Products of Change delivered a plethora of industry firsts to Licensing Expo this year, playing host to industry carbon emission discussions, packaging design innovations from some of the industry’s biggest brands, and new insight into product impact and transparency technology.

Taking the conversation of industry collaboration to the next level this year, POC advanced its position as the dedicated facilitator for the positive and sustainable transformation of the global $390bn brand and licensing industry, showcasing the boldest and biggest steps being taken by some of the sector’s biggest players, including the Walt Disney Company, the LEGO Group, Smiley Future Positive, the Natural History Museum, Wastebuster, Dayrize, and the technology and service provider, Fabacus.

A booth this year constructed almost entirely from ‘waste’, the Products of Change stand embodied the values and ethos of the story it is on a mission to drive across the industry – that waste has value. The LEGO Group brought its story of packaging transition to life once again with a collection of ‘before and after’ examples of how it has been removing single use plastic from its design process, while the Natural History Museum showcased its beautiful collection of Dunelm homewares, all of which have been produced with sustainability top of mind and in line with both the Museum’s and retailer’s own sustainability strategies.

Also housed on the Products of Change booth this year were a select number of the finalists from the 2024 Licensing Excellence Awards’ Best Sustainable Product or Campaign category. This year’s win went to The Narwhal Ocean Research Centre and ERDOS (in partnership with Afilo Brands) for its Polar Series collection making use of more natural fabrics to reduce carbon emissions. The Narwhal Ocean Research Centre (NORC) is China’s first civilian Antarctic research centre to have participated in beach clean up activities, micro plastics analysis, coral conservation, and marine protection.

NORC members wore the collaboration products during their recent Arctic expedition, proving the professionalism of the brand while Erdos recently opened a pop-up store at Xintiandi, a fashion landmark in Shanghai, and invited outdoor influencers and Arctic researchers.

The not-for-profit environmental educational platform, Wastebuster was also part of this mix this year, showcasing its cross-industry collaborative project Recycle to Read, a broken plastic toy recycling campaign that last year enjoyed a successful pilot run with the UK supermarket giant, Tesco. The campaign provided local Tesco stores with a line up of plastic toy collection bins Ito which children and families were encouraged to dump their broken hard plastic toys for recycling. Families were then invited to log their deposited toys online to receive points. These points could then be distributed to their choice of local school. The school with the highest number of points then stood to receive an impressive reading resource bundle from across the children’s publishing industry.

Meanwhile, Products of Change took the chance to showcase some of the developments being made in industry resources, presenting its own Sustainability Framework for the Brand and Licensing Industry alongside guidebooks developed by the likes of Bluesign Technologies and Aykroyd’s & Sons whose Sourcing for the Future booklet is a compendium of the steps it has taken to date on its sustainable journey of development.

Produced to be shared with Aykroyd’s customers, licensors, and all its business partners, the publication offers a new level of transparency over the production and development processes behind the company’s apparel portfolio, with key points highlighted within including the team’s approach to circularity in garment design as well as its ongoing investigation into closed loop operations and ways in which the team can recycle its garments.

From here, visitors to the Products of Change booth were invited to explore the Materials Innovation station, a showcase of the technologies and material alternatives being developed across the textiles and materials industries. This included a look at Upcycle Labs, part of the PDS Group who has been working with the circular fashion logistics company, Yellow Octopus to process waste and deadstock fashion items into fibres used as a resin in the creation of new homewares products ready to be sold back to consumers.

A remarkable step forwards in fashion waste management, the Upcycle Labs process marks the first etchings of what could be functional circularity across fashion, textiles, homewares, and retail.

From here, visitors were encouraged to explore the materials library and take a deeper dive into learning about some of the more sustainable and natural alternatives to fossil-based textiles. The library housed some truly groundbreaking innovations including banana leather and algae-based textiles.

On the subject of groundbreaking innovations, it fell to Fabacus to showcase a pioneering new piece of technology destined to transform the topic of sustainability in licensing at retail when it presented its Digital Product Passport at Licensing Expo this time around.

A new transparency tool developed to arm the end consumer with as much information as needed about the sustainable credentials of each product they consider purchasing, the Digital Product Passport will be a tool utilised by the European government and one that is expected to feature on every consumer product available to purchase by 2030.

Fabacus has begun to introduce its pilot DPP to the licensing industry, taking the shape of a QR code which, when scanned by the consumer, presents a ‘passport’ of product information, including where its materials where sourced, how they have been processed, how the product was manufactured and by whom, the distance it has travelled to the retailer, and the end of life initiatives the product has in place.

An EU-backed Digital Product Passport scheme will make its official emergence in 2026 and will kick off within the batteries and textiles sectors before being rolled out to all consumer products categories by 2030, forming an integral part of the EU’s Green Deal and its overarching ambition to shift towards a circular economy.

Build the Change, meanwhile, is the LEGO Group’s ongoing commitment towards sustainability and its mission to empower and amplify the voices of children around the world when it comes to the topic of securing the future for the next generation. Presented at the Products of Change booth this year was the LEGO Group’s campaign and manifesto, a printed booklet which was handed out to delegates, politicians, and world leaders at COP26 in Glasgow to bring home the importance of laying the foundations for a safe, secure, and sustainable future for our children by doing what needs to be done today.

Legislation and Innovation | The Walt Disney Company and the LEGO Group

Over the course of 2024 so far, Products of Change has been curating the narrative of sustainable transition across the global licensing industry helping brand owners, licensing partners, and manufacturers adapt to the incoming tidal wave of legislative demands and regulation changes – including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulations, Extended Producer Responsibility, and more.

The implementation of these new legislative pieces is tipped to transform the current business landscape, a matter that was addressed head on in a special Products of Change panel session featuring the Walt Disney Company’s vice president of environmental sustainability, Yalmaz Siddiqui and Jakob Max Hamann, business development and sustainability governance of LEGO partnerships, licensing, and publishing. 

In a challenge to the global brand licensing industry, Yalmaz told session attendees that “we can panic about the incoming legislation, or we can get innovative.” 

Both Disney and the LEGO Group offered a comprehensive introduction to the current lay of the land, exploring what we mean when we talk about scopes 1,2, and 3 greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the plans that both industry leading brands have to drive down their own emissions through their current Environmental Social Governance strategies. 

It was a discussion that set the scene for what came next – a dive into the steps that both brands have already taken to address their product and packaging design and manufacturing processes, as well as the tools and resources each are sharing with their respective partners to help with the transition of packaging and product design with firm 2030 net zero commitments in mind.

Disney’s Yalmaz shared insight from toolkits now available to the almost 4,000 strong network of licensing partners which – among other things – offer guidance on the materials and design approaches partners ought to avoid, those that are acceptable for the short term (as part of a longer-term transition) and those that are the preferred approaches for Disney licensing partners today.

As the largest brand owner by value within the global brand licensing and consumer products industry, boasting a portfolio valued at $62bn, the Walt Disney Company’s influence over the global network of licensed manufacturers and partners cannot be overestimated. 

Among its many commitments – supported by the company’s alignment with the Science Based Targets initiative – is Disney’s ambition to transform this network of stakeholders over the next five and a half years.

“By 2030, our goal is for 100% of our branded product textiles to contain recycled or certified sustainably sourced content or be made from lower impact alternatives,” said Yalmaz. “By the same year, our goal is for all plastic in our branded products and packaging to contain 30% or higher recycled content or to use a lower impact alternative, while the design of all our branded packaging will ensure the ability to reuse, recycle in region, or compost by 2030.”

Similar ambitions are shared by the LEGO Group who has detailed its targets and pathway to ensure that by 2025, all LEGO packaging will be free from single-use plastic, made from sustainably sourced renewable materials or recycled content, designed to be recycled and made with materials that are recycled globally as well as easily identified as recyclable by consumers, and be more efficient by reducing packaging volume, material weight, and eliminate all excessive packaging.

Indicating the toy company’s pathway to reaching this goal, Jakob highlighted that here, in 2024, the LEGO Group is currently monitoring all LEGO branded packaging to be reported on against its sustainable packaging criteria.

“We will then assess progress towards our 2025 sustainable packaging ambitions and provide additional support as needed,” said Jakob. “When designing packaging with a focus on sustainability, a priority should be placed on preventing and avoiding waste to minimise waste at end of life, as well as reduce environmental impacts throughout the packaging life cycle. Our waste hierarchy ranks waste management options according to what is best for the environment, from what to avoid, to what is good, what is better, and what is best.”

Platforming Carbon Workstreams and Emissions Missions

It was the same motley crew that joined Products of Change once again, later that same day, to make Licensing Expo history as leading actors from across the industry – including the Walt Disney Company, the LEGO Group, Informa Markets, and the sustainable toy brand Shore Buddies – joined for a special discussion on brand licensing’s carbon impact.

Marking a truly international gathering, the hour-long session welcomed voices from across the North American, UK, European, and Australian markets representing a mix of brand owners, licensing manufacturers, technology and service providers, and even the Licensing Expo trade show organisers themselves.

The open forum discussion sought to explore the subject of the global licensing industry’s carbon impact and the steps and plans businesses across the global scene currently have in place to measure, track, and reduce their scope 1, scope 2, and even scope 3 emissions. 

The session offered roundtable attendees the chance to not only hear once more from the Walt Disney Company’s Yalmaz Siddiqui and the LEGO Group’s Jakob Max Hamann, but other key players in the development of tools and strategies to aid the sustainable transition of the brand licensing industry, including Fabacus’ founder and ceo, Andrew Xeni and cco, Jonathan Baker who brought the discussion around to the subject of Digital Product Passports.

On the subject of transparency, the conversation was held to a backdrop of an innovation showcase from the product impact scoring platform, Dayrize whose pioneering technology enables manufacturers and brand owners to gain accurate visibility of the environmental impact of each of the products they develop before giving each one a product impact score. Dayrize’s technology has recently expanded to allow companies to manipulate criteria and individual product elements to explore manufacturing methods or materials that would deliver a lower – and thus better – environmental impact score in the actual manufacturing process.

Conversation spanned material use across products and packaging as well as retail demands and the big subject of the financial burden often associated with ‘going sustainable’ – brought to the table by Shore Buddies’ ceo Malte Niebelschuetz. 

While the roundtable traversed a broad spectrum industry sustainability factors, discussion was ultimately brought around to the subject of carbon emissions and the active role that leading brands such as Disney and the LEGO Group have been playing in the latest Products of Change project to set out an industry-wide standard and methodology for measuring, tracking, and ultimately reducing the global industry’s scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. 

A cross-industry collaborative project that is now well underway, the Products of Change Carbon Workstream is on the pathway to deciding upon a collective approach, which will be taken to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol with whom it will eventually be certified as the global industry standard.

While this year marked the second year running that Products of Change hosted its on-booth industry roundtable sessions, the 2024 Licensing Expo marked the first time these plans were brought to the public forum, offering a clear indication of the advancing collective mindset of the international brand licensing business.

Conversations now are building on foundations Products of Change has been laying over the last five years. With so much impactful change on the horizon, in terms of legislative demands, retail and licensor demands, and new innovative leaps forwards to meet them, POC is looking forward to bringing the next phase of this conversation to life at Brand Licensing Europe later this year.