Sustainability – a key driver for Kiwi companies - part two

There is an individual and collective responsibility for Kiwi businesses to live up to the clean, green tag, or suffer the loss of that valuable perception. 

So, if you wish to get started today, here are six key factors for you to consider.

1. Take the initiative

The greatest long term risk is in doing nothing, so make a start.  Invite the question: what could and should sustainability mean to your company?  Engage your colleagues and encourage debate. 

Make it permissible to challenge current assumptions and ways of doing things. Allow people to speak from the heart and to express their values and how they would like to see these expressed in company performance.  Have this conversation in the context of the trends and issues that face your business

2. Make links between what is going on out there and your strategy

Take a good hard look at the issues and trends that are most relevant to your business and markets. How are they likely to impact on, for example, your supply of raw materials, access to markets, consumer attitudes, retailer requirements, competitors and regulators? 

Critical to this are the demands of key customers. Wal-Mart, Tesco, John Lewis and Marks and Spencer have all introduced wide-ranging measures to make their businesses and supply chains more sustainable. What are your customers demanding now and how may this change in the future? If you have not already done so, ask them!

Identify the risks and opportunities for your business that these trends present. Ask: how robust is my strategy in the face of these challenges? What might I need to do differently? 

The subject may be complex but the solutions are not rocket science. You are probably doing quite a lot already and you can take small steps and build on this as you go.

3. Know your performance

Many companies don’t really know what their environmental or social impacts are and where in their supply chain there may be problems and/or opportunities for improvement.

An easy first step is to find out what your carbon footprint is.  This can be done by product or across the company. There are specialist companies such as CarbonZero (www.carbonzero.co.nz) that can provide this service.  This knowledge enables you to benchmark where you stand against competitors and retailer expectations. 

It also tells you where you can focus efforts to reduce energy, save money and enhance environmental performance. Importantly, it enables you to go to market with confidence on your performance and to include this in brand communications and labelling.

As your company becomes more familiar with these topics, you can expand the elements of environmental performance to look at issues such as water, raw material supply and waste management.  As you learn, you can move to total lifecycle analysis to enable you to think holistically about all the material ‘ins and outs’ of your business. 

This will give you the capacity to take a fundamental look at what you do and how you do it for the long term. Where important to your markets, you can move to certification and traceability of relevant factors throughout your supply chain.

On the social side, New Zealand companies often play a large and well respected role in local communities because of their dependence on them for supply and their importance to the local economy. 

Much of the social dimension in sustainability is already well managed through local employment, skills development and procurement, good community relationships and investment.