The Beekly: Entrust's Director of Corporate Responsibility, Jen Dudgeon
Entrust makes the secure physical and digital identity products that underpin everyday trust — ID cards, credentials, and authentication technology used by governments and enterprises worldwide. One year into building out its corporate responsibility program, Director of Corporate Responsibility Jennifer Dudgeon is juggling five compliance workstreams at once, several with rules still being written.
Entrust's environmental program already covers REACH/RoHS product compliance, ISO 14001-certified environmental management at its Minnesota headquarters, and a Net Zero commitment for Scopes 1 and 2 by 2050 backed by a third-party-verified GHG inventory — one that saw Scope 3 emissions jump from roughly 85,000 to over 133,000 MTCO2e year-over-year as measurement matured.
Jen is now building the operational muscle to govern all of it: standing up a new EPR compliance function as California and the EU roll out packaging rules with deadlines that arrive before the regulations do, recreating a cross-functional "product stewardship" team to unify restricted materials, forced labor due diligence, and carbon footprinting, and pushing her board to recognize a gap the existing TCFD report doesn't capture — physical climate risk across the supply chain and suppliers that make and move Entrust's products, not just its offices.
In this conversation, we cover:
Building an EPR compliance program in real time, across inconsistent state and EU classification schemes, with no final rules and a hard deadline
Why restricted materials, forced labor due diligence, and carbon accounting are converging into a single "product stewardship" function — and what that means for how compliance teams are structured
Why a clean-looking TCFD report can still be leaving your biggest exposure unmeasured, and what it takes to convince a board that "no material risk" isn't the same as "no risk assessed"
How to make the case for climate risk to a traditional enterprise risk function, in language they already use — materiality, impact, time horizon — rather than as a separate sustainability conversation
This is a candid, in-the-weeds look at what corporate responsibility work actually looks like at a company that manufactures and ships physical products globally — where every new regulation adds another layer, and the hardest problem is often just knowing what you don't yet know.