What's on my mind? Paper towels, purposeful living and our planet

What if we do nothing??What if the temperature rises two degrees? Extreme weather starts impacting the global economy? Critical infrastructure is disrupted?

This is how I started my keynote speech on sustainability this week at Digital Transformation World - Ignite. I went on to talk about the 10.8 billion tonnes of ice that have melted in Antarctica and how the Casey research station temperature spiked by 6.9 degrees, while our Colt employees were down there last year on a sustainable exploration expedition.?

The entire conversation up to this point was BIG. Big change in temperature, big impact on the planet and completely unrelatable. I mean, let’s be honest, even when you watch the huge ice glacier melt in Antarctica you hold your breath while you are watching it and then go back to doing the same things you have always done. I am no different.

I was no different until last year when we held our sustainability hackathon. From this, I was provided so many ideas to live green that I started trying out some of them. I moved to bar shampoo, changed to “Who Gives A Crap” sustainable toilet paper and changed my cat's litter. All pretty easy swaps until it came to the paper towel.

This one was enormously hard. We could not get our heads around it - putting a cloth in the microwave to warm our food seemed weird, and cleaning up cat barf with a cloth and then washing it seemed gross. My kids didn’t even know what to do with the cloth after they used it because they were so used to throwing the paper towel away.

Changing out the paper towel itself was fairly easy, a simple purchase on Amazon. Changing our mindset and our daily behaviour, was super hard.

What it made me realize, is that climate change or any change for that matter is not about putting some aspirational thoughts on a PowerPoint and then wishing and wanting it to happen. It’s about actually making the change. Even when it is hard.

Paper towels are the largest household waste in the USA, contributing to the deforestation of over 100 million trees a year. If we were just to stop using three rolls in each of our households a year, we could reduce 120,000 tons of waste. Worthwhile? Yes. Sound easy? Yes. Habitually and horribly hard? Also yes.

Climate change is not about setting an easy target, it’s not about doing something easy in the short term that creates a false economy in the long term. It is about actually making the changes in both our personal and professional lives.? Doing this with purpose and most importantly action. Changing the hard habits to enable the long-term impact.

I am very proud of our sustainability progress at Colt, we have changed out so many ‘paper towels’. We have removed legacy equipment, greened our vehicles, moved to corporate binding rules, rolled out menopause training and became a menopause-friendly employer to name but a few. All of these things were hard. Not technically or organisationally but they were hard habitually.

In every instance, we had to change our daily behaviour to make them happen. We had to re-program our minds to a new normal.

As AI moves to the forefront of our industry and according to DeepMind, compute power is doubling every 3.5 months, it is imperative we start thinking differently across the industry. We will surpass the transportation industry for energy consumption in just a few years. A sustainable mindset and personal accountability need to be a principal consideration - or we will quickly become the primary problem for the planet.

So the question I asked the audience at the end of my speech was not “What if…” the question is “What?”. Whether it is a paper towel or a process to remove legacy equipment. We must act now.

What is your ‘paper towel’?

If you'd like to listen to my speech at DTWS, you can find it here.