Our latest posts on ‘sustainability consulting’
We all know what we need to do to make our companies more environmentally friendly: use less energy, water, and paper, travel less and make less garbage. But yeah, it’s easier said than done especially if you’re in a carbon intensive business like manufacturing or energy production. What’s the company without a lot of time or expertise to do? Well, hire someone, of course! Who do you hire, and how do you know what to look for? Here’s the lowdown on the biggest and smallest players in the newest consulting game and how to separate the wheat from the formerly-unemployed-newly-rebranded “Sustainability Consultant.”
First, you need to know what you are looking for. Different consultants have different kinds of expertise:
MACT air emissions regulatory compliance tools
Image credit:Processing Magazine
Operators of energy-intensive US industrial facilities, having benefited from years of USEPA ‘enforcement light,’ now face an old-fashioned onslaught of environmental reporting requirements. USEPA is poised for action – gathering what information it needs before revised or new regulations are published. Even though new industry rules by EPA – reporting previous year’s carbon emissions for operating sites, or estimating prospective site clean-up costs, for two examples – seem reasonable, meeting the Agency’s deadlines may be a serious challenge for many operating sites and for overseeing corporate staffs. Why?
No one left to delegate to
Over the last 8 to 10 years, corporate-level Environmental, Health, & Safety (EHS) staffs have been thinned past the bare bones stage. I’m not talking about the happy talk “Sustainability VP,” a slot usually disconnected from regulatory compliance. (That will change.) I’m talking about the loss of seasoned regulatory professionals who’d spent their careers learning how to measure emissions, apply for and receive operating permits, testify at public hearings, and answer questions from plant neighbors. This stuff is definitely not taught in college.
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by Kelly Flores
Making your products “sustainable” is no easy task. There are a variety of issues for product managers, designers, and engineers to consider about design, materials, packaging and transportation. In a recent study of best practices, we found that companies approach the challenge of creating sustainable products in several stages.
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By Vijay Kanal, CMC, Kanal Consulting
NGOs, or Non Government Organizations, have long been known for promoting socially responsible activities and engaging in philanthropic efforts. What is less known is that several are also partnering with major corporations around the globe on environmental sustainability efforts. On the surface, such partnerships may seem strange, since historically business and NGOs have had a somewhat adversarial relationship (mostly instigated by the NGOs). But enlightened companies and a few business-friendly NGOs have realized that their interests are more often aligned than not, and they have much to gain from working with one another.
What NGOs offer
NGOs have expertise in a number of areas – such as energy, food and agriculture, waste, and natural resources – to help business become more environmentally friendly, which can positively impact a company’s operations, supply chain, and impact in the marketplace. And they have a long history of working globally on these issues, so they can be valuable allies for companies even outside their home country.
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By Kelly Flores, Kanal Consulting
It’s quite possible that if you don’t have a sustainability program in your company, you probably do and just don’t know about it yet. In the process of conducting a recent study with 25 leading companies to identify best practices in sustainability, we discovered many formal, established sustainability programs originated from “grassroots” employee efforts unknown to senior executives.
Today, employees want to work for organizations that reflect their values, and respect their concerns about environmental and social responsibility (ESR). The days of “The Organization Man” are long gone. If companies want to retain the best and brightest employees, they must consider how to better align their values and interests with their employees. And ESR is not just for tree-huggers anymore. As humanity faces the global impact of climate change and the growing loss of our natural resources, individuals are looking to their own lives to see how they can make a difference, at home and at work.
Participation
So what should companies do? Leading organizations are harnessing their employees’ energy by first identifying who and where they are in the organization. Setting up brown-bag lunches, carrying out internal surveys, or organizing town-hall type meetings can help to gauge interest and coordinate early participation. Employees in common groups and departments can be identified and official “green teams” established to begin to consider issues together. Supporting managers and executive sponsors can also be identified at this time and formally assigned to create guidance and foster communication among groups.
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By Ryan Young, Blu Skye Sustainability Consulting
There is no need to wait millions of years for deceased organisms to compress into fossil fuels to burn. Forget about how the wind doesn’t always blow hard enough to move wind turbines, or that the sun doesn’t shine on solar panels at night. A typical U.S. dairy cow is a renewable energy machine, producing 150 pounds of “fuel” in the form of manure…every single day. There are no intermittency issues as there can be with wind and solar; as one dairy farmer said to me: “cows crap 24 hours a day.”
The U.S. dairy industry produces a staggering amount of manure every day, to the tune of 167 million gallons of manure from some 9.3 million cows. That is enough manure to fill 250 Olympic size swimming pools every day of the year, generated by a population of cows that is more than three times the number of people in Chicago. (This is definitely something to impress your friends with the next time you they ask you to pass the milk for their coffee.)
If not properly managed, this large amount of manure can present a big environmental problem. For example, when stored manure decomposes in the absence of oxygen (anaerobic decomposition) it releases methane, a nasty greenhouse gas with more than 21 times the potency of carbon dioxide. Due to the large volume of manure generated and the potency of methane, dairy manure is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the entire U.S. dairy industry supply chain (21%). This dwarfs some of the usual suspects such as processing/manufacturing (7%), transportation/distribution (3%) and retail refrigeration (3%).
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(all images from Alan AtKisson)
I had the pleasure of attending Sustainable Silicon Valley’s (SSV) two-day Sustainability Change Agent Training with Alan AtKisson, November 16th and 17th. It was a packed workshop full of information and interactive exercises. Parts of it fully engaged me and parts of it left me feeling frustrated, so I decided to wait a few weeks before writing about it. I wanted to see which concepts and tips stuck with me.
AtKisson, a sustainability consultant and author, has built the workshop around the principles explored in his recent book, The ISIS Agreement: How Sustainability Can Improve Organizational Performance and Transform the World. Chapters 7-10 cover much of the information presented in the workshop. The unique thing about the training, and where the real learning took place for me, is AtKisson’s interactive approach that included story telling, singing and small group and one-on-one exercises.
More than 70 participants from a range of sectors participated. Sustainability directors from large Silicon Valley companies such as Intel, Yahoo! and Palm, sustainability managers working for municipalities, NGOs and consultants gathered to learn about the ISIS Method–a methodology for transformation that integrates indicators, systems, innovation and strategy.
After letting things percolate a few weeks, my favorite three tips to be a more effective sustainability change include:
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As Geoff Barneby noted in his earlier post Doing the Right Thing in Business: Are You Doing it Right?, several critical questions must be considered before launching a strategic sustainability program, including:
- What is your corporate vision for sustainability?
- Do you have clear and measurable sustainability goals?
- Who will sponsor and lead your sustainability initiative?
- Who will manage your sustainability initiatives through full implementation, and coordinate across business silos?
- How will you measure the results and report on your progress?
- How will you get critical stakeholders on board with the program?
In Geoff’s subsequent post, Sustainability Management Infrastructure: What It Is and Why You Should Care, he introduced the Sustainability Management Maturity Model (or SM3), a tool developed by FairRidge Group to help organizations address these questions using a quantitative, systems-based approach. In addition, SM3 helps businesses to assess how capable their management infrastructure is for responding to, managing, and ultimately taking advantage of coming sustainability challenges.
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“Climate change and climate policy in Europe and the U.S. – Opportunities and Challenges in the Run-up to the Copenhagen Summit and beyond”
Thus was billed a recent conference I attended last week at the Aspen Wye River Conference center located in rural Maryland along the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The two-day conference was yet another step in the Transatlantic Climate Bridge began earlier this year between Germany and the U.S. in hopes of fostering greater understanding and cooperation on energy and climate issues, especially now in the final days before the Copenhagen summit.
The conference brought together journalists from both sides of the pond, along with a select group of advisors, consultants, negotiators, and policy experts on the front line of the issues facing the world next month in Copenhagen. Since the journalists (and blogger) at the conference are subject to the Chatham House rules, I am not able to attribute specific positions to any particular speaker, but the ideas discussed and the perceptions explored in the dialog are worth summarizing – kicking it off with the burning question in the wake of news over the weekend that world leaders have “agreed not to agree” to a fully binding treaty at COP15: Is there any real hope left for “success” in Copenhagen?
In a word, yes. There is not only hope, but a realistic chance for success at Copenhagen. That is, if we can engage in “expectation management” and tailor a definition of success within those expectations – let the qualifications begin.
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The first online Sustainable Brands Boot Camp produced by the folks at Sustainable Life Media who convene the annual Sustainable Brands Conference kicked off yesterday.
CEO KoAnn Vikoren Skrzyniarz recently spoke to one of the SB community members, Diane MacEachern, Founder and CEO of Big Green Purse about what drove the launch. We’ve published the whole interview below. The Boot Camp, which continues weekly for 13 weeks, pulls together many of the top sustainable business consultants and teachers in the US to provide an inexpensive, convenient 360 overview of the principles and current best practices of building a sustainable brand. 3P readers looking to boost their career would do well to consider participating.
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Lost in all the talk about whether or when nations and industries will have emissions targets, is the question of who, exactly, is going to measure those targets.
Without a pool of trained and certified professional GHG managers, climate change initiatives — from the United Nations Framework down to the sustainability plan for the shop around the corner — could stall.
Worse, a lack of accountability could turn the “greenhouse gas expert” into the snake oil salesman of the 21st century, peddling a dubious product whose ingredients change from one bottle to the next.
Enter the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. The Institute provides professional training in greenhouse gas accounting and verification, primarily online, and its ultimate goal is to create a professional society for greenhouse gas accountants and verifiers, similar to the way other fields — architecture, law, medicine, accounting — have national or international certification bodies.
The Institute was launched in 2007 as a non-profit by Michael Gillenwater and Tom Baumann, two recognized experts in emissions measurement, who realized that there was an emerging need for standardization in their field.
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It’s a Consumer Reports or CNET type of comparison shopping service for the eco-conscious crowd.
Eco-rate is the brainchild and a labor of environmental love and activism founded by a Seattle couple, Brycelaine Self and Colby Self.
“The Eco-rate idea is to allow people to compare common household products, based not only on their green attributes, but also on their affordability,” says Brycelaine Self, co-founder of Eco-rate and principal of a related green building, green marketing and energy consulting company, Eco-innovations.
Launched in mid-May, they spent more than two years designing and developing the Web-based product and technology rating and comparison resource for shoppers looking to make ecologically-intelligent choices on just about any product out there, from autos to dishwashers to TVs to paint to water heaters.
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Today, many companies acknowledge that they can play a significant role in addressing climate change and sustainability in general. Some have even begun proactively beating a path to transform their businesses, reaching for lofty goals such as zero waste, carbon neutrality, or even restoration of degraded ecosystems. Most, however, are only just starting to figure out what it means to be a sustainable business. In a previous post, I discussed the 5 levels of sustainability management maturity, through which a company must progress in pursuit of a sustainability transformation. So where should a company invest to successfully reach their sustainability goals?
In my opinion, there are four primary areas that you should consider when developing a sustainability investment plan: management infrastructure, eco-efficiency programs, strategic initiatives, and marketing programs. Clearly, there is a need to address these areas somewhat sequentially; you cannot successfully market sustainability before making strategic changes, and you cannot develop strategic initiatives without already having an appropriate management infrastructure in place. There is, however, room for overlap, and most mature companies manage to do all four in parallel.
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By Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact
Ever since I studied adaptive leadership with Ronald Heifetz at Harvard, I have been interested in the intersection between organizational change, systems theory and sustainability issues. Many sustainability professionals seem to lack an understanding of what it takes to create enduring, lasting change within an organization or system. As illustrated with the recent departure of Van Jones from the White House, a change agent needs a strategic understanding of how to navigate the dangers of leading change without getting scapegoated or sidelined.
I recently learned that Sustainable Silicon Valley (SSV) is offering a two-day Sustainability Change Agent Training with Alan AtKisson, November 16th and 17th. I’m excited that I will have the chance to attend (I will be attending to cover the event for Triple Pundit).
I realize many of us have “workshop-itis” these days after attending a few too many workshops and conferences. But I feel this topic has not been well covered at past green trainings. And Sustainable Silicon Valley is offering Triple Pundit readers a discount of $100 off the registration fee (applies only to SSV partner and non-partner rates). Go to the registration page and use the code “triplepundit” when registering.
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These days, we hear more and more that a company’s stance on social and environmental issues plays a significant role in choice of employer. A recent survey found that over 50% of American workers report being inclined to work for “green” companies. Women and Generation Y in particular want their company’s mission to go beyond profitability, encompassing benefits to the wider community, on social, environmental and economic dimensions (with men and Boomers not that far behind). They are eager to work with companies in which they feel they can make a difference.
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