Ok, so I have talked with a whole lot of award winners on The Winners' Circle, and I usually expect the big idea to feel big. This time the big idea was a portfolio of lab solvents that work exactly like the ones they replace, and honestly, that turned out to be the entire point.
Jeffrey Whitford, formerly the Vice President of Sustainability & Social Business Innovation at MilliporeSigma, the U.S. and Canada Life Science business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, is now the Chief Sustainability, Social Responsibility and Inclusion Officer for Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. The company just won Sustainability Product of the Year at the 2026 BIG Sustainability Awards for a suite of bio-based solvents built for HPLC and LC-MS labs. He is actually no stranger to our program, either, since BIG named him Sustainability Hero of the Year in 2023. We sat down to talk about how you really get a cautious industry to change, and it was pretty fascinating.
Why Labs Hate Changing a Validated Method
Now, a regulated lab is a bit different from your average office. Scientists in pharma quality control, diagnostics, and academic research typically run methods that took ages to validate. So swapping in a new solvent, even a greener one, usually means a pile of rework.
Whitford was really upfront about that on the show, saying, "let's be honest, humans, we don't necessarily like change." His first bio-based solvent was what he calls a novel substitution, which basically meant customers had to do different work to use it. That was a hurdle, and it clearly taught his team something.
Then he told me about a customer meeting in the UK, back in 2013 or 2014, where he was a little overly confident and promised a new solvent in 18 months. His teammate gave him a look, and she was more or less right. The real timeline was, in fact, closer to six more years.
The Drop-In Rule
That lesson sits at the heart of sustainable product design, at least the kind that actually sells. Trellis reports that at MilliporeSigma, environmental considerations are automatically included in product design and packaging decisions, which is quite a different setup from bolting green on at the end.
So the team asked a simple question, and Whitford put it this way: "What happens if we could come up with a drop-in replacement?" Basically, a drop-in means "one-to-one, chemically, structurally, identically the same." The award-winning portfolio covers bio-based acetonitrile, methanol, and ethanol for HPLC and LC-MS work, and it is really built for technical labs that cannot compromise.
According to the launch announcement, the portfolio delivers 25.9% lower CO2 equivalents on average, which is really about a quarter, based on the company's own lifecycle numbers. The company says labs can switch without redeveloping their analytical methods, and that is a pretty big deal.
Whitford was fairly determined to avoid the trap of the greener cleaner that "just kind of moved grease around." He knows a sustainable option that falls short could basically cost him the customer, and he said that would be "a huge disservice."
Decommoditizing the Commodity
Next, Whitford talked about where a company has a right to win, and this part was kind of brilliant. Solvents, he said, are "really a commodity category," so his mindset was to ask, "what happens if you could actually decommoditize a commodity."
The numbers were really telling, since solvents made up about 10% of the company's CO2 footprint in its inventory, and the portfolio holds more than 300,000 products. That is a pretty big slice from one product category. In certain applications, the team is actually looking at waste from the whiskey manufacturing process as a raw material, and Whitford says, "You connect people in a totally different way with that story."
The bigger picture is a little sobering. Basically, My Green Lab's reporting says about 75% of emissions for public biotech and pharma companies, and 88% for private ones, come from supply chains. In fact, the GHG Protocol makes the same point in broader terms, noting that the majority of total corporate emissions come from Scope 3 sources. Even the leaders are moving at a fairly slow clip, since the top 25 biotech and pharma companies by revenue posted roughly a 10% decline in Scope 1 and 2 emissions and a 5% reduction in Scope 3.
So a supplier that hands customers a lower-carbon input with zero requalification work is, frankly, a pretty valuable partner.
Proof From a Professor
Now for my favorite story of the whole conversation. Whitford said they just had an event with their board of partners and supervisors and one of their customers, and a professor talked about her students using the new material. Five of those students were working on PhD theses, so the stakes were really high.
Whitford admitted he was pretty nervous, or in his words, "sweating bullets," as she described how they tried to break it. She told the room, "We intentionally tried to go in and break it," and then, sort of dropping the mic, said, "but we couldn't find it."
That kind of proof travels fast inside a company. One colleague stopped Whitford in an airport and admitted he had actually thought there was no way the solvents effort would succeed. Product managers who once needed a nudge are now, at times, pulling back a bit to reframe a few things.
Whitford says that is when you have "tilted the scales," and it is a pretty good test. In his own words, "it's not just a sustainability thing anymore. It's just how we do business." He has been really consistent about this with the press too, telling Trellis he sees firsthand how sustainability is "creating a more attractive environment for our customers to choose us more often."
What Marketers and Operators Can Steal
So what should a Director of Marketing or a PR account executive take from a story about lab solvents? First, remove the adoption tax. If your new option asks buyers to change how they work, you are basically selling homework.
Next, pick a boring product that everyone has to buy and give it a story people repeat. Finally, prove it in numbers and stay upfront about the limits. Whitford is really candid that carbon accounting is still "art and science," and that his "job is predicated on trust." He is pretty blunt about AI too, saying that if you have "bad data to start you off on, you're off on the wrong foot."
His closing advice for other leaders was to just "start somewhere" and "quantify the impact," since about 57 to 58 percent of the company's footprint sits in its product portfolio.
Honestly, I spent a big chunk of my career in telecom and technology marketing, and I watched sustainability go from a shrug to CIOs asking which device would shrink their carbon footprint. I began in newspapers, so I have a soft spot for anyone who wins by making the reader's job easier. And as a Six Sigma Black Belt, I love a good friction-removal story, which this basically is. Good sustainable product design, in the end, is just design that respects the customer's time.
Congratulations again to Jeffrey Whitford and the whole team on the win, and on the really well-earned promotion to Chief Sustainability, Social Responsibility and Inclusion Officer. If you want more stories like this one, subscribe to The Winners' Circle podcast at bintelligence.com/podcast, and honestly, your commute will thank you.