ABOUT THIS EPISODE
How does a company with 120,000 colleagues and 500,000 products put a number on its carbon footprint and actually act on it?
Matthew Yamatin is Global Director Sustainability at Thermo Fisher Scientific. He built the corporate sustainability program from scratch after joining in 2022 and now runs it across eight business groups.
In this episode:
- The scalable method Thermo Fisher uses to calculate product carbon footprints across half a million products
- Why mass balance is the only realistic path to non-fossil plastics in a regulated industry
- How biogenic carbon accounting actually works, and where the greenwashing debate sits
- Why bio-based plastics stay tied to the oil price, and what it takes to decouple them
- How to keep a sustainability program simple enough to move
If you work in sustainability, procurement, or product development in life sciences or medtech, this gives you a model you can copy.
Connect with Matthew: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewyamatin/
Thermo Fisher Scientific: https://www.thermofisher.com
00:00 How a 120,000-person company tackles sustainability at scale
01:16 The shampoo aisle problem
06:21 Inside Thermo Fisher
12:43 Scope 1, 2, 3 and the GHG Protocol
15:23 PCF vs CCF
17:50 The scalable PCF method
24:21 Why mass balance is the only scalable path
30:27 Biogenic carbon explained
40:59 Why bio-based costs more
44:10 Building a program from scratch
49:33 Find your North Star KPI
55:14 Closing
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