Why are companies failing to bring #sustainable products and working practices to market?
Paul Foulkes-Arellano
Open to additional NED roles for 2025 ? Board Member ? Non-Executive Director ? Advisory ? Co-Author "Materials & Sustainability" (Routledge)
Every listed company has opened up a “Sustainability Department” over the past 20 years. There have been countless workshops and memos and commitments. Every year a CSR report is published with several pages of bar charts and alluring photos on the #Sustainability achievements.
Most of this in unutterable greenwash
- 40% of our product is recycled (i.e. 60% is landfill trash)
- We reduced our water consumption by 8% (why was it so high in the first place?)
- We worked with X NGO to protect several hectares of woodland (yawn)
Everyone is fully aware that businesses need to do better. Sometimes there is a CEO commitment to do just that. Yet businesses still rely on constant overconsumption to grow, and are opposed to business model changes (how many FTSE or Fortune 500 businesses have actually changed their business models for the better?)
It’s become patently clear that despite the stated wishes of committed CEOs, a standalone sustainability team of 4 (in an organisation of 100,000) is never going to work. Every part of the organization needs to be prefixed with Sustainability; every job role needs to begin with the sustainability elements before describing the functions and KPIs of that role.
Could this ever happen? Perhaps in the next decade it will have to happen, as consumers get more and more savvy as mass media and social media go into climate emergency overdrive. There are many presidents and prime ministers across the world who totally understand the need for dramatic change. But business doesn’t do dramatic, it doesn’t do “emotive.”
I learned nothing about sustainability in my MBA 25 years ago. I doubt many MBAs are learning about it now (correct me if I’m wrong). But these future CEOs need to understand that business needs to change forever, otherwise sustainable carbon-neutral behaviours will never see the light of day.
We are going through the most dramatic changes in business in a century because of digital transformation; but any business which fails to understand that their customers require full transparency on all matters of green business, are destined to fall from grace, and disappear from the stock indices they worship. In this new world of minute by minute digital business, there can be no trickery and no cover ups. It's time to put sustainability at the heart of every function, and every individual.
Leading multilingual communications and marketing specialist with sustainability in mind.
4 年David Southall Richard Wardlaw bearing in mind current resourcing!
General Partner in Multi Family Real Estate. Helping families achieve passive income through vetted Multi-Family Investments. Advocate for strengthening families thru collecting. | I will not respond to solicitations.
4 年Its worth mentioning that many investors simply won’t touch an early stage startup. There is even more phobia for an early stage green startup. Maybe by the time it gets to series A they will have a look. We all know the more familiar story of capitalism’s fixation with short-term gains. This too takes the winds out of the sails leaving many ideas sunk because the NPV of a current prospect outweighs the opportunity cost of a similar green competitor. Until this is rectified at the level of banks, lending and payout, we will scale / pivot to the green economy slowly.
Owner at Odyssey22, Owner at Condo, Co-Founder of Matters, Recording & Mixing Engineer at Stand Out Studio
5 年Why are beverage companies not fighting and lobbying for DRS systems, so there is more food-grade PCR feedstock to produce new foodgrade rPET?
Water-without-border, Safe Drinking Water, Humanitarian Crisis & Water, Water-AID, National Defence & Water, Atmospheric Water Harvest, Farm Irrigation, Electricity from Wind, Solar & Kinetic Technologies
5 年I follow your way of thinking Zaour, this is why the finance industry must lead this campaign against greenwashing which only add further risk to their board room agenda. The S&P downgraded 27% of the global finance industry five years ago and a whopping 44% less than two years ago still this is not taken fully inn as an actual risk for them if we look at their priorities. But as the rest of the largest corporations worldwide, whether they sell cars, hair shampoo, palm oil, finance products, insurance or food they all say they will and must do "something" not yet defined.
Water-without-border, Safe Drinking Water, Humanitarian Crisis & Water, Water-AID, National Defence & Water, Atmospheric Water Harvest, Farm Irrigation, Electricity from Wind, Solar & Kinetic Technologies
5 年"We" will not succeed until "we" agree uppon what sustainability was meant to do in 1987 when it was coined, knowing it was mistakenly and wrongly translated from a German assessment written in 1713 after a total collapse of the whole eco-system and the society due to total deforestation caused by the mining and smelting industry all over Saxony and more than 10 000 people died. The German word "Nachhaltigkeit" was first time used and coined in his book, the writer explains why it's important for us all this never happens again and it must be "Avoided and Prevented" before it happens by understanding the consequences and results of our actions. The UN IPCC "stumbled" a bit in their translation as the English verb; To Sustain in German is: Unterhalten, it was believed important "to sustaining" mine shafts which were not correct.