Corporate Sustainability Made Easy | Matthew Yamatin (Thermo Fisher) on Carbon at Scale

How does a company with 120,000 colleagues and 500,000 products put a number on its carbon footprint and actually act on it? Matthew Yamatin is Global Director Sustainability at Thermo Fisher Scientific. He built the corporate environmental sustainability program from the ground up after joining in 2022 and now coordinates a team of about 32 people across eight business groups. We get into the part most companies get stuck on: scale. Matthew explains the pragmatic method Thermo Fisher built to calculate product carbon footprints across half a million products, why mass balance is the only realistic path to non-fossil plastics in a regulated industry, and how to keep a sustainability program simple enough to move. We also dig into biogenic carbon, the greenwashing debate around bio-based plastics, and why bio-based stays tied to the oil price. If you work in sustainability, procurement, or product development in life sciences or medtech, this one gives you a model you can copy. CHAPTERS 00:00 How a 120,000-person company tackles sustainability at scale 01:16 The shampoo aisle problem: why sustainable buying is so confusing 04:47 Compete on performance, not on marketing 06:21 Inside Thermo Fisher: 120,000 colleagues, 8 business groups 08:12 Why the lab cares about waste and the boardroom cares about carbon 12:43 Scope 1, 2, 3 and the GHG Protocol in plain language 15:23 PCF vs CCF: product carbon footprint vs corporate carbon footprint 17:50 The scalable PCF method: site intensity over bill of materials 20:37 Why it always adds up to the corporate footprint 24:21 Why mass balance is the only scalable path to non-fossil plastics 30:27 Biogenic carbon explained 32:36 Where you can and cannot count biogenic carbon today 34:12 The greenwashing debate around negative-emission plastics 37:36 Two accounting theories: 0/0 vs minus one plus one 40:59 Why bio-based costs more and the pricing decoupling problem 44:10 Building a sustainability program from scratch 47:01 Anchor to customers, start now, skip the analysis paralysis 49:33 Find your North Star KPI: carbon, waste, or what matters to you 53:24 The innovation risk every manufacturer carries 55:14 Closing CONNECT WITH MATTHEW Matthew Yamatin:   / matthewyamatin   Thermo Fisher Scientific: https://www.thermofisher.com ABOUT THE PODCAST MedTech Sustainability by Design is the Gradical podcast on choosing better plastics and building better medical devices. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4vNQ6rP... Gradical: https://www.gradical.ch Book a free consultation: https://calendly.com/lucas-pianegonda... #MedTech #Sustainability #CarbonFootprint #LifeSciences #MassBalance