Starting with the basics
The beer case
Each group was handed a beer manufacturing value chain and asked to map where the emissions actually come from, then figure out what to do about it.
The numbers surprised a few people in the room. Agriculture made up about 23% of the footprint, malting 4%, brewing 14% — all inside the company’s direct control. But packaging alone came to 34%. Add distribution and transport (14%), refrigeration during use (9%), and end of life (2%), and it’s clear that most of the emissions sit outside the factory walls, in Scope 3.
That’s the part that tends to get missed. Companies can spend years optimizing their own operations and barely move the needle, because the bulk of the impact sits further down — or further up — the chain.
Groups worked through the whole lifecycle — agriculture, production, packaging, logistics, storage, end of life — and came up with fixes for each stage. A sample of what ended up on the whiteboard:
- Regenerative farming and organic fertilizers on the agriculture side
- Renewable energy and recycled water in production
- Lighter, reusable packaging, plus bottle and can return schemes
- Route optimization, EVs, and rail instead of road for logistics
- Natural refrigerants and heat recovery to cut down refrigeration emissions
- Anaerobic digestion and biogas to deal with organic waste at end of life
Nothing groundbreaking on its own, but the exercise forced everyone to connect each idea to a number, and to a specific point in the chain. That’s harder than it sounds when you’re used to talking about sustainability in generalities.
Why this mattered
The session worked because it didn’t stay abstract. It asked people to think like operators — where’s the emission actually coming from, what would it cost to fix, is it even worth it — rather than just agreeing that sustainability is important.
Professor De Giovanni’s closing challenge summed it up well: stop treating sustainability as a box to check, and start asking how it can actually shape the way a business is run. That’s a harder question, and a more useful one.
Part of the Milan immersion week for the International Executive MBA (IEMB) cohort at SDA Bocconi Asia Center.
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