Berkshire Businesses & Sustainability
5 Sustainability Solutions
What do a law firm, a church, a chemicals company, and a wellness consumer company have in common?
They all prioritised sustainability on a Monday morning before work and joined Wokingham’s People Planet Pastry - a relaxed and informal session designed for local businesses who are short on time but not ambition for reducing their business impact on the environment.
Despite their very different industries in the room, it was fascinating to understand current challenges and successes while enjoying coffee and pastries from local bistro-style restaurant Hamlet inspired by our surrounding offering hundreds of zero waste options in Maya’s Refillables.
What businesses need help with:
Engaging Employees Engagement - Even when environmental sustainability is given a strategic priority and companies are committed to leading the way, it is a challenge bringing everyone on board beyond the green team.
Verifying suppliers when there are so many different suppliers. One local business that has sustainability baked into every wellness product line find themselves with over 300 suppliers. This is not uncommon when sourcing more sustainable which usually mean one thing - more suppliers. Not all suppliers have the same levels of engagement and trying to make a quick decision on who to work with while balancing other considerations such as prioritising local vs national suppliers is a challenge.
Demystifying what Net Zero and Carbon Neutral mean and what exactly the targets really should be for a company.
Retrofitting listed buildings which is a slow process but one that is made easier when part of a network.
What came up:
A dedicated and cross-functional team is critical for any sustainability efforts so the entire business is represented and the the support of a senior sponsor non-negotiable.
There is a real dilemma between voluntary and mandatory action when making sustainability a strategic priority. One solution suggested was linking KPIs to sustainability specifically. Net Positive is a great book to read written by Paul Polman who took over as CEO at Unilever and embedded long-term thinking.
There are very different levels of engagement on sustainability by suppliers.
When thinking in terms of circle of influence you have - whether it’s in the ones, 10s, 100s or 1000s.
Integrating sustainability into product development from the very beginning - and learning from customers what they want to see
Making it easy for people to change their behaviour. The church encourage their congregation to bring their recylcing to the church.
Solutions Discussed
Mothertree - Changing your banks while daunting, is likely to have the single biggest effect for reducing a business’s impact and it doesn't need engagement from employees. For reference, since a big climate agreement known as the Paris Agreement came into effect in 2016 - binding countries to limit global heating - the world’s 60 largest banks have spent €4.9 trillion on fossil fuels.
For employee engagement on the environment and corporate volunteering made easy, we talked about Giki which is focused on gamifying environmental action and On Hand which offers both social and environmental actions. They take care of all the CRB checks and connect employees with local initiatives.
Small 99 Hero - is a free Carbon Accounting Tool focused on helping SMEs get to a Carbon Reduction Plan. Most appreciated I think is how rapidly you move on from a carbon footprint calculation to identifying your top priorities and ideas for what actions you can take whether it’s done, doing or do later can be tracked and shared.
Orlofus - A new but nevertheless incredibly useful aggregator to discover the best products and services to make your business more sustainable.
