Beyond Box Ticking: Alan Knight’s playbook for pragmatic sustainability

Alan Knight OBE, Chief Sustainability Officer at WE Soda, has spent four decades moving sustainability from the page to the plant. Ahead of his Sustainable Industry Live keynote — “Forty Years in Corporate Sustainability: Observations from the front line, and why net zero is wobbling” he sets out a positive, deeply practical agenda for manufacturing leaders who want to make change that lasts.   

Start with your product story 

Knight’s first and most consistent lesson is disarmingly simple: stop letting frameworks dictate your agenda. “Focus on your product story rather than the frameworks,” he says, by which he means understanding, end-to-end, how your product is sourced, made, used and disposed of, and where in that chain you can make the biggest, fastest difference. What makes you proud? What makes you uncomfortable? Fix more of the latter; scale more of the former.   

That product first mindset isn’t anti-reporting. It’s anti distraction. In the early days there were no surveys to fill in, Knight recalls; you learned by visiting suppliers and seeing issues firsthand. He worries today’s blizzard of questionnaires can flip the ratio: less fieldwork, more formfilling, thinner impact. The course correction is to protect time for the real work; listening, walking the line, solving problems with your value chain partners and treat disclosures as a byproduct, not the product.   

A three-part formula that actually moves markets 

When Knight maps his biggest career wins, a pattern always appears;  partnerships, innovation & standards. The Forest Stewardship Council and Responsible Steel are his go to examples.  

Competitors, customers and civil society agreeing what “good” looks like, committing to make and buy to that common North Star, and then innovating technically and in the supply chain to deliver it. Leave any one of the three out, he says, and momentum stalls; combine them, and whole sectors shift.   

To join Alan and 200 of his sustainability peers at the sixth annual
Sustainable Industry Live, click the button below. 

This years event is focused on practical ways to harness technology to drive greater agility while reducing emboddied carbon. 

November 6th. 
Free for manufacturers.
The Bridgewater Hall - Manchester.

Why “net zero” wobbled, and how to steady it 

Knight doesn’t relish the headline, but he doesn’t duck it either: net zero has “wobbled”. Not because science changed, but because the politics, the economics and, frankly, the messaging did.  
Three correctives stand out: 

1. Dial down the absolutism. Business leaders know the 80/20 rule: the last 20% can be exponentially harder and more expensive. Framing decarbonisation as “major reductions now and a credible, conditional pathway for the rest” can keep more organisations in the tent and accelerate aggregate progress.   

1. Get out of the weeds. We’ve become “drowned out” by technical debates about scopes, removals and definitions. Important? Yes. Enough to dominate the story? No. Rebalance toward outcomes.   
2. Be honest about the economics. Reputation and loyalty matter but so do cost curves and competitiveness. If the economics don’t work, adoption stalls. That’s a policy design issue as much as a corporate one, and we should say so plainly.   

The tone he advocates is “adult-to-adult”. Tell stakeholders what you can do today, what you could do with the right incentives, and what would unlock the rest, then create the forum to fix those dependencies, together.   

Embrace complexity by narrowing to what’s material 

Sustainability is a system of systems; complexity is built in. Knight’s antidote is materiality with teeth: identify the three or four issues where your product has the biggest footprint or the greatest potential handprint and put your weight there.  

If you brew beer, carbon matters, but alcohol related health impacts may be the most material issue to tackle. If you make chemicals for glass, carbon pricing and sector policy may dominate your pathway.  

Don’t let the loudest generic metric drown out your genuine material risks and opportunities.   

To police your own blind spots, he offers two routes.  

1. The informal (and most effective): talk to customers, NGOs and communities; go up your supply chain and see conditions yourself, “Nothing beats a field trip.”  
2. The formal: use double materiality to map impacts and rank them by severity. Either way, widen the lens beyond internal bias.   

Markets move when the rules do 

Is there a business case for greener products? Of course, but only when the timing and pricing are right.  

Knight points to “choice editing”: the 1990s playbook that quietly pulled the worst options from the shelf (CFCs, phosphates) or made better choices more attractive (energy labels), so consumers didn’t have to be saints for markets to improve. It worked then; it still works, provided sector pathways and policy align to tilt the economics toward better.   

On technology, he’s refreshingly clear eyed. Provenance tools, digital traceability and satellites will help enormously, but they are catalysts, not causes. “Technology doesn’t tell you what good looks like, nor persuade others to work towards it,” he says. That takes negotiation, consensus and, yes, politics. “Human intelligence” must come first; then the tooling can scale the solution.   

 Action over admin 

Many sustainability teams feel trapped in a zero-sum between reporting about impact and creating it.  

 Knight urges leaders to ask harder questions:  

• Which schemes actually alter behaviour on the ground?  

• How many do we really need?  

• Are we optimising for comparability at the expense of creativity?   

Until the balance shifts, ring fence time for direct engagement, “talk to people, visit factories, have the arguments” because that’s where ideas and trust are forged.   

Targets, promises and conditional pathways 

We’ve made “bold targets” the price of entry. Knight’s not against ambition; he’s for precision. Publish the long term goal and the near term promises you control.  Then list the dependencies (policy, carbon price, customer demand, technology readiness) required to go further. That clarity is more useful to policymakers than a wall of net zero logos.  

His example from soda ash and glass is telling: if a large slice of your footprint sits in how customers use your product, some target frameworks may not fit neatly, so collaborate at sector level instead of forcing a square peg into a round hole! 

Circularity that solves two problems at once 

Knight, gets excited when circular economy becomes matchmaking. He cites work turning waste plastics into inputs that can be processed into soda ash, a new feedstock for detergents, glass and more. “One person’s problem can be another person’s solution,” he says, provided you can find each other and commit.  

The prize is bigger than carbon alone: supply resilience, cost stability and reduced environmental burden.   

 The next big frontier: nature 

Asked what most excites him about the next trend in sustainability, Knight doesn’t hesitate: nature.  

Restoring landscapes and ecosystems reframes our relationship with place, delivers co-benefits like wellbeing and water security, and could rival, even overtake carbon as the defining corporate sustainability priority by 2035.  
Manufacturers with land, logistics and local ties are well placed to lead here, so should be alive to first mover advantages.   

Five moves manufacturing leaders can make now 

2. Build the trilogy. Convene competitors, customers and civil society to define “good”, codify it in a standard, and line up the innovation, technical and supply chain ecosystem(s) to deliver.