How 3M accelerated to portfolio-scale sustainability data

With a complex and diverse product portfolio, 3M began receiving increasing requests for product-level sustainability data from customers and other stakeholders. What had historically been delivered through manual Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) at a limited scale was now being requested across thousands of products at a time.

The existing approach presented scalability challenges, so 3M set out to find a fundamentally different way to deliver sustainability data at the enterprise level.

A growing gap between what customers required and what could be quickly delivered

Previously, LCAs at 3M were conducted by a small group of specialists working through detailed, manual processes. Each assessment required gathering data from across the organization, mapping materials and chemicals to appropriate datasets, and applying expert judgement to ensure methodological consistency, with the team delivering dozens of assessments per year.

Customers were increasingly requesting sustainability data not for individual products but for the full set of products they purchased from 3M, sometimes covering hundreds of items at once. In parallel, regulatory requirements began to formalize product-level carbon reporting, particularly in the EU, with additional developments emerging across geographies, including in China. These requests were often connected to large commercial relationships, government tenders, or sector-specific requirements in automotive, electronics, and construction.

This created a widening gap between what customers and other stakeholders expected and what 3M could deliver with existing resources and processes. The issue was not simply operational efficiency; it was the ability to meet rapidly expanding external expectations at scale.

The requests kept coming, regulatory requirements were hardening, and behind every customer request sat a valuable commercial relationship. The question was no longer whether to act – it was how best to chart the path forward.

“While the total number of products they were asking for was small, the total value of those customers was meaningful. If you were to extrapolate what might be coming, and what that could mean in terms of potential customer impact – that was a big motivator.” – Amanda Yates, Chief Sustainability Officer, 3M

The internal case for change

Before implementing a new approach, 3M spent significant time understanding the problem and aligning stakeholders, beginning with exploration and pilots in 2021 and moving to full implementation in 2024. This process involved identifying relevant data sources, assessing different approaches, and evaluating whether to build a solution internally or adopt an external one.

The commercial considerations were central. The team analyzed customer needs across key sectors, assessed associated revenue, and evaluated how the pace at which 3M could provide sustainability data might affect competitiveness.

3M also explored building additional capabilities internally. While the technical expertise existed, the additional requirements around LCA methodology, access to external datasets, and development time made this undesirable within the specified timeframe.

Why scaling the existing approach was not an acceptable option

Increasing headcount would not have meaningfully addressed the scale of the underlying challenge facing 3M. Each assessment involved significant manual effort. With a portfolio of tens of thousands of products spanning multiple industries and manufacturing processes, each product introduced unique variables across materials, processes, and supply chains.

As information demands increased, it became clear that a fundamentally different approach was needed, one that could operate at enterprise-scale without proportionally scaling the team behind it.

Moving from individual assessments to enterprise-level coverage

3M implemented a scalable approach to generating product-level sustainability data working with Makersite, moving from individual assessments to structured, repeatable modelling across portfolios.

Two capabilities were central to the decision. First, the ability to connect directly to 3M’s existing internal data warehouses and automate the translation of that data into inputs suitable for LCA and PCF calculations. Second, access to secondary datasets where supplier-specific primary data was unavailable. Getting both in a single platform was a key factor.

In practice, 3M’s data is curated internally, transformed, and loaded into Makersite on a periodic basis. The calculations run automatically from there, with the core team focused on ensuring data quality and consistency over time rather than manually processing each assessment.

This enabled 3M to accelerate from dozens of assessments per year to targeting coverage across tens of thousands of products, and the hundreds of thousands of unique materials sitting beneath them. Rather than treating each request as a standalone project, product data could now be structured, enriched, and reused across multiple use cases.

A key part of this shift was the ability to work with data as it exists and enhance it over time, rather than requiring fully standardized inputs before generating outputs.

“It was helpful to have a team flexible enough to take the data we have as it is and translate that into something more usable – that iterative relationship was really beneficial.” – Malachi Heder, Product Life Cycle Engineer, 3M

Additionally, rather than scaling access to modelling tools directly, 3M built an architecture around the outputs. Results are pushed into 3M’s data warehouse and made available through Power BI dashboards allowing users across the organization to access product-level sustainability data without specialist training or direct access to the modelling environment. Sustainability teams are no longer required to act as intermediaries for every data request. Business units can access what they need directly, while the core team maintains oversight of methodology and data quality.

Beyond the BOM: the chemical mapping challenge

For many manufacturers, the primary challenge in automated LCA is assembling accurate and comprehensive product and process data. For 3M, there is an additional layer: chemical composition.

3M’s portfolio includes formulated products where environmental impact is tied directly to the composition of each such product at a chemical level. The LCA model accounts not just for materials and processes, but for specific chemical substances within those materials, mapped accurately to the secondary datasets that allow their impacts to be calculated.

Thousands of chemicals require mapping across 3M’s portfolio, with new materials being used within its portfolio continually, each requiring review, analysis, and dataset matching. Previously, working through the LCA process thoroughly represented at least a month of work each year for one to two full-time practitioners.

Looking ahead, the goal is for new materials to be mapped automatically as they enter the Makersite platform, streamlining the process and ensuring underlying data remains current as the portfolio evolves.

“It’s a significant task. We have thousands of unique chemical components based on our broad portfolio – that was already a sign that we could benefit from a more automated way to do this.” – Malachi Heder, Product Life Cycle Engineer, 3M

Making sustainability data accessible across the organization

While an initial driver was increasing external information requests, the resulting capabilities are increasingly being used internally. Since 2019, 3M has expected all projects entering the new product commercialization process to have a Sustainability Value Commitment that demonstrates how the product advances overall sustainability, improves competitiveness, and responds to customer demand – and structured product-level data is now helping support that goal more directly.

R&D and product stewardship teams can evaluate the impact of design choices in real time, comparing materials, assessing process changes, and understanding potential trade-offs across multiple environmental indicators. Although adoption is still early, this represents a meaningful evolution: from sustainability with a significant focus on reporting activity to sustainability further embedded within the innovation process.

The road ahead

3M’s focus is now on progressing from scale to assurance, moving from product carbon footprints to certified LCAs and, ultimately, to published and verified EPDs, with ISO alignment as a key milestone. As chemical data mapping becomes more automated and product-level results can be aggregated up to division and business-group level, the ambition is for sustainability to become an even more significant input across the business; focused less on responses to external requests and more on how products are designed and decisions are made.

“The goal is to roll that up – from product, to division, to business group. That’s a significant advancement in product lifecycle intelligence.”– Malachi Heder, Product Life Cycle Engineer, 3M