10 thoughts on how you might use the Sustainable Development Goals - and who you might speak to.

Led by the man-of-many-impressive-hats, Gavin Milligan (who somehow manages to work for Green Knight Consulting, William Jackson Food Group and support Sedex all superbly), our panel session at the 2018 Sedex Summit - with Andy Butler of P&G and Jonathan Horrell of Mondelez - discussed how businesses are addressing the SDGs. An enjoyable session and one that certainly encouraged the use of the SDGs as a positive framework - for both aligning, measuring and communicating commitments to sustainable business. Worth checking out the great work of both P&G and Mondelez in this area too.

A quick crowd-source of social-media and our Manufacture 2030 platform identified a wonderful jumble of stories and resources from around the world - and I've tried to boil it all down into a list of some of the most interesting. It is certainly nowhere near a definitive list and the brief call-for-insight showed that there really is an extraordinary range of great initiatives going on around the SDGs. Proof if anything to me that it has become THE framework the world is finally throwing its weight behind.

If you know of anything else worth adding, please do in the comments below!

1) @GlobalGoalsUN - www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/

An obvious place to start... But it's the way people of taken the Goals and applied them that yields the probably more interesting resources. Such as:

2) @ukssdnetwork - www.ukssd.co.uk

Led by the great people at Bioregional, The UK Stakeholders for Sustainable Development (UKSSD) creates a space to mobilise people, communities and organisations in the UK. A great list of organisations and activities in the UK that could support you. Such as:

3) @2030Hub - www.local2030.org/local-labs

The great work of David Connor in Liverpool is one of the first of these Local Labs. The Liverpool collaborative's 13 year plan to 2030 in the immediate term focuses very much on awareness raising, stakeholder mapping and engagement, local measurement and a growing pipeline of tangible impact project delivery. I was also struck by the range of projects/initiatives happening at a local level elsewhere around the world. Such as:

4) @surgeimpact - www.surgeimpact.org

Thanks to Deepa Mirchandani for highlighting this great initiative in India that is a not-for-profit accelerator for entrepreneurs who want to work on the Sustainable Development Goals impacting the lives of the people at the Bottom of Income Pyramid in India. They also offer a range of business consultancy solutions to large enterprises and governments across India on social innovation and leadership.

Naturally, I discovered that plenty of others are leveraging the crowd to source great examples of the SDGs in action. Such as:

5) @aim2flourish - www.aim2flourish.com

Claire Sommer shared 981 (no less!) examples of positive and profitable business innovation for the SDGs. Every story is written by a business school student as part of their preparation to be Global Goals leaders. (AIM2Flourish is a UN Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) and AACSB International - an endorsed, nonprofit initiative of the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University.

and:

6) @TBLServicesLtd - www.supportthegoals.com

Colin Curtis' constant curation of great examples of the SDGs in practice and all neatly searchable.

An important recommendation made by the panel was to pick the SDGs that are most relevant to you and focus your efforts. I also was sent great examples of initiatives around specific goals. Such as:

7) @wasteaid - www.wasteaid.org.uk/waste-sustainable-development-goals/

WasteAid is increasingly talking to big international brands about opportunities to support community waste management in low-income countries, helping tackle the global waste crisis and keep plastic out of the oceans.

It was great to see examples of people being brought together to collaborate on the SDGs face-to-face too. Such as:

8) @jadeadvisory - www.meetup.com/SustainableDevelopmentCommunity/

Carolina Karlstrom has used the SDGs to create a community of change agents at a grassroots level. She believes in the power of educating, inspiring and connecting people at a grassroots level to create change. She is doing this through the SDG Network MeetUps and with a community of more than 600 members in London, this is clearly something which people are drawn too!

New and exciting industry collaborations on the SDGs are being announced all the time too. Such as:

9) The British Retail Consortium's: "Better Retail, Better World" strategy.

The news of this collaboration broke on the day of the Sedex event and was neatly summarised by Gavin. It's worth looking at James Murray of Business Green's summary of it (link above and his commentary on the Twitter thread below). Positive news but the ambitions declared were not all worthy of the word. Commitments on sustainable sourcing by retailers by 2022 were balanced out by zero waste commitments that are already being surpassed by individual retailers. Still, many suppliers to retail will welcome any collaborations to make life easier for them by their customers.

10) Too much SDG noise?

Finally news that plenty more needs to be done and that there could be too much of a cacophony around the SDGs for many. However, it is by its nature a multi-stakeholder commitment and the more grass-roots action, combined with strategic change by business and government - the better for us all.

We at Manufacture 2030 are aligning behind the SDGs - both in terms of the commitment to the next ten years but also in support of a number of the SDGs. In particular, we believe that SDG 17 - the need for us to work in partnership to deliver them all - is one of the most important. We won't halve the amount of resources used in manufacturing by 2030 without it.