The global health and hygiene company is meeting Australia's stringent new reporting requirements in-house—while turning compliance into a business advantage
Essity is a global health and hygiene company whose brands, like Tork and TENA, reach roughly a billion people a day worldwide. Its Australasian business spans manufacturing in Melbourne, a paper mill in New Zealand, and operations in Fiji, making it a Group 1 entity under Australia's new ASRS framework. With a sustainability team of just two, Essity is completing its ASRS submission largely in-house, using Watershed to measure emissions, surface hotspots, and demonstrate that compliance can create real business value—not just tick a regulatory box.
Challenge
As a Group 1 company under the Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards (ASRS), Essity faced mandatory ASRS disclosure with a lean two-person sustainability team, no prior full scope 3 measurement, and a need to embed sustainability governance across a complex, multi-site manufacturing business without leaning heavily on external consultants.
Solution
Essity used Watershed as its primary platform for scope 3 emissions measurement and reporting, while building cross-functional working groups across brands and manufacturing sites to embed sustainability ownership throughout the business—making ASRS compliance a shared effort rather than a sustainability team burden.
Results
Challenge
Essity Australasia operates across multiple manufacturing and distribution sites, selling consumer goods at scale—a profile that places it squarely amongst the highest-emitting categories of the GHG Protocol. When ASRS came into scope, the sustainability team of two faced a steep challenge: fully compliant reporting, exceeding minimum requirements by including a first-ever scope 3 measurement in year one, and the need to stand it all up for audit, largely without external support.
The core difficulty wasn't just data. It was knowing where to start. The GHG Protocol contains 15 scope 3 categories, and not all of them warrant the same level of rigor. For a finance company, many categories can be estimated from spend-based data. For a manufacturer of physical consumer goods that procures raw materials, buys finished goods from third-party suppliers, ships products internationally across Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji, and sells consumables at scale—the calculus is very different.
The reason is that physical supply chains carry layers of variability that spend-based estimates can't capture: grid emissions factors differ significantly across countries; raw materials carry different footprints depending on where and how they were produced; and shipping intensity varies by mode, route, and distance. Even a single SKU can require tracing emissions across multiple countries and sourcing origins before you've accounted for half its footprint. Activity-based data isn't a nice-to-have; it's the best way to understand what's actually driving emissions.
Getting those people across a sprawling business to care and act upon the data was the other challenge. Machine operators, procurement teams, packaging engineers—these are the people whose daily decisions determine Essity's actual footprint. Without their engagement, compliance would be a surface exercise.
“Compliance and reporting is probably 60-70% of what we do, but it's the other 30–40% which really adds value in making progress against sustainability targets. The question is: how do you leverage all that time and effort to create value for your business?”
Jake Hatton,
Head of Sustainability
Solution
Before Essity collected a single data point, the team invested in something more foundational: making sustainability everyone's priority, not just theirs. The team built cross-functional working groups across each brand and manufacturing site, and before ASRS had even entered the picture, convened a governance workshop with senior leaders and their direct reports. The goal was deliberate—by involving that layer of the business in shaping how sustainability would be governed, the team ensured that when compliance questions came later, people felt ownership rather than obligation.
That groundwork shaped how the team approached scoping. Before collecting data, they asked a more fundamental question: given what kind of company Essity is, where are emissions most likely to concentrate? The answer pointed clearly to the same three categories already flagged in the challenge—not guesses, but the signature footprint of any company that makes and moves physical goods at scale.
To pressure-test those assumptions, the team ran a benchmarking exercise against Essity's global footprint, which confirmed the priorities and gave them confidence to go deep on activity-based data where it mattered, while using spend-based approaches for lower-priority categories. "Not all 15 GHG Protocol categories are equally important to collect as activity data," explains Amadeo Ardisa, Essity’s Sustainability and Impact Advisor. "For us, as a manufacturer of physical goods, three categories stood out immediately—and once we measured them, we could see exactly what was driving our emissions."
With sustainability ownership embedded across the business, the team turned to measurement. Watershed became the engine for Essity's first full scope 3 measurement—and critically, the business was already primed to receive what it found. For Modibodi, an Essity brand that makes leak-proof underwear, moving from spend-based to activity-based data was a step change in visibility, revealing the specific drivers of emissions rather than an aggregate estimate. Because stakeholders had been engaged early and were already expecting these categories to be significant, the data didn't arrive as a surprise—it arrived as confirmation, which made the case for action significantly easier.
For ASRS itself, Essity built its report in-house, using Watershed for emissions metrics and report building. The audit process—now complete—has revealed something the team didn't expect: with the requirements of ASRS being so new, auditors and clients appear to be learning from each other as they work towards compliant Sustainability Reports. Their advice to others going through it for the first time: treat auditors as a resource, not just a scrutineer, and use the time to extract as much forward-looking insight as you can—it pays dividends into the following year's reporting, not just this one.
“We couldn't do this in-house without having successfully embedded sustainability within the business, and without an effective software solution to help us measure and identify opportunities beyond the reporting requirements.”
Jake Hatton,
Head of Sustainability
Results
The Modibodi scope 3 baseline is a concrete example of what the work unlocked. The prior spend-based measurement gave an aggregate picture; the activity-based approach through Watershed showed exactly where emissions concentrated—and confirmed the team's hypotheses about which categories were driving the footprint. Now that the full Scope 3 measurement has been achieved for the total Essity Australasia business, that specificity is feeding back into conversations with procurement and transport stakeholders who were engaged early and are now partnering directly with suppliers to identify reduction initiatives.
A recent scope 3 transport analysis surfaced a handful of hotspots that challenged some prior assumptions—pointing to specific sourcing and logistics decisions, including where packaging and pulp are procured, that can now be addressed in direct partnership with procurement and transport teams who were engaged in the process from the start. The team's view: the report itself may only ever be read by auditors, but the data it generates will inform real business decisions for years.
“While our final Sustainability Report may not look quite as impressive as some others out there, we’ve delivered a substantial document that has an unqualified audit and goes above and beyond the minimum reporting standards. The content is of a high quality—and more importantly, the data that sits behind it is already allowing us to identify hotspots we can actually do something about. Given constant regulatory creep, it’s important to remind ourselves that at the end of the day, sustainability teams exist to reduce the impact of our operations and products.”
Jake Hatton,
Head of Sustainability