Corporate Responsibility Overview

Corporate Responsibility

In 2018, we launched Goodyear Better Future, our corporate responsibility framework, to enhance the existing governance of our high-priority topics. The framework helps ensure corporate responsibility is integrated into all levels of our organization, promotes communication and awareness and drives alignment with our corporate strategy and stakeholder priorities.

Goodyear’s Board Committee on Corporate Responsibility and Compliance oversees our corporate responsibility objectives and regularly monitors our progress toward achieving them.  Specific functional leaders implement our strategies, goals and purposes, reporting on progress in their areas to the Board or Board Committee.

The Better Future Steering Committee is responsible for ensuring functional goals are established and aligned with corporate strategy for Goodyear’s high-priority topics and for advancing our communications to external stakeholders. Our VP, Global Environmental, Health, Safety and Sustainability (EHS&S) and Business Continuity, reports to the SVP, Global Operations and Technology and Chief Technology Officer, leads the Steering Committee and provides an annual update to the Board Committee, enhancing their collective knowledge and awareness of key sustainability issues.

The Better Future Working Group is made up of the program managers of each of our high-priority topics. Each Working Group member maintains a sustainability scorecard, updated on a quarterly basis, to help ensure we are effectively managing our high-priority topics. Program managers share scorecard updates for their topic twice a year with the broader Working Group to enhance awareness and cross-functional collaboration. Members are responsible for understanding the current state of their topic, developing and aligning appropriate goals and targets and ensuring KPIs/metrics and strategies are in place for each goal. Performance is measured at least annually, and updates are shared internally and externally, as appropriate.

The Better Future Associate Council is a cross-functional group of associates who identify and implement location-specific initiatives aligned to our high-priority topics. The Council launched at our Corporate Headquarters in Akron, Ohio and meetings resumed in 2021. We hope to expand the Council to other global locations in the coming years.

Collectively, this governance structure is helping grow internal awareness and engagement for our Better Future framework while enhancing our communication to key stakeholders.

Stakeholder Engagement & Significant Corporate Responsibility

Topics Goodyear gathers stakeholder feedback throughout the year, building on information gathered during our sustainability assessments that are conducted on a regular basis and guided by our global sustainability team with participation of functional leaders. Our VP, Global EHS&S and Business Continuity provides the results of these assessments to the Board Committee.

To ensure we are managing our most significant ESG impacts, risks and opportunities, we continue to engage internal and external stakeholders who are knowledgeable in and value corporate responsibility. This summary highlights our key stakeholder groups and the type and frequency of interaction:

During our most recent sustainability assessment, conducted in 2018, we worked with an external consultant to gather feedback from internal and external stakeholders on why they viewed certain topics as significant to them, and the results were quantified. The final results helped us create a matrix of our high-priority topics:

The 2018 assessment validated the importance of many topics to our organization and stakeholders and highlighted new opportunities. Following the assessment, we confirmed we had existing owners for all high-priority topics and verified our commitments for these topics.

Better Future

In Goodyear’s Strategy Roadmap, we address the importance of developing great products and services that anticipate and respond to the needs of consumers while building the value of our brand by focusing on quality and efficiency. Better Future, our corporate responsibility framework, supports the Strategy Roadmap, summarizing what we believe and where we will focus. The pillars of the framework are illustrated below.

Throughout this report, we explain why these topics matter, what we are doing to manage each, and our progress and performance on commitments. Some commitments outlined in the pages that follow were set recently and may not yet have performance data available.

Climate Change

Evaluating possible impacts on climate is a global concern, and as a business with global operational impacts, Goodyear is committed to doing our part. Our plans to launch a climate sub-committee in 2020 were delayed with the need to focus on the business response to the pandemic. However, despite the pandemic, in 2020 we were able to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across our operations by 20% compared to a 2010 baseline. We also achieved a 31% reduction in rolling resistance in our global consumer tire portfolio, thereby advancing toward our goal of reducing rolling resistance in our global consumer tire portfolio by 40% compared to a 2005 baseline.

In 2021, we will initiate a cross-functional committee sponsored by our CEO and a steering committee comprised of senior leadership team (SLT) members with the goal of establishing Goodyear’s climate strategy that aligns with stakeholder expectations and requirements and enables Goodyear to contribute to global climate change objectives. The strategy will define our ambition and include long-term and incremental science-informed targets for Scope 1 and 2 emissions and the most relevant and influenceable elements of Scope 3. The outcome of the strategy will be a tactical roadmap with key strategy elements and actions. 

As the graphic below shows, the biggest impact through the tire life cycle is in the product use phase. One way that Goodyear can influence this is by helping to increase consumers’ fuel efficiency via improved rolling resistance products. Additionally, we work to improve our impacts throughout all life cycle phases through various strategies.

Goodyear utilizes Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to evaluate products quantitatively through the entire life of the product – from the sourcing of raw materials all the way to the end of the product’s life. LCA is performed using internationally recognized ISO frameworks that help provide a full picture of product impacts as well as opportunities for improvement that can be used in product development. Goodyear has also collaborated with the Tire Industry Project (TIP) to develop Product Category Rules (PCRs) to evaluate the impacts of tires.

Human Rights

Goodyear has strong policies and practices relating to Human Rights. For example, Goodyear’s Human Rights policy is incorporated in our Business Conduct Manual, Zero Tolerance Policy, Natural Rubber Procurement Policy, and the Supplier Code of Conduct. Purchasing associates globally are provided annual training on Human Rights.

In recent years, stakeholders have shown an increased interest in learning more about our efforts regarding human rights. In 2021, Goodyear intends to launch a Human Rights Subcommittee to develop an aligned and enhanced human rights strategy. This committee will evaluate potential risks and opportunities to reduce risk in our operational footprint and our supply chain, including in the areas of child labor, forced labor, workplace health and safety, working hours and wages, freedom of association and collective bargaining, discrimination and harassment, conflict-affected areas, and environmental health and degradation. We plan to provide an update on this subcommittee’s efforts in future reports.