Sustainability Strategies

New Strategic Principles

In 2008, 3M launched a project to develop three strategic principles around sustainability. 3M's strategies for sustainability encompass the pursuit of customer satisfaction and commercial success within a framework of environmental, social and economic values. These principles were developed to provide 3M businesses and corporate staff groups with a flexible framework to engage our customers and key stakeholders around sustainability including help our customers address environmental challenges through 3M products and technologies.

3M Sustainability Principles

• Economic Success: Build lasting customer relationships by developing differentiated, practical and ingenious solutions to their sustainability challenges.
• Environmental Protection: Provide practical and effective solutions and products to address environmental challenges for ourselves and our customers.
• Social Responsibility: Engage key stakeholders in dialogue and take action to improve 3M’s sustainability performance.

The Development Process

An internal strategic planning team with representatives from environmental operations, corporate communications, strategic planning, and 3M businesses developed the principles. This team used feedback from 3M’s external stakeholders including customers, non-governmental organizations, governments, investors and others to develop a set of draft principles. Then, over three months, the team held nearly 50 internal feedback sessions with 3M employees across the global to get their input on the new principles. The final principles were reviewed and endorsed by 3M’s corporate operating committee which includes the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer and other executive officers.