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In Asia, we developed our own initiatives. For example, we helped to raise wellness in the office, particularly in the pantry. What works well in the pantry offer are biscuits, coffee, milk, and so on.... So one of the offers promoted, in Korea and Hongkong, was to have healthier options, such as healthy snacks like nuts, or providing fresh fruits that differ from traditional snacks.

We initiated projects around circularity and "loops", such as with eco-friendly cleaning and hand sanitizing solutions or reusable food containers. We tested the subscription models to deliver monthly supplies in an eco-friendly and waste-free solution.

Clients understand the intent of subscription models, and it works well for water dispensers.

It always takes time to adjust to a new model, from a sales team or from a customer point of view. The sales cycle is short when selling paper or notebooks, it is a market driven primarily by volume and margin. Changing the way of working requests time, work and continuous effort to be adopted.

In order to infuse the Sustainability strategy within our team, we wanted to empower them by having local representation. As a result, Lyreco Asia has a Green Team at regional level, which is quite unique in the global organisation. This Green team is composed of local team members from Human Resources team and also Quality Safety and Sustainability. This is the Core Asia Green Team.

This team used the Asia Strategy roadmap as a backbone of its initiative. We exchanged regularly, at least a month for updates and ideas to share. We also had some ideation sessions to work on new projects or also push boundaries in terms of employee engagement.

This did not prevent us to work with Satellite teams. For instance, our green tree product assessment was done in collaboration with the Marketing team and the QSS team.

With this way of working, we really made sure that Sustainability was dealt across the board. It also made everyone responsible of his own topic shift. This meant that everybody had a chance to the impact his actions could have into the day to day operation, the customer satisfaction and the company sustainable strategy.

It is a customized methodology, and there are variations per category. We had 16-18 categories and sections, which represent different products, and, according to the category, we assigned different weights to each criterion.

Every year, we re-evaluated specific SKUs using this internal scoring system.

We reviewed the methodology internally for Asia with each country's Product Manager. It is a lengthy process with approximately 5000 SKUs per country. We usually began with the simplest category such as paper and then progressed to general office products before moving on to other categories. We did not scan everything at once, we did it category by category.

What is complicated is Lyreco has suppliers that carry many different labels, typically FSC, CFC, the European ecolabel... along with their own claims. A self-claimed characteristic is the most difficult to evaluate because you have to carefully look at the composition of products and score them accordingly. We built trust with our suppliers and we tried to be as thorough as we could on what they mentioned to us. This detailed exercise enabled us to provide a range of eco-friendly products to our customers they could buy with full confidence.

As for the challenges, Singapore and Asia as a whole have a competitive advantage in terms of agility and quickness. However, there are some drawbacks.

The objective of the majority of companies in the region has clearly shifted to go greener, but most decisions in companies are still centralized based on pricing and convenience, especially with such products as office supplies.

Asia is still on its way to sustainability, therefore you need to have a lot of discussions and meetings and you must persuade and educate people, not only from your sales teams and within your company, but also with your customers and their management.

The other point is more related to the ecosystem itself. There is a desperate lack of recycling facilities in many Asian countries. The current situation provides very few possibilities in terms of end of life product management. As a result, it can bea major challenge for any circular economy strategy.

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In terms of services offered, in Europe, Lyreco offers recycling services. Clients have some Lyreco boxes (made themselves in recyclable material!) placed in a corner of their office where people can simply drop their belongings, and once full, customers can give a call for Lyreco to take the boxes. More than 10 product categories are covered: Laser and Ink Jet Cartridges, Batteries, Light Bulbs, Electrics & Electronics, Paper, Cardboard, Cups, Plastics bottles, Aluminium Cans & Coffee Capsules…

We started in Asia with toners and cartridge recycling in Hong Kong and South Korea.

One of the constraints is the complication of cross-border issue, as some materials in toner and cartridges can be considered dangerous.

Furthermore, customers want to know how much is collected from them and how much is truly recycled so that they can include those data in their own CSR report. Therefore, you need to find partners who can report to you the whole recycling process. It is yet a fragmented industry with many intermediates so finding the right partner can be a challenge.

But this is the future and any company's responsibility to offer such services as the circular economy implies to fully recycle all products.

I am very proud of the Sustainable community we created in Asia with my colleague, Karine. This is a very unique set-up in a company as we had one or two ambassadors to lead the sustainability topics locally. They were fully empowered and involved many different roles into their initiatives, creating the right internal emulation.

To me, the most important is to create those regular catchups during which you can share not only the status on projects but also ideas. Even what can be seen as small actions are source of inspiration for the whole community.