Sustainable and responsible

The case study for this week looks interesting in terms of what some companies can do. What was interesting when doing the assignment was the seven sins. Now I can see that so many companies are committing the seems and I feel like saying "they will be rewarded a hundredfold". That even makes me think like "how does it profit a man to gain the work world but lose his soul?" 。of course they will not stop tomorrow, but st let we need to help them open their eyes and see what they are doing.

Create integrate sustainability strategy

This article published on the 18 of October attempts to set out guidelines on creating a sustainability matrix by focusing on a sustainability strategy.

http://www.triplepundit.com/2016/10/create-integrate-sustainability-strategy/

Sustainable Growth

Having read through the Fiji Water case, the term sustainable growth was thrown around quite a bit. To the keen observer, this is an obvious oxymoron, growth in inherently unsustainable. To put it simply, you cannot grow infinitely with finite resources. The very idea of growth is self-defeating and self-limiting. Fiji Water's devotion to this idea of sustainable growth shows how greenwashed the company truly is (aside from justifying its existence). So how do we grow, but be sustainable? The answer is simple: We don't.

If a company truly wants to be sustainable, it first has to move away from this idea of growth. So long as growth is the objective of a business, it will be forever unsustainable. Fortunately, alternative metrics exist, at least when it comes to macroeconomics, however implementing them would unfortunately require a major shift in cultural attitudes.

It is unfortunate to say the least, however, I believe that as marketers, it will be our jobs to reimagine  the idea of business itself in the future. As Yvon Chouinard taught us in the last case, profit is possible, even without growth, and if we want to be sustainable, then scaling back on this idea of growth is where we must start.

Please take time to review the latest Podcast from McKinsey on the value of The Circular Economy.

Weakness of recent sustainability metrics & How to fix

Before coming to a recent discussion about sustainability metrics, I would like to introduce a paper of Cohen (2014) summarizing the growth of sustainability management, three groups of sustainability metrics related to environment, society and governance (577 total indicators in ESG sustainability metrics), and some challenges in this field.

Mentioning about challenges, beside of lack of consensus in the metrics being used by different associations such as Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) or Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), the paper does not mention about the weakness of most of these metrics like Chen (2016) pointed out in “Why sustainability metrics fail to measure achievement, and how to fix them.”

In this article, the researchers argue that there are many indicators that can prove the efficiency in an activity done by a company but can hide the effectiveness. For example, a company can show to be efficient in reducing water consumption per unit output but in fact it does increase the total water consumption, which can be hidden in the indicator.

Therefore, the AVERAGE INTENSITY of the resource used can be put under tricks to make the EFFICIENCY of the resource used higher.

There are typically three situations a company can utilize to create such tricks.

1.       Partial outsourcing (or in-sourcing): “if a manufacturing step using water is moved to a third-party (outsourced) while the final production remains on site, average intensity will decrease.”

2.       Change in facility use: “When production is increased, average intensity will decrease because each unit of production will receive a smaller allocation of the fixed water use.”

3.       Change in product or service mix: Many activities in the production process can help produce many different products. If a mix of these activities can be arranged in a tricky way towards less resource-intensive activities, it can lead to a decrease in the average intensity.

According to Chen (2016), “Overall average intensity is a metric of limited usefulness, and serves as a very poor proxy for corporate efficiency.”. They also suggested the application of “a method based on flexible budgeting was jointly developed by Bacardi Limited and North Carolina State University and has been in practice by Bacardi for several years.”

“The method is able to effectively eliminate all of the distortional effects discussed in points 1 through 3 above, providing an accurate measure of a company’s overall performance for each sustainability parameter.”

They also provided a case study of the application of these metrics at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tqem.21400/full

 Reference

Cohen, S. et al. (2014) The Growth of Sustainability Metrics [Pdf] Available at: http://spm.ei.columbia.edu/files/2015/06/SPM_Metrics_WhitePaper_1.pdf

Chen, Y.S.A. et al. (2016) Why sustainability metrics fail to measure achievement, and how to fix them. [Online] Available at: https://www.greenbiz.com/article/why-sustainability-metrics-fail-measure-achievement-and-how-fix-them

Difference between Sustainable and Responsible Marketing and Green-washing!

 As I have recently been reading extensively on sustainability, in general and on sustainable marketing in particular, I have encountered a lot of thing, that marketers might not want to associate themselves with! A good example of that would be greenwashing, pretending green when your (company) is not! This has let me to more questions than answers and trying to find out a nexus between Sustainable and Responsible Marketing and Greenwashing if there is any! Why do companies lie about the nature of their activities or simply why do marketers take a lead in that? Is it just being greed or green is cool and people like cool things? Is all this for a short-term profit? It was very frustrating that I have wasted a lot of my time reading and could not find convincing answers and ended up monologuing and convincing myself that not all companies have to be sustainable or green but all companies must be responsible. After few days, I resumed my research and luckily ended up reading on some companies that I know for real, raising the flag of sustainable mining, not responsible mining my the way! Yes sustainable mining if you have not read it appropriately! Yes again, sustainable depleting of mines, and sustainable polluting their surrounding ecosystem with whatever chemicals possibly available, just to name few, cyanide!
Honestly speaking the latter issue was an eye opening for me and has let me to something that I have never done before, praying that UN could extend the notion of R2P to include businesses! Please pray with me!

Lab grown meat. Yay or nay?

Most of us are aware of the environmental impact of meat production and raising livestock. It is one of the biggest human activity that has a huge impact on the environment. Given the fact that the planet isnt getting any bigger whereas the global population and the global appetite keep growing, scientist and businesses have produced what you call a lab-created meat that will be "healthier" than conventional meat and more environmentally friendly. The idea is that cultured meat will be able to help alleviate the environmental and health challenges posed by the world's growing appetite for conventional meat. Well this is the general idea of a lab grown meat. I am curious to know what do you guys think of the idea of a lab grown meat? Will it posed a problem for current meat industries for example, putting them out of businesses and will there be additional health problems that is currently unidentified because it is still unexplored.

this is the article below
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/lab-grown-meat-is-in-your-future-and-it-may-be-healthier-than-the-real-stuff/2016/05/02/aa893f34-e630-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html