A practical guide to building a sustainability report that goes beyond compliance and turns your progress into real business value.

Compliance Is Just the Baseline: Turning Sustainability Progress Into Business Value

You are probably doing more on sustainability than your customers and stakeholders realize, whether that is material reduction, waste diversion or emissions goals. Often, it's work that happens behind the scenes. And as rising customer expectations and new packaging rules such as EPR and the EU's PPWR set the floor, demonstrating measurable progress can drive real business value.

An annual report is an opportunity to show how sustainable priorities are embedded across your organization. Treated as a compliance filing, it checks a box. Treated as a strategic communication tool, it shows customers, investors and employees what your organization stands for and what its sustainability work is achieving. Compliance is only the baseline. A strong report turns sustainability progress into something your stakeholders can see, weigh and act on.

This article provides a practical guide to building that kind of report, using the Pregis 2025 Sustainability Report as a working example. It walks through four steps: set your purpose, set measurable goals, hold yourself accountable and turn progress into business value.

Set Your Purpose

Start with purpose, not metrics. Define what your organization stands for and why sustainability matters to your business, customers, employees and communities. The strongest reports connect that purpose to company strategy and business results, so the metrics that follow have context. Many organizations start from the three Ps of sustainability, people, planet and prosperity, then adapt the framework to what they value. Pregis frames its own version as Protect, Preserve and Inspyre, which put people, planet and performance at the center and tie packaging directly to business, sustainability and community impact.

Set Measurable Goals

Turn purpose into goals you can track. Build them on a SMART framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound, so every target carries a baseline and a deadline. We track progress against our purpose through our 2K30 goals, each a step toward a north star of net zero carbon emissions by 2040. What matters is how a goal gets measured. A broad aim to cut its carbon footprint is hard to prove, so Pregis breaks it into specific metrics it can track over time, like market-based emissions and operational emissions intensity. The 2025 report shows a 4% drop in market-based emissions, with renewable energy credit (REC) purchases driving the reduction.

Hold Yourself Accountable

Report progress transparently. Show what improved, name what you did and make performance comparable from one year to the next. A recognized standard defines how each metric is calculated, using methods that auditors and investors trust. Pregis aligns with Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) for reporting structure and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) for industry-specific metrics. That shared reference lets stakeholders benchmark your results against industry peers. For companies getting started it's also a strong first step: once you understand the data you need to collect and disclose, it sharpens your initiatives and the stories worth telling.

Turn Progress Into Business Value

The Pregis 2025 Sustainability Report, for example, highlights a national confectionery retailer's switch to the Pregis EasyPack® Strata on-demand paper system, made with 100% recycled content. That move cut material usage by 52%, kept packing fast through peak season and still delivered a premium unboxing experience. Less material per box also lowered cost and emissions, and protection held steady. That is the real purpose of a report, to prove that sustainability progress and business performance rise together.

The best time to prepare next year's report is now, while this year's purpose, goals and baseline metrics are still fresh. Explore the Pregis 2025 Sustainability Report to see how these four steps come together in one place.

Talk with a Pregis sustainability specialist about packaging solutions that support your sustainability goals and help demonstrate measurable impact.

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