These things are absolutely going to matter in the runup to 2030 and beyond. A strategy aligned with these megatrends can make your voyage a success. Failure to heed them just might put you on the rocks.

At the same time, figuring out which trends are rising and which falling within a dynamic landscape can be difficult. “In this environment, forecasting has become almost impossible – change is no longer linear but exponential,” notes Roland Berger.*

Perhaps, but at least we can keep a weather eye on the crucial trends that may affect us, and our organizations. We can see what is happening, assess the risks, and watch closely what others are paying attention to — and planning for.

Now that 2020 is here, and the engines driving climate change — including the risks and opportunities associated with them — are clearly understood, the notion above is even more critical than before.

Now, I have believed for years that companies who failed to consider climate change as a critical trend — and a major-league risk — were not planning effectively. But that’s me, and I’ve been working in sustainability for 25+ years.

What about organizations that aren’t in the field? They may have other ideas, based on their own unique mission and experience. How much weight do they actually give to sustainability and climate change? Which megatrends are they following?

I decided to find out, and set our research team to look at what thirty large and influential organizations — think tanks, corporations, government agencies, consultancies, and more; across sectors and around the world — were thinking.

In this proprietary 30 for ’30 Megatrends survey, we searched for and compiled what these sources see as the biggest and most critical trends for the next decade.

We intentionally leaned towards organizations that were not sustainability-focused — 90% of the entities we included were not related to sustainability.

Yet climate change took the top spot as the predominant megatrend. That in itself is fascinating considering the broad scope of these sources: military and civilian, strategists and accountants, forecasters and governments, and more.

The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, for example, has said climate change, “These changes… will have direct and indirect social, economic, political, and security effects,” including impacts on agriculture, migration, infrastructure, supply chains, and beyond.

Financial services firm PwC, the Rand Corporation, the U.K. Ministry of defense, and others just as diverse, also had the changing climate high on their lists.

As different as these organizations’ perspectives were, however, as a group they saw issues related to sustainability as shaping the world over the next decade. Here are a few examples:

#1 Climate change, which underpins many of the other trends on the list

#3 Urbanization, which is forecast to increasingly become a function of climate change. Coastal areas face challenges, desertification and groundwater issues move people off the land, and many other submerged effects of changing conditions swell our cities

#6 Resource scarcity, too, is clearly a partial function of higher global temperatures. Water. Food. Power. Trees and forests. Species. The climate is going to dramatically alter these in the coming decade. Worldwater’s ‘Water Scarcity Clock’, for example, keeps a running total of humans living in water-scarce areas, currently above 2.36 billion. They expect that will rise to 2.7+ billion by 2030.

And let’s not forget #10, mass migration which, while historically a function of war, persecution, or economic conditions will increasingly come from climate-driven sources such as those noted above. In fact, the 2018 World Bank report, Groundswell: Preparing for Climate Change found that, without drastic and concerted action, around 143 million people will be displaced within their own country’s borders by mid-century, “to escape the slow-onset impacts of climate change.”

Thus, four of the top ten issues these 30 major organizations see as megatrends relate directly to sustainability. But the results held another surprise.

Our survey showed that climate change was top-of-mind for a wide variety of organizations most of whom had nothing directly to do with sustainability. That means any company’s strategy may founder if it doesn’t include the biggest force driving the world we’ll see in 2030. That’s a problem.

And not just for you: it means your entire company probably has a blind spot. Most people pondering the largest global megatrends imagine that sustainability is somewhere on the list. But now we know where it should actually be placed: right at the top.

If you or your organization hasn’t already positioned it there, you are navigating from the wrong chart and that, too, is a problem.

Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance firm, also sees climate change as a core concern moving into the 2030s and — raise your hand if you see another trend forming — has been refusing to insure some Big Carbon producers.

As their chief climatologist — notice that they have one — told The Guardian last year, “if the risk from wildfires, flooding, storms or hail is increasing then the only sustainable option we have is to adjust our risk prices accordingly. In the long run it might become a social issue,” meaning people and businesses with lower incomes may not be able to afford insurance at all.

This could be a game-changer for the social fabric, and for companies and systems dependent on solvent families and businesses in order to thrive. Homes, small businesses, land in a flood or wildfire zone, or a business model based on carbon, may shortly be uninsurable.

On the other hand, companies probably want more than to simply compete. They want to do something good for the world, to work in alignment with the U.N. Sustainable Development Goas (SDGs), to be leaders in resolving the worlds ills.

Clear and penetrating understanding of megatrends can allow these organizations to be more, to do more, to have a catalytic effect. As we’ve noted many times, companies who lead on sustainability are the ones who drive innovation, and thrive by placing their values out front.

It is interesting that the World Economic Forum’s risk-trends assessment also lists Climate Change as their top issue, with an eerily similar list of corollary risk factors.

This point should not be lost on any of us: the very opportunities afforded by these trends when properly planned for, present a nearly identical set of risks when they are not. Whether you end up stuck on a reef or with a strong breeze at your back depends on how well these megatrends are embedded in your strategic plans.

To learn more about our 30 for 30 megatrend original research, and how best to apply it, contact us or email me directly.

* Roland Berger was one of the sources surveyed in our 30 for 30 research.

Intuitively, money that is almost entirely electronic seems like it should be environmentally friendly. No paper, no rummaging the earth’s crust for metals, no armored-car deliveries, no inks or energy for printing and stamping machines… a big win, right? 

Yet most of these blockchains are also ‘mined,’ using massive numbers of specialized computers, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Massive computers running 24/7/365 mean massive electric bills translate to massive greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).

Mining crypto, which is essentially an incredibly complex and decentralized accounting exercise — requires an incredible amount of energy. As The Guardian colloquially framed it in 2018, “Effectively, a bunch of computers engage in a race to burn through the most electricity possible and, every 10 minutes, one wins a prize of 12.5 bitcoin for the effort.”

The BBC reported in July that the estimated total energy consumption for Bitcoin mining alone is “around seven gigawatts of electricity, equal to 0.21% of the world’s supply. That is as much power as would be generated by seven Dungeness nuclear power plants at once.

Depending on the price of Bitcoin at the time, the value may or may not be worth the effort, hence there is now a focus on reducing electric costs. 

The majority of cryptos are mined in China, Mongolia, Russia, Canada, Iceland… Do you see a trend developing here? Sweltering places like Guatemala, Pago Pago, and Indonesia are not top destinations for mining, and that is likely because of another challenge for crypto miners: the incredible amount of heat generated by the data centers needed as mining equipment. 

Mining in the cold lands means less need to pay additional costs — in dollars and greenhouse gases (GHG) — for air conditioning. With an average temperature around the freezing point of water, mining in Irkutsk means no A/C is needed, and that plenty of heat is provided by the very equipment used to mine. And this is now proving useful, for not everyone who lives and works in the cold mines cryptocurrency, and those people need heat also. 

Enter: a number of solutions for using excess heat from mining as home or industrial heating. Take Iceland — where crypto’s demand for electric has, for the first time anywhere — now outstripped that of households. Iceland, though very cold on the surface, is a bubbling mass of magma from the mid-Atlantic ridge, and between geothermal and hydro power they are able — without the use of fossil fuels — to generate more electricity than they need. Rates are low, miners have flocked, and now they are using the excess energy and returning it in the form of heating for barns and other buildings where they can house their thermally challenged equipment. 

Some miners have since relocated from China — the largest crypto-mining hotbed in the world — to Canada, and one such is operating data centers at Canadian oil and gas field sites due to low gas prices. 

Just within the past few weeks, a Canadian oil drilling firm actually formalized an agreement with three mining outfits to use their excess natural gas byproducts for onsite electrical generation, specifically to power their crypto-mining operations.

“Especially in areas of the world lacking pipelines and other gas transportation infrastructure, vast amounts of such associated gas (byproducts) are commonly flared as waste or unusable gas.”[1]This agreement assigns the gas to “several large mobile units equipped with gas-electric generators at oil wells. The excess fuel is used to produce electricity to power the cryptocurrency mining hardware, which is typically installed in modified shipping containers that are easily transported. 

An enterprising miner in Irkutsk, Russia — with a mean temperature hovering around the freezing point — has started a company offering sealed mining units to locals to heat their homes. With the seven — count ‘em — coldest months averaging a toasty -12.8℃ (9℉), it’a a tempting deal. The valuations will change as Bitcoin rises and falls but, at the time of The Guardian’s report (August, 2019), “a single heater (made) about $55 for its owner while radiating heat for up to 10 square meters.” The customers would get paid for the crypto their box mines while they get free heat for their homes.

Doing Siberia one better, a company called Hotmine is marketing a similar program in Ukraine. A company in France, too, began such a program in 2018 — though presumably there’s less call for heaters there. All concerned seem to like the idea of taking crypto away from the big mining companies and sending it back to its decentralized roots. 

There will come a time when — just like Sutter’s Mill — the rich lodes of Bitcoin and many of the other cryptos will play out. Bitcoin is expected to dry up for good in the 2140s for example. In the meantime, it’s clear the initial mining models are unsustainable. Kudos to those innovators who have, at least, reduced the impact of this lucre on the planet. Here’s to many more.

References:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare

This time of year, it’s traditional to wrap things up, tie the year up in a nice, neat bow. To note what has happened in the sustainable world, with all the trimmings.

Yet, as specialists in sustainability, we must look a little askance at any kind of wrap (4.6 million pounds of wrapping paper produced annually),[1] at tying things up in a nice, neat bow (61,000 kilometers of ribbon used each year), or making notes (2.65 billion Holiday cards, “a football field 10 stories high”[2]). And, of course, we worry about putting it all under a tree (25-30 million live trees annually and 23.6 million constructed of PVC[3] in the U.S. alone[4]). 

[1] Lifehacker.com, How to Recycle all Your Holiday Garbage
[2] Stanford University, Frequently asked questions, Holiday Waste Prevention
[3] Statista, Christmas trees sold in the U.S. 2004 to 2018, 2019
[4] National Christmas Tree Association, Oct. 2019

Predictions, on the other hand, have a far lighter footprint. Last December we roundup up others’ predictions for sustainability. An upsurge in the Circular economy was in one analyst’s crystal ball, and that has certainly been coming to pass. Vegetable ‘meats’ were in another’s, forecast to trend upwards — and this surely was The Year of the Plant-Burger.

An emphasis on measurement and valuation was also seen in the offing, although, while that has indeed been underway, we feel there’s a long way yet to go — as we’ll note in our PreCap ahead.

The list rounded out anticipating a rise in Green construction starts and in corporate partnerships with green-and-CSR NGOs.

Yet this year — this critical, make-or-break year of what is, perhaps, the most critical decade in humanity’s history — we’re not just summarizing what others have projected.

We’re also casting our own (organic, farm-raised) bones, dusting off our (100%-post-consumer recycled) Tarot deck, and savoring the last drops before reading our (fair-trade) tea leaves.   

We’re just ten years out from the IPCC’s 2030 winter take-all deadline and we need to know where we stand.

So we’re devoting this Special Issue to the Ghost of Sustainability’s Past, 2019, and to the Spirit of Sustainability Yet to come. After all, as dark as that Christmas Eve night was for Scrooge, the foreshadowing of his own tombstone was a catalyst for dramatic and permanent change. Perhaps our awareness that we have a very short window to sort ourselves out will do as much for us.

2019 Recedes: ReCap

The Word Has (Finally) Gone Forth from This Time and Place: Sustainability

In the wider world, this was the year sustainability arrived in the mainstream of public consciousness. The impact of the IPCC’s report defining climate change as not only an emergency, but one requiring immediate and massive triage or else cannot be underestimated.

It may have been the ‘or else’ that galvanized the greater world community, or it may not; but it cannot be denied that we’ve never seen anything like the wave of climate meetings, climate actions, climate strikes, and climate marches we were treated to in 2019. 

The notion, too, that a 16-year-old girl, who cut school in Sweden each Friday to stand alone in front of the Parliament building with a homemade sign, has just been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, is more reminiscent of a Harry Potter plot than a real-life story.

Yet Ms. Thunberg, Generation Z’s unlikely ambassador to the U.N. and de facto leader of the youth climate movement, was runner up for the Nobel Peace Prize, tore the world’s top politicians a new one on international television, and has earned the vilification of those who, to put it mildly, are not all-in on climate change.

Exactly how far Gen Z and their teenage clarion can push the world towards action is unclear, but a whole generation of climate first-responders who are not yet 23 years old, and many of whom are voting and marching for the first time, is a force the world has not seen the likes of recently.

Plastic: In 2019, Lots of People Started Doing Stuff About It

Plastic was another dominant 2019 theme. As we’ve been reporting, plastics have moved from the ocean ‘patches’ to global ubiquity with the advent of micro plastics, which have been found throughout our waters in unprecedented quantities; and we are now grappling with plastics so tiny they can actually become part of the fabric of our tissues.

Nano plastics, which you can read about here, and the effects of which we do not yet have data for, are everywhere and cannot be cleansed with a boom, a sweep, a net, or a sieve. As we’ve also reported however, strains of bacteria and of fungi have been discovered happily snacking on PET and other plastics, and may be viable for breaking down man-made polymers.

On the other hand, plastics hitting the world’s radar — and ours — has also produced programs like Loop®, a partnership between a recycler and several of the world’s largest consumer-product corporations. Loop was announced this year at the Davos summit to create new, closed-loop products with reusable containers, to-and-from shipping, and high hopes for a circular future.

During the year Loop added major-league retailers like Kroger, Tesco, Loblaws, to their initial roster of manufacturers such as Clorox, Proctor and Gamble, and Unilever — to name a few. Delivery giant UPS was also heavily involved.

We attended the 2019 Ocean Plastic Leadership Summit (OPLS), held in the Atlantic gyre off Bermuda (read about it here). The most important takeaway from the Summit was the willingness of wildly differing stakeholders — from major activist organizations like Greenpeaceon one end to major plastic polluters on the other — to sit down on a ship together for days collaborating away on the issue.

Renewables: The Forage for Storage

During the year we highlighted several new and promising storage systems for power generated by renewables, the lodestone of the green-energy industry. CO₂ itself is a viable medium for renewables storage, and Scotland debuted new tech making hydrogen for fuel from excess tidal energy generation.

Perhaps the most fascinating approach we reported this year is a new utility being tested in Berlin using nano-coated salt to store excess energy. But we’re especially keeping an eye on — and an upcoming issue of Sustainability R.O.I. will cover — a new liquid battery called solar thermal fuel, a fluid that can apparently store solar energy for up to ten years, make it available for use, then recharge again in the sun. Game changer? TBD but we’ll have more on it soon.

Meanwhile, Back at the Brazilian Amazon… The International Year of the Forest Fire

2019 was certainly The Year of the Forest Fire. The world is going to have to come to grips with the phenomenon of wildfires that can be seen from space. Whether man-made through climate negligence, as we’re seeing in Australia, Alberta and Alaska — and many other places not starting with ‘A’ — or man-made for-profit fires, as in Brazil.

California rounds out our ABCs, but we can skip to I and M, Indonesia and Madagascar, and let’s not forget Russia, where Greenpeace reports 12 million hectares (≈ 30 million acres) have burned since the beginning of the year. Many of these fires are raging on into 2020.

And Speaking of 2020… Here’s our PreCap

Gen Z: A Generational Tipping Point?

All current information points to a younger generation zeroed-in on climate change. While the reasons are obvious — they are about to inherit this Earth — they are an age group that traditionally has little voice or power. This particular generation of high schoolers, however, may be an exception.

We all saw student climate strikers take over the streets of virtually every major city in the democratic world in 2019. The U.S. has seen unprecedented levels of activism on gun control, also being led by teenagers. The affected — and apparently aggrieved — young people have been roused to action and they have unheard-of crowdfunding, crowd-organizing, crowd-everything tools their forebears did not.

All current information points to a younger generation zeroed-in on climate change. While the reasons are obvious — they are about to inherit this Earth — they are an age group that traditionally has little voice or power, and sometimes little interest. This particular generation of high schoolers, however, is an exception. 

We all saw student climate strikers take over the streets of virtually every major city in the democratic world in 2019. The U.S. has seen unprecedented levels of activism on gun control being led by teenagers. The affected — and apparently aggrieved — young people have been roused to action and they have unheard-of crowdfunding, crowd-organizing, crowd-everything tools their forebears did not. 

Amnesty International reported this month that the 18 – 25 crowd — Gen Z, Post-millennials, Digital Natives, the iGen, or what have you — list climate change as their number-one concern, based on a survey of more than 10,000 young people.

In fact, the survey showed, of the 23 top concerns facing their country or the world, the respondents listed climate change at #1 (41%), pollution at #2 (36%). Loss of natural resources was ranked #4 (23%), while access to clean water came in at #8 (19%). In other words, four of that generation’s top-ten concerns had to do with climate and the environment. 

As defined by birthdays after 1997 to somewhere in the 2,000s, Gen Z is now the largest U.S. age demographic, with more than 90-million members. Likewise around the globe, with voting ages generally between 16 and 18, this bodes well for climate legislation, activism, and focus. 

In the U.S. alone, there are 15.3 million students in grades 9 – 12, meaning 15 million young people – deeply concerned about climate change and already trained to advocacy and activism — entering the voting rolls between the 2020, 2022, and 2024 elections. 

This time next year we’ll be recapping a period of youth activism unlike any since the Vietnam-war era, yet one with far greater access to information and therefore less naïve and more forward looking. As we all know, one member of this generation just hit the cover of Time for her impact on climate change activism.

Blame!

In a world where many live in scarcity, one commodity is always in full supply. And, while there’s always plenty of blame to go around, we expect environmental blame to be in overdrive before 2020’s in the books.

The effects of climate change are becoming too frequent, too severe, too onerous a financial burden to many large and powerful institutions, for denial to be maintained. 

The next ‘thousand-year-flood’ doesn’t care if it carries off the home of a climate denier or an environmentalist, and when the truth finally becomes personal, anticipate deniers howling for relief along with everyone else — and looking for someone to blame. 

They may not find such a receptive audience, however. As Fortune succinctly framed it, “for the insurance industry, global warming has advanced from a future ecological challenge to a present financial shock.”

Reinsurance company Munich Re called 2017-18 the worst two-year period for natural catastrophes on record, with insured losses of $225bn.[1]

The largest reinsurer in the world, Swiss Re, has taken in twice as much in premiums for disasters at it has paid out in claims over the past twenty years. Not bad, not bad at all. However, “for the past two years, Swiss Re has had to pay out vastly more for large natural catastrophes, those over $20 million apiece, than its models anticipated for an average year’s loss.

In 2017, Swiss Re expected to incur $1.18 billion in large “nat-cat” losses, based on actuarial averages, but racked up a bill of $3.65 billion.” In 2019 hurricanes once again blew their projections out of the water – rain and floodwater in this case.[2]

So insurers at least, have no doubts whatsoever about climate change. Their prime question is, how do we protect ourselves? They are, after all, masters of managing financial risk. So, what are their plans?

[1]Financial Times, Sept 9, 2019, Why Climate Change is the New 911 for Insurance Companies[2]Fortune, Oct 24, 2019

For one, as Fortune notes, some are pulling back from insuring carbon-dependent industries such as coal. In our last issue we noted that there were two tipping points: one for climate change, the other for the movement working to preserve our world as it was. We did not, however, consider adding ‘lack of insurance for carbon polluters’ to the scales. Hmmm.

One reason such companies are easing back from insuring Big Carbon? As Fortune continues, 

“In January, the CRO Forum, a Netherlands-based organization of chief risk officers of big insurers, warned of new sorts of climate-related claims that may confront insurers. Among them: hefty bills from corporations they insure against lawsuits.

At this point, legal action charging that big carbon emitters contributed to climate change or failed to react sufficiently to it is just beginning to emerge. But, as the insurance group noted ominously, the science of pinning climate blame on corporate polluters “is developing fast.” (Emphasis ours. -Ed.)

The oil industry, for example, whose documents prove they knew decades ago the effects their products were having on climate, may be in for a beating. We believe it will be in motion by late 2020. 

We also anticipate that politicians and individuals alike who denied climate science right up until it smacked them in the head, will zero in on Big Carbon polluters. Rending of garments and anguished cries of, “They knew but they didn’t tell us!” might be heard in committee hearings and courtrooms everywhere. 

The courts, too, will be busy assigning blame in their black-and-white fashion, and their decisions could have consequences far beyond any one decision. As we’ve seen above, insurers and investors are mighty touchy about backing or underwriting industries taking a pasting in the courts.

For those considering the current state of the U.S. judiciary, we suggest that such decisions are just as likely to happen outside the U.S. – and even from other jurisdictions, they can still affect multinational companies, including those based in the U.S.

Government Policy Post-2020 Election: It’ll Be About Climate Regardless

Whoever wins the next election, we are convinced next December’s debate will be all about government’s role in climate change. Either how we prevent the government from continuing down its dark and stormy path, or how we use government to pull the world back from same. 

Let’s say the Democrat wins. No doubt we’ll reengage with Kyoto and Paris, no doubt we’ll see a return to our accustomed air and water protections. 

But how will we deal with carbon? Will we tax it into submission? Will we embrace cap-and-trade? Will we remove subsidies, or transfer them to green initiatives, allowing the market to correct carbon? 

Or will we be forced to turn to less-direct action given the U.S. political system’s veto points?

On the other hand, should President Trump win a second term, how will the world deal with the only nation in the world to sign and then repudiate Paris, to tilt at windmills on national television, and to fill its ministries with those who represent harm to the planet? 

In terms of nuts-and-bolts regulation, the first-term damage has been consistent and systematic: 

•    Clean Fuels Grant Program: Rescinded
•    Clean Power Plan: Repealed
•    Oil and Gas Emissions Standards: Weakened
•    Waters of the U.S. Rule (WOTUS): In Rescission
•    Clean Air Act Emissions Standards: Repealed
•    Energy Conservation Standards for lamps: Repealed 
•    The Methane Rule: Stayed

And much, much more of same. There is no reason to believe this agenda won’t pick up speed in a second term. 

Most likely the rest of the world is, in some sense, waiting for the U.S. election to decide how best to proceed.

While a U.S. leader can be ignored, shunned, laughed at, and repudiated, the actions of the world’s most powerful country cannot. Should Trump be reelected, the reality of another four years of American improbity and climate recalcitrance may galvanize the rest of the world. 

They may ask, can anything be done even though the lone superpower left in the world is out to sabotage those efforts? Can voluntary action work? Can businesses provide an active counterweight? 

This time next year, one way or another, those things will be top-tier issues.

Meatless Meats: Millions Served Many More on the Grill

The rise of the non-meat patty — a rise many have been awaiting for years without result — has come to pass. The stunning growth of Impossible Foods, purveyor of the Impossible burger — available at such behemoths as Burger King, White Castle, Red Robin and Little Caesar’s — and the Beyond Burger, also rocketing up the charts in Dunkin’ and other outlets from coast-to-coast, has shocked the burger establishment. 

The dichotomy of a company committed to converting the hard-core meat eater, in an outlet like Burger King, which has reaped the financial rewards of deforestation and factory meat farming, is not lost on either party. Yet the symbiosis is working. Burger King had its largest growth spurt in decades in 2018. 

Here, too, is an example of values in action. Four years ago, Impossible Foods had an offer on the table — from Google — of between $200 and $300 million for the company: they turned it down. In 2017 Business Insider quoted Impossible Foods CEO and founder, Pat Brown, to the effect that, “The company is defined by a mission that — no matter how much someone who wants to acquire the company may say they believe in it — no one believes in it with the commitment that we do, and we’re not going to put it at risk.”

The trend would indicate they made the correct decision. Given the growth curve, we anticipate others will be entering the market with similar products this year looking for big-time partnerships. it’s time for imitators to enter the market through their own outlets. The Big Prize, of course, would be McDonald’s, which has dipped its toes in the vegan-patty market with a test-offering in Scandinavia and, this year, a pilot of a McDonald’s proprietary Beyond Burger in Ontario, Canada.

Given an exponential growth pattern between 2016 and the present, we see no reason why we won’t be talking about meatless offerings again at the end 2020. Look for the continued strong growth of meatless in next year’s December recap.

Measure Everything: Total Impact is Coming

There has been a trend towards measuring stuff for some time, and some of us have had the bug for longer than others. Valutus, of course, has had a thing about measurement for years, but we are noticing one particular strain of the disease that is just getting underway and which, we predict, will be a hot topic come next December: Total Impact, also known as Full Impact. 

Traditionally, a company’s impact centered around its revenues: how many customers they served or people they employed, how much value in assets did they control? How large was their market share or — the frequent refrain — how much did they increase shareholder value this quarter? Monetary results are meaningful, no doubt, but what about the wider footprint? 

As we wrote earlier this year, “A company’s true impact is much deeper than its carbon emissions, its water use, its payroll, or its taxes paid. In fact, a huge chunk of a company’s impact is submerged, not visible on the surface at all. Generally, it stays that way until the right questions are asked.”

Consider the 3+ billion iPhones out there in the world. We’ve reported in this space the advent of inexpensive power and gas metering in rural Africa, all done by cell phone, and the submerged social effects once women and children don’t need to forage, then burn, charcoal toxic to them and to the environment. They can then attend school or do other useful work. These impacts are not measured on the traditional balance sheet.

On the other side, what of their manufacture? Their use? Their disposal, given the complexity and breadth of materials and batteries within each device?

How about the power they take to operate, or the social environment created by their manufacturing facilities in Taiwan and China? Is there a value to the example they set for other companies?

Elephants knock down trees on their way through the brush, bears and big cats shred bark to sharpen their claws, while beavers, of course, change the landscape itself with their architectural efforts.

Elephants don’t mean to create firebreaks or habitat for the dung beetle, and beavers don’t plan to reduce downstream flow, nor do big cats mean to expose insects for hungry birds. Yet those submerged effects happen just the same.

Likewise, business often churns up the landscape on its way to making things and generating profits, with consequences rippling out far and wide across their customer base, their value chain, employee ecosystem, and planet. It’s important to know what those effects are, how large the impact is, and who is affected.

Consider the fur industry’s impact on those same trees and rivers when it harvested beavers almost to extinction. Such impacts — both the pro and the con — can and should be measured to see the clearest possible footprint of a company across all activities.

There is still a need for a unified standard in TI reporting, however the basic framework — looking at Social, Economic, and Environmental impacts — is fairly consistant.

Valutus has a particular take on how to ferret out the total impact using something we call Impacts Science. Impact Science leans heavily on raising submerged impacts to the surface while also valuing catalytic impact. (For more on this, see our series on Total Impact: Part I, Part II and Part III.)

This may just be the year we end by noting that big companies began working on TI reporting.

Happily, many of us just had a short break, a breather, a catnap away from the fretting and the struggling and the urgency and foreboding that comes with working on sustainability and wondering what it will take to power it down, to make the world safe.

We’ve all been hard at it, noses-to-grindstones, and engines revving dangerously high and a little rest and refreshment was certainly in order.

Now, as you rise and turn to your overcoats and galoshes once more, we urge you to take stock of your own impact, of what your contributions mean to the world and to us all.

How? Well, given the season, we suggest the George Bailey method: Consider what the world would be like if you had never been born.

Imagine our skies, our lands, our oceans. For all their challenges, would they be as healthy as they are if you — whether scientist, activist, legal expert, NGO, entrepreneur, writer, researcher, corporate head of responsibility, or consultant — were not here?

What if you’d never been born to fight the holes in the ozone over the Great Barrier Reef, or the fires raging there right now? Or to catalogue micro-and-nano plastics in all corners of our globe? What if you weren’t holding back commercial whaling and cetaceans were now just relics fastened together with hardware in museum rotundas?

How could we have held industry so accountable, created sustainable reporting standards, or fostered organic farming, without you? Who would advise businesses on how and why it is worthwhile to champion the environment, if not you? If you weren’t here to re-green our planet, we might all be living in a blighted Potter’s Field rather than in lovely Bedford Falls.

If you had stood beside George on that bridge above the Falls, and hadn’t been there to champion renewables, what then?

After all, activists before us were here to create the EPA, the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Superfund, and many other critical institutions that have held back at least some of the tide. Without them, the air above Los Angeles and Houston and New York might be unbreathable today, instead of among the cleanest in the world.

Would there be seahorses and great white sharks and bald eagles back in the Hudson? We don’t have an angel to show us, but it’s not likely.

But you were there, and so the whales and eagles are here. The air above New York is clean. The oceans still have a fighting chance. Climate change, still in the balance, might just tip the right way.

In this extraordinary period for the race, you may, like George Bailey, feel your contributions aren’t enough, that in spite of your best efforts, things are regressing. No! No way.

We are at the nexus of two tipping points, one slipping deeper into climate change and its dramatic consequences, one an upswell of good works and powerful actions that might just keep us all above water, and below +2.0º C.

Perhaps, without your contributions to the planet and its people, we would already be tipped the wrong way.

In these times, and as this brief Holiday respite draws to its close, we hope you’ve relaxed. Taken a breath. Sipped some Champagne. Rested. You’ve earned that!

And so, we at Valutus wish you and yours a safe, happy Holiday season and a new year full of the knowledge that what you are doing matters.

Time to get those parkas and boots on. Time to square your shoulders and put them, once again, to sustainability’s plow.
We need you.

Warm regards,

Daniel Aronson,
Founder, Valutus
The Value of Values

All mining is tough on the planet, but most metals that are mined in large quantities have critical uses for building things. Consider iron, of course, along with copper, zinc and aluminum. Magnesium and calcium have widespread critical functions, as do lithium, potassium, and many others. 

Consider cadmium too, used in nuclear fuel rods and other specific applications. Global production is in the low tens of thousands of tons annually. Gold, on the other hand, saw 3,332 tonnes come to the surface last year, up 2% from the year before.

China led the way with 404 tonnes followed by Australia, Russia and the United States.

Now, gold has its uses: dentistry for example, and as a highly conductive element in electronics components. It is used in certain types of glass, and for infrared shields. But 3.3 thousand tonnes? How much infrared shielding can there be?

The truth is, the vast majority of gold has no intrinsic value, just the value we assign it. More than 50 percent of gold is used for jewelry, and another 30 percent for bars and coins (25+%) and banking purposes (almost 5%). What remains, a mere 20% of all gold, is used industrially. 

There is, potentially, an argument in favor of jewelry and bullion, coins and gilding: aesthetics are difficult to quantify.

And as long as the world was on the so-called Gold Standard, with fiat currencies backed by gold reserves, it was easier to make the argument for some significant level of gold mining.

But once we consider gold in all its ramifications; once we factor in the environmental costs of mining, we unearth a very different – and unpleasant — aesthetic. Headlines, such as this one from the Smithsonian reading, “The Environmental Disaster That is the Gold Industry,” are not encouraging to the argument that jewelry alone is worth it.

Using “practices such as open-pit mining and cyanide heap leaching, mining companies generate about 20 tons of toxic waste for every 0.333-ounce gold ring,” adorning a bride or groom’s finger. “The waste…is laden with deadly cyanide and toxic heavy metals. Many gold mines dump their toxic waste directly into natural water bodies,” explains Brilliant Earth.com.

Twenty tons for every third of an ounce, at about 3,200 tonnes of gold mined annually, suggests the industry creates a staggering 6.1 billion tons of toxic sludge every year. Yikes! That is a heavy price to pay for trinkets, crown jewels or no.

Coal, after all, is damaging on both ends, at the mine and once it’s burned. Yet coal, at least, keeps people warm and cooks their food and supplies millions with electricity to power everything from light bulbs to electric cars to, well, gold mining. 

Iron ore too is difficult to extract and takes a toll on almost all aspects of the environment. Yet as justification, we build much of our lives out of it. Schools, houses, office towers, machinery, tools, none of these would be possible without iron. Mitigation and best practices are needed, but it’s not difficult to make the case for its use. 

Gold, which cannot make such a case, is also difficult to extract, and to do it requires energy. Lots of it. The raw ores must be taken from the mine and treated chemically to separate the gold, a process requiring 25 kWh / gm of refined product. 

Consider the 3,300+ tonnes of gold produced last year: at 25 million kWh per metric tonne, that comes to a truly shocking 82.5 billion kWh of energy, roughly the annual use of Pakistan. There are more than 182 nations using less.

So, while there may be gold in those hills, we may need to consider carefully if we should leave it there. As the World Gold Council notes, virtually all the gold ever mined still exists above ground, some 187,200 metric tonnes, representing close to 9 trillion dollars in assigned value. 

Couldn’t that be enough?

By Dan Kempner, Managing Editor, Valutus Sustainability R.O.I.

I once spent a month going cross-country via Greyhound. New York City to Toronto, and thence across the broad expanse of Canada to Vancouver, courtesy of Greyhound’s brand new unlimited travel Ameripass program. Ninety-nine days for 99 dollars, anywhere in the U.S. and Canada.

I made full use of it, skirting the great lakes, then across the prairies and up, up, up to Banff and the glorious Canadian Rockies before nestling, happily, in Vancouver’s pristine embrace.

Down the rocky Pacific coast a week later to San Francisco and a night at the Wharf, turning the last streetcar of the night by hand, and eastward now, through the wide-open west to Amarillo, then across the Mississippi in the dark, and on homeward through the Blue Ridge and up the East coast, home at last.  

Buses are somewhat unique in that they wind through otherwise untraveled hamlets and stop in front of Dime stores in every small town. I began by keeping count of the ‘Main Streets’ and ‘Broadways’ but quickly gave it up — every town had at least one.

A day out from Toronto, north of Lake Huron, we found ourselves in the center of a town I’d never heard of. The bus pulled up with the usual wheezy exhalation of brakes and the doors sighed open.

“Where are we?” I asked my seatmate, as he shook me awake. He pointed and, following his finger I saw a huge, enormous Canadian nickel, raised on a pedestal, dominating a nearby hill.

“Sudbury, Ontario”, he replied. “Armpit of the Universe.”

 “Why?” I asked groggily. “I mean, why is this the armpit, specifically?”

His answer was lost in the rush for hot coffee and restrooms. But now, with apologies to the inhabitants, I may have an answer. The story is a common one in the broad brush of its unforgiving and unsustainable history, but so uncommon in its severity, that it’s worth detailing here. There is also good news, too, in that the city is apparently working hard to restore its habitat.

It begins something like this: In late 1849, Ojibwe natives objected to the Quebec and Lake Superior mining Companies’ operations on their own land, and asked to have their resources back or compensation for same. In a familiar refrain in such cases, “The government… was not willing to provide compensation for valuable mining locations, nor participate in any negotiations – a refusal which flew in the face of Indigenous law and the Royal Proclamation of 1763,” notes Sootoday.com

 Some of those Algonquin Ojibwe attempted to disrupt the mine’s activities, in what is now known as the Mica Bay incident.

The ‘incident’ ended, inevitably, with several of the Indian leaders arrested. Treaties were quickly effected along Lake Superior and Lake Huron, in which the British Crown became the new owner of what had been Algonquin Ojibwe land for an estimated nine-thousand years — since the Wisconsin glacier melted[1] after the last ice age.

In exchange for the land, “the Crown pledged an annuity to the First Nations people, originally set at $1.60 per treaty member and increased ‘incrementally’,” the last such increment being in 1874 and bringing the annual sum to $4. per member. That remains the number today. (Sigh.)

The natives moved to pre-established reservations, copper mining operations continued unmolested, and Sudbury, Ontario, was born.

In the early 1880s, the huge pine forests attracted some 11,000 loggers and a railhead was established, bringing yet more Europeans to the area for railway work. Blasting for the railroad revealed more rich mineral deposits — specifically nickel-copper ore — and hastened yet more settlers.

The establishment of roasting yards was, it seems, the coup de gras. These were giant pits laid with pine logs over which was poured raw ores. The pine was lit to reduce the ores and, “about 250,000 tons of ore would burn in 100 heaps. After the lighting, the wood burned in about 60 hours. The pile would continue to burn for approximately three to four months,” giving off sulfurous steams that affected man, beast and plant. [2]

“Between 1913 and 1916,” notes Active History, Canada, “the Mond Nickel Company removed all vegetation from the Coniston area to provide fuel for the roasting yard.”[3] Over the next forty years, “100 million tons of sulfur dioxide gas was emitted from the ores, which severely impacted the health of Sudburians and had catastrophic impact on the natural environment.”[4]

In combination with massive open-pit nickel mining throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, “the loss of vegetation in the Greater Sudbury area has caused soils to erode into watercourses, degrading… streams and rivers. This degradation continues today in areas that still have poor plant coverage.” This was true over more than 82,000 hectares (202,600 acres / 820 sq kilometers.)

A group that manages the city’s geological and educational tours takes visitors to the ‘superstack’, a 1,250 ft (380 m) chimney, the second tallest in the world, located atop the Inco mining company’s smelting facility. The tour encompasses enormous fields made of mining slag poured, semi molten, to form a new surface, a sort of man-made volcanic field.

Beyond that, “as mining, stripping, sintering, and smelting operations increased with world demand for metals, Sudbury’s landscape began to look like a barren moonscape. The mining and processing of sulfide minerals released sulfur that contaminated and acidified soils,” noted the American Geoscience Institute.

The tour mentioned above guides visitors past rock formations of a curious dark-black hue. As their materials explain, “Greater Sudbury’s rocks are not naturally black – rather, rock surfaces were stained black by early mining practices. Early smelter emissions contained sulphur dioxide and metal particulate. Sulphur dioxide mixed with atmospheric moisture to form acid rain that corroded the rock and produced a coating of silica gel, which in turn trapped metal particulate fallout to form a black coating,” more than three inches deep.

Much of the plant loss reported in the 1800s still remains today, and “there are still thousands of hectares of land without adequate plant cover. In these areas, continued land reclamation and restoration is needed to begin the long-term healing and recovery of the ecosystem.”

Now, there’s good news here, and I’m getting to that and I’m not trying to pick on Sudbury. Most other towns in North America can also talk of displaced natives and improper use of resources.

But Sudbury stands alone as an example in this sense: its entire reason for being was to rip local resources from the earth with absolutely no thought, care, plan or concern shown for the land, its foliage, its wildlife or its people. The land was literally stripped, blasted, sintered, burned, poured over with molten slag, acidified almost beyond redemption and utterly denuded of vegetation in the service of its logs and minerals.

It had earned the title my seatmate had given it by its sheer, wanton lust for wood and metals. It was, indeed, the armpit of the universe.

Yet, by the time of my advent, most of the damage had happened long before. Remediation was beginning. All I knew was that I was in an exceptionally dirty and denuded town in the middle of nowhere, that the coffee was hot, and the nickel was big. Heck, it was huge!

And Sudbury has been working hard on remediation ever since. So hard that it has won numerous awards, been honored with praise by such environmental luminaries as Jane Goodall, who noted that Sudbury proved, “that determination and persistence can heal habitats.”[5] It was one of twelve cities to receive the Local Government Honours Award at the 1992 Earth Summit for its greening efforts.

There are still 15 active mines in the area, and the challenges are legion. Yet, according to the American Geosciences Institute (AGI), greater Sudbury is now home to, “the largest, most successful environmental restoration program in the world.”

That may sound a bit ambitious but considering that, “when restoration efforts began in 1969, germinating seeds died on contact with contaminated soils,”[6] it doesn’t sound quite so far-fetched.

According to Joseph Casciaro, writing in Prezi.com, “it was 1972 when people became concerned with the destroyed land and horrible air to breathe.”  Ah hah! Three years later, when I passed through, there were already efforts at remediation underway. The mines themselves have made enormous strides to reduce dangerous emissions and remediate the landscape.

Three more years and the Regional Regreening Program was in effect. By the early 1990s, more than 2 million trees had been planted and some animals, birds and fish were coming back to the area.

Due to the acidic soil conditions that, as noted above, kept the land barren, Sudbury laid down a layer of alkaline dolomite mixed with grasses and small plants rather than trees. In a short time trees began to grow in these seeded areas and the process of reforestation was underway. This same process is continuing today.

Yet, as John H. Gunn notes in his 1995 master work on the area, Restoration and Recovery of an Industrial Region: Progress in Restoring the Smelter-Damaged Landscape near Sudbury, Canada,[7] the mainly birch forest stands that have resulted were far too small and isolated to support animal life other than insects. These trees were themselves far more open to infestation and disease from these same creatures.

Over the years since, however, the stands have filled out, pines and other trees have been planted or found their way naturally into the landscape. As of 2018 around ten million trees had been planted by more than 12,300 volunteers.

The topsoil liming continues in areas still deforested to allow the regreening process to begin in those areas as well. This soil is pre-seeded with a charming mixture of forest brush plants:

Fall rye, Canada wildrye, little bluestem, slender wheatgrass, and alsike clover are the precursors of the forests to come. Sudbury now has some of the cleanest air in the Province, according to CBC Radio, and reforestation is partially responsible. The Sudbury Regreening Program’s own 2018 Annual Report sums up the last four decades of restoration fairly well.

“Forty years of regreening effort has achieved remarkable results, transforming a barren, rocky landscape into a green and living one.”

There are still many thousands of hectares to be tended and restored, lakes and rivers to remediate. There may still be a history of native displacement to contemplate and diverse forests yet to fully regrow.

But at least we can say this: the next Greyhound stopping in Sudbury, taking a breath before crossing the great prairies, will do so in a shiny new bus station, in a town surrounded by trees. They will see the same huge nickel on its bright new base at the new Dynamic Earth Science center, presiding over a thriving city with breathable air, blooming wildflowers and budding new forests.

And the next cynical seatmate will have to find another moniker for Sudbury. There’s a long way to go but it is no longer, as it certainly once was, The Armpit of the Universe.

[1] Winterhalder, Keith, Living with Lakes, ch.2, pp.17 [2] Republic of Mining, 2008
[3] Forestry Chronicle, December, 1972
[4] Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED), 12/1/2012 Ed.
[5] Goodall, Hudson & Maynard. Hope for Animals and Their World. Grand Central Publishing, 2009
[6] American Geosciences Institute, “Mining remediation in the Sudbury region of Ontario.”
[7] Springer-Verlag, New York, 1995

The most widely used model describing the spread of innovative products is called the Bass Diffusion Model, after its creator, Frank Bass. In it, adoption is driven both by innovators — those who have adopted the new product or idea, or who tell others about it — and imitators, those who hear about it, some of whom then adopt it.[1]

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[1] Typically between 30% and 50%

For a sustainability-related example of what this looks like, here are sales figures for plant-based meat company Beyond Meat:

When we add a trendline, you can really see that we’re in the exponential-growth phase of adoption:

This is in contrast to the growth pattern of CDP disclosure, which has been very robust but much more linear:

Obviously, we need whatever positive growth we can get, but it’s critical to have more of the exponentially-growing good stuff.

Is there enough of that good stuff? Sometimes it doesn’t seem so – but maybe there’s a lot more than we see. One recent example brought this home to me.

I’m pretty engaged in the issue of plastic waste. I’ve given presentations at SB Oceans, SB New Metrics, and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Disruptive Innovation Festival. I’ve led the creation of the True Plastic Impact standard (now being used by a billion-dollar consumer goods company), been part of the Ocean Plastic Leadership Summit, and penned articles about it, such as what the history of Wi-Fi can teach us about a plastic standard. 

And yet, even I only found out a couple of months ago about some fantastic work being done to build collaboration in this area. And just today, I learned for the first time about one of the biggest microplastic pollution datasets.

That gives me hope that there’s a lot more out there I don’t see. While the bad stuff is big and visible, maybe there’s more of the good stuff than we think.

So how do we help the good stuff grow, once we find it?

• Examining Bass’s model suggests some specific approaches we can take to nudge those growth rates upwards. Increase the ability of adopters to tell others. We at Valutus do this with language, stories, and concepts that resonate with people who haven’t yet felt compelled to join in – for example, talking about sustainability in ways that echo with financially-oriented businesspeople. And others do the same but for different audiences, such as talking to people about their legacy and what they want to leave behind

• Grow the uptake of sustainable actions by those who hear about them. Our strategy at Valutus is to make adoption faster and easier through tools, support, and showing the connection to success (financial, competitive, and otherwise)

• Ramp up the ‘market’ for sustainability, broadening its base by showing more people that it matters to them. We accomplish this through helping people see the value of values – how much value is created when they act on their values.

• Amplify the impact of sustainable actions on the physics of the world. The goal is to help people evolve more quickly, from actions that are valuable but don’t have direct, physical impacts on the world — such as setting a science-based target (SBT)[1] — to actions that do. For example, we try to help companies meet the targets they set by changing the business model or production techniques, or by getting others in the value chain to change theirs (by being a catalyst) 
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[1] Setting a science-based target is important. We even help companies do it! But we help them do it 95% faster than the traditional way, so they can move on quickly from setting the target to meeting it, since that is where the physical impacts are.

OK, but even so, will we make it? Will we shift the balance and do so in time?

It’s daunting. But we end up at an approach inspired by Sustainable Brands: Be courageously optimistic. We choose to be optimistic. This takes courage given the reality of the situation, but we must.

Deciding we’re going to make it is actually powerful, in an unexpected way: it engages the human capacity for creativity. Saying, “We’re going to make it. How?” makes us work backward from success, which opens up new avenues of creativity and generates better ideas.

Then we have to turn those ideas into actions. Here, optimism is a choice that helps us — and others — to act. Optimism is more energizing than anxiety — though there’s plenty of cause for that — or pessimism. It’s also more contagious, more catalytic.

It’s tempting to say we don’t know if we’ll make it, but it’s better to say we will. We have no choice. We just have to figure out how – then do it.

Game on!

If we’re near a tipping point, we ask, which way are we likely to tip? Will we slide downward, towards environmental and social crisis? Or will we swing upward toward recovery?

It is safe to say that the first five IPCC reports — 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007, and 2013 — while of critical importance to scientists, green-oriented policy makers, and activists, did not make much of an impact on the public consciousness.

It wasn’t until the IPCCs interim Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5℃, released just over a year ago, gave us an actual deadline — 2030, just 12 years ahead — by which we had to have our carbon under control or face irreversible consequences, that the IPCC broke into the mainstream.

It was that report which seemed to enter the public consciousness and, for the first time, truly broaden the notion that we had a finite date, a time-frame within which we must accomplish something enormous, or else. In essence, the report suggested, you all have 12 years to hold off the tipping point for the climate. That point, of course, is now just ten short years away.

And you know us, we like to think about these questions rigorously, so let’s start with the basics: a tipping point is, “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point,”[1]  after which something — an idea, a product, a belief — takes off, grows exponentially. It is, as Malcolm Gladwell put it, the point where it “spreads like wildfire.” 

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[1] Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point. Little, Brown, 2000

In the case of our climate however, we’re not concerned with one single tipping point, but two. The first is the point beyond which climate damage and GHGs in the atmosphere will accelerate, pushing us farther and faster where we don’t want to go.

The other is closer to what is usually meant by the tipping point, and what Gladwell focused on: in our case it’s the point at which beliefs about the importance of protecting the planet begin to gain faster and wider acceptance, and actions that follow from those beliefs become dramatically more widespread.

The hard part: these two tipping points would tilt us in opposite directions! That means it’s critical to know which one is likely to win out. If it’s the downward scenario, we need to mitigate all we can and take action to adapt to a completely new way of life. If it’s the swing back toward normalcy, how much damage will be done before we get there and what do we do about it?

There are things pushing us in the wrong direction, such as accelerating melting of ice and decreasing investment in alternative energy.[1] And there are things pushing us in the right direction, such as growth in the percentage of the population that thinks it’s important to do something about the climate and in the number of companies that have set science-based targets. Which will win?

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[1] Partially mitigated by falling prices. But we need a lot more investment, not less

It is also making its way into corporate governance. Companies reporting their climate performance to CDP have risen from 220 in 2003 to almost 7,000 in 2018. 

Yet it nonetheless must be admitted that, for the year following the IPCC Special Report — this year — we are again expected to top the prior year’s record for global carbon emissions.

Ten years out from the 2030 deadline and the U.S. is beginning the work of withdrawing from the Paris agreement. Around 3,500 square miles of Amazon rainforest has been lost to wildfires for agriculture expansion. And the year is not over yet. 

Yet we amazing humans, when we measure things and commit to improving them, usually do. Think about the unimaginable improvements in computing power for example, enabling today’s iPhones to process 3.36 billion instructions per second versus 5,000 for ENIAC, the room-sized first true computer, in 1945. That’s more than 670,000 times as fast in 75 years. What if we could do that for a sustainability issue?

In just the past few years, as we’ve reported here, there are new methods of tidal energy generation, mini-solar grids in Nigeria, windmills harvesting wind on roadway medians, forest litter used for airplane biofuels, electric current from microbes and from saltwater running over rusty iron. 

There are utilities using nano-coated salt for renewables storage, permafrost protection experiments using wooly mammoth DNA, and solar panels next to high-tech sails on ocean vessels.

What does all that add up to compared with what Vox recently called the “hundreds of gigatons on the way from existing fossil fuel infrastructure”?

So we’re back to asking: are we going to make it?

There’s a lot not to like about the trajectory we’re on — which just means it’s that much more important for us to change course. Now.

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This article will continue shortly in Part II: Specifics on how we can get our game on.

While there are myriad perspectives on sustainability and corporate responsibility, each with its own unique value, I often find myself focusing on sustainability’s operational aspects: what can we do to increase the pace at which belief in sustainability translates into concrete actions that benefit the environment, society, and business? To me, a key question is how we get more done, how we “hard wire” sustainability into the way businesses operates.

The time is right to focus on the how of increasing sustainability because so much great work has already been done on the what over the years, and sustainability has come to be so well-known in business. For example, the concept of the triple bottom line (social, environmental, economic) is now decades old, and it has been remarkably successful at becoming part of the thinking of businesspeople. (There is, however, a long way to go in terms of becoming fully integrated into the day-to-day operation of businesses, as we will discuss later.)

While in years past sustainability and responsibility efforts had to fight being perceived as distractions, surveys now routinely find it is perceived as important—for example, one found that 93 percent of CEOs see sustainability as important to their company’s future success. In this context, it makes sense to me that our primary challenge is less about raising awareness of sustainability and responsibility and more about raising the level of action related to it.

Part of raising the level of action is addressing issues that frequently stand in the way of businesses doing more. While there are many barriers, I believe a core issue is the tendency to see sustainability as separate from the business, rather than as integral to how it creates value. This has two key components:

• Cultural: Sustainability being seen as not as rigorous or financially valuable as other areas of the business
• Conceptual: Sustainability being seen as tangential, or as outside of the core of how the business creates value

Separation from the business

The response to this perceived disconnect between sustainability and the business can be twofold: First, to demonstrate that sustainability is being run with the same culture of performance (e.g., rigor, focus on value) as the rest of the business; second, to illuminate the links between sustainability and the value-creation engine of the business.

One effective way to address the culture of performance aspect is to run sustainability programs with the same management rigor and focus on value, meeting the same business case requirements and using the same performance improvement processes as the rest of the business. Over the years, many studies—and my personal experience—have found that one of the top barriers to doing more around sustainability is the difficulty of demonstrating the business case.

As just one example, a report commissioned by the Institute of Chartered Management Accountants states that sustainability will only be embedded in an organization if it is supported by a robust business case linked to tangible benefits.

I’ve spent over a decade trying to address this specific issue, in particular working on how to better measure and grow the true value sustainability produces for an organization. In my experience, better valuation of sustainability’s benefits produces two key benefits: Proving and Improving. Proving the value sustainability brings is important: first, because a business that underestimates the value of sustainability may then underinvest in it, and, second, because the act of quantifying and valuing benefits can bring sustainability efforts in line with the rest of the business, where that kind of value-focused analysis is a core activity.

The reason that not proving the benefits of sustainability normally results in underinvestment is simple: people’s intuitive sense for how much value sustainability provides typically produces an estimate that is too low—much too low. In my experience, when we have finished finding all the “submerged value” that sustainability provides but the company hadn’t previously seen, the actual value produced by sustainability is often 1,000% as much as previously believed. As you might imagine, businesses are frequently investing much less than they would if they saw sustainability as ten times as valuable than they currently do.

Measurement may not only result in increased ability to prove sustainability’s value, but also to improve it. The old saying, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” is as important to sustainability as it is to other parts of the business—if the business believes that sustainability efforts can’t be measured well, and therefore managed well, sustainability may not have an equal seat at the table. For this reason, breaking down the measurement barrier also leads to breaking down part of the wall separating sustainability from the business.

In addition to helping convince the business that sustainability can be improved through the same processes as the rest of the business (e.g., Six Sigma and related methodologies, which rely heavily on measurement), there is evidence that measurement improves the outcomes of sustainability and responsibility efforts. For example, one report found that:

• Measurement, to an extent, is its own reward: it encourages improvement, management, and the explicit formulation of assumptions and expectations. It should be viewed as a process whose greatest value is achieved by organizations that learn from evidence amassed over time.

Similarly, another study found that responsibility practitioners running volunteer programs saw greater success when their programs used measurement and that both they and senior executives at their companies believed that measurement and evaluation was key to program success:

• Both CR/volunteer managers and senior executives agree that Measurement and Evaluationis key to the success of their volunteer programs….CR/volunteer managers from companies that measure and/or evaluate volunteer events/activities rate their programs more successful than the programs of their peers whose companies do not measure and/or evaluate.

Connecting to the value generation engine of the business

One reason people often intuitively believe that sustainability is not profitable is that they cannot see how it is connected to the way the business generates value. While saving money on the business’s energy bills, for example, is clearly good, it is not a core part of how most businesses compete. For the majority of firms, their competitive position is primarily about something else, such as product differentiation, brand strength, innovation, or overall low cost (primarily driven by controlling other types of costs besides energy, such as labor and materials). To the extent that sustainability’s benefits are seen as tangential to the core of the business, that perception affects efforts to embed it in the business.

One way to address this is to make clear how sustainability is, in fact, tied to the core ways the business creates value. For example:

Product differentiation: Many products and services are seen by buyers as commodities—that is, as not very differentiated from the competition’s (in spite of companies’ best efforts to differentiate them). Increasing numbers of buyers have begun including sustainability in their buying decisions—for example, the economic activity of organizations with supplier sustainability programs is well into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and many leading industries have groups of firms that are advancing sustainable purchasing, such as Practice Greenhealth in the health care space.

Innovation: Intuitively, it makes sense that including sustainability in a company’s thinking would help it to be more innovative—change the way you think and you change the way you create—and there is increasing evidence that this is the case. Research I led, for example, found that companies that were sustainability leaders were much more likely to be innovation leaders than those that weren’t—400% more likely, in fact.

Overall costs: Sustainability provides a lens that can help identify waste, whether tangible (e.g., material) or intangible (e.g., wasting existing goodwill or wasting the opportunity to develop more of it). Often by following the carbon emissions of a business, for example, companies find wasted material or effort, which leads to identifying opportunities for increased efficiency within the supply chain.

As just one example, suppliers may be sending products to stores over-packaged, costing the suppliers money in materials and the stores money in labor. Fixing this requires little if any investment and can yield millions of dollars in savings, generating a very strong ROI. This may be why research on sustainable supply chain projects finds they deliver such a high return on investment–such as ROI figures well in excess of 100%.

Brand: While there are multiple factors that go into brand strength, many companies see brand protection as one of the values provided by sustainability. For firms whose key advantage is brand strength, this means sustainability can be a way to reduce the risk of damage to that key asset.

Removing impediments to action

If we take the perspective that sustainability is not separate from the business, and that not only should it be “hard wired” into the business, but also that it already is, that can help change how businesses behave. In doing so, we can help businesses create more value, not only for themselves but also for the world.

A little while ago, Wired magazine’s Jeff Abramowitz took a look back at how Wi-Fi, the now-ubiquitous wireless internet system, came to be the way we all remotely connect. It’s a complex tale, as computers were still plugged into walls and cables, a lot of internet access depended on phone lines, businesses and consumers were working with different systems and so on. It was chaotic, to say the least.

The industry players — the large manufacturers of hardware, software, chipmakers, and so on — hadn’t yet agreed on which system was best. The great VHS vs Beta battle for the soul of videotape had a similar ring — but nowhere near the impact — of this epic struggle. And this all happened only twenty years ago this September!

Abramowitz compares this period to a digital ‘wild west’ wherein “one vendor could build ‘standards-compliant’ products that weren’t fully compatible with ‘standards-compliant’ products from another. These weaknesses in the international specification led companies to support rival technology consortia, each aiming to become a de facto standard.”

Right. Exactly, there was a hole in the system. We needed a standard. A universal standard makes it easier to focus on real impact; to allow everyone to get on with manufacturing their next generations of goods and services. To allow the whole industry to move forward.

By September 15, 1999, when the 17 major digital players finally got together in a room to back Wi-Fi, this was well understood and, as Abramowitz notes dryly, “there was no lack of enthusiasm in that room.”

It’s easy to see why, as we’re all still grappling with manufacturers using different types of screwheads. With Europe, Asia and the US wiring their electrical systems differently. With some countries driving on the left, some on the right. And with at least one major country continuing to resist universal adoption of the metric system. Mercy!

There is yet another major arena with an analogous situation: Plastic neutrality. Similarly, this is a new arena, one that is urgent for the world and that is struggling to find a meaningful standard in time for the big players to all get on board together.

Thus far, the standard has simply been pound-for-pound reclamation of any plastic in place of any type of manufactured product. But this is clearly flawed, just as Wi-Fi’s predecessors were.

What about plastics that are currently in a wetland channel, on their way to the sea…are they equivalent to a ton of the same material currently lying next to the highway in Montana? What about a ton of just-manufactured micro-plastic versus a ton of intact PET in the back room of a supermarket? There is more to the true impact than weight and volume.

Type, condition, toxicity, likely destination, economic impact and probable longevity in the environment — all these go along with the amount of plastic to create a real, meaningful, useful standard that all can adhere to.

For almost two years now, Valutus has been grappling with this and we’ve been developing a plastic standard that includes all of these impacts, a standard we call True Plastic Impact (TPI).

Let’s take the condition of the plastic involved. Currently a company can manufacture a ton of pristine plastic objects that happen to shred easily into shrapnel-like particles in the environment. Perhaps they’re designed for boats and generally end up in a waterway. And these fragments may complete their cycle in the digestive tracts of marine animals and, ultimately perhaps, in humans.

Yet currently, as long as the company finds and recycles a ton of plastic somewhere, whether similar to the one they used or not, they are considered ‘plastic neutral.’

To accelerate actual, meaningful action on plastic, companies need to understand and manage the true impact of their plastic use.

For us the True Plastic Impact calculation looks like this:

Those reading this article are likely doing so using Wi-Fi because all agreed that it was the best, most workable and universal option. The existence of a standard makes more action happen faster. It helps create the acceleration of action we saw when areas such as DVDs and green buildings adopted their own widely used standards. (About a year after Blu-ray defeated HD DVD, Blu-ray player sales nearly doubled.) For this reason, we believe it’s urgent that we all get quickly to a workable, meaningful plastic impact standard – and a more credible, comprehensive standard makes that happen faster.

Fundamentally, standards that consider all plastic to be the same (“mass-balance” approaches) create a credibility problem, since people know that isn’t the case. That holds back adoption and progress.

TPI doesn’t have this issue. As plastic waste expert Joao Sousa says:

Plastic waste is a big issue, and its impact needs to be measured accurately. Unfortunately, most plastic impact measures rely heavily or exclusively on weight and don’t include other factors that matter, such as location and toxicity.

The True Plastic Impact measure developed by Valutus is an exception and is the most comprehensive measure I have seen. 

— Joao Sousa Programme Lead, Plastic Waste
Leader, The Marine Plastic Footprint Report
IUCN

For more detail about True Plastic Impact, or to join the companies who are already using it, contact us or go to www.plasticstandard.com.