By Frédéric Godemel, EVP of Energy Management at Schneider Electric
When you want to improve your diet, you don’t just rely on promotional packaging on food, you check the nutritional information. The real insights lie in the details: the facts and figures that tell you what you’re really consuming.
The same principle should apply to sustainability. As the climate crisis intensifies and pressure from regulators, investors, and stakeholders grows, businesses are being called to account for their environmental impact. But without clear, reliable data, it’s impossible to know whether they’re making meaningful progress, or steering blindly.
Environmental transparency is fast becoming not only a minimum requirement, but a market differentiator. Businesses that lead on transparency today won’t just be more prepared for the future; they’ll be gaining a powerful edge. With clearer insights, they can cut waste, reduce risk, and build trust with customers, employees, and investors alike.
Unlike sectors such as food and finance, which have long been regulated and closely monitored due to health and financial risks, sustainability reporting in other industries has historically been more voluntary. However, this is now shifting toward a more standardized and mandatory approach, with new regulations like the proposed EU Green Claims Directive, which aim to address greenwashing and promote environmental transparency between businesses and consumers.
So, how can we raise the bar for environmental data and empower businesses in their sustainability journeys?
We launched the Environmental Data Program to improve transparency in product environmental data reporting. The program provides detailed, lifecycle-based environmental information on our products, including data on carbon footprint, recycled content, energy efficiency and end of life options. This approach aims to give customers and partners clearer insight into the environmental impact of their choices.
Setting the scene: Why sustainability reporting needs clearer measures
For years, sustainability reporting has operated in a fragmented landscape. While progress has been made, the tools available to businesses are not keeping pace with the urgency of climate change or the complexity of global supply chains.
Now, as the climate crisis intensifies, the landscape is shifting. Regulations such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) are setting clearer expectations for how environmental performance should be measured and reported. These are not just regulatory checkboxes, they are powerful signals that sustainability is becoming central to corporate value and long-term resilience.
At the same time, stakeholder expectations are rising. Consumers, investors, and employees alike are demanding not just ambition, but evidence. And businesses are feeling the pressure; today, companies representing two-thirds of global market capitalization now disclose critical environmental data through the Carbon Disclosure Project website, reflecting the scale of transparency demanded by investors and other stakeholders. Sustainability is not a box ticking exercise. It is a competitive advantage. Yet a lack of clear standards and poor data quality is holding everyone back.
Data, The Necessary Ingredient
True transparency in sustainability goes beyond broad labels and marketing claims. It demands detailed, quality data, that ideally can be comparable and third party verified. This kind of clear, actionable environmental information is essential for accurate sustainability reporting, tracking emissions, and making smarter decisions across the value chain.
Why such detail? Because better data leads to better decisions. In Europe, the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) requires both new and existing buildings to meet increasingly strict energy-efficiency standards. For developers designing new buildings, this means ensuring that every aspect—from the overall electrical design down to individual components—complies with those requirements. That’s where granular data becomes critical. With detailed information on the energy performance of even small parts, like circuit breakers, developers can build with confidence, meet regulations, and deliver buildings that are both compliant and efficient.
By providing consistent, transparent, and easily accessible environmental information, organizations can then empower partners and customers to make more informed decisions, whether it’s choosing a supplier or selecting a product.
Just like how you eat healthier when you understand what’s in your food, you can act more sustainably when you truly understand a product’s environmental impact.
Putting Data to Work
Ensuring high-quality environmental data is the first step toward meaningful impact. The next critical step is making that data comparable. This requires industry-wide collaboration. We need to ensure there’s a common language across the industry, which requires consistent frameworks and standards that guarantee data is both trustworthy and aligned with wider industry benchmarks.
After all, how can anyone determine which product is more sustainable without a common scale for measurement? While transparency lays the groundwork, comparability is what enables data to drive action at scale.
That’s why we’ve gone beyond our legacy Green Premium label and introduced the Environmental Data Program. Through this initiative, we empower our customers and partners to track progress and make informed decisions that support their decarbonization goals. We are the first in our industry to disclose such a comprehensive level of environmental data, with over 110,000 products, each with at least 14 environmental data points, representing 70% of our 2024 turnover. This unprecedented scale of transparency sets a new industry benchmark and gives our customers and partners the clarity they need to move forward on their sustainability journey.
But data alone isn’t enough. Companies must also ensure it’s understandable and actionable. That’s how we accelerate innovation, support smarter choices, and drive industry-wide decarbonization. At Schneider, we’re using this data to clearly communicate product impact, enable better decision-making across our ecosystem, and push for the systemic changes needed to support a low-carbon economy.
And this is just the beginning. Building consistent, transparent sustainability practices across industries requires collaboration. Standardization depends on strong partnerships, and businesses have a vital role in engaging their entire value chains in sustainability and transparency initiatives.
