sustainability
‘When your company is called Waste Management, and your customers all talk about “zero waste”, you better change your business model’
customers, your consumers, your employees have higher standards than the government, which I think they do in almost every sector now, then that’s the standard that you have to meet.” One need only look at retail giant Walmart for an
example, says Winston. “Anybody serving Walmart, which represents a huge chunk of the global economy, knows that Walmart’s asking a lot of questions about your carbon footprint, about your energy use, your packaging. That’s the standard, if you want shelf space you’re going to have to reduce your footprint, whether there’s a climate bill or not. “There’s pressure going on in almost every value chain
in the world; there’s rising standards from employees, especially the next generation. Then you throw in actual resource constraints around the world. I don’t hear any CEOs debating that. They may debate climate change but they don’t debate the tight supply and price volatility of the resources they need.”
Green recovery There’s been a sense among some commentators that cli- mate-change issues have taken a back seat while economies around the world attempt to recover from the worst recession since the Thirties.Winston says it is the very reason he penned Green Recovery two years back. “I wanted to say: yes we’re clearly in a recession, but
green is one of the ways out,” he says. “Imean there is this whole sets of things we can be doing to get lean that actu- ally save money very quickly. You get companies saying: ‘I can’t really afford to think about this now’ but I think you can always afford to think about innovation, as the lead- ing companies always do. “Even if you have to put off the bigger stuff for now,
there’s plenty of incremental things that add up – in your fleet in distribution, in your facilities, in your IT systems. I mean, some of it’s literally just about turning off the lights, which costs nothing, or about small investments, some of which pay back in a matter of months.” He points to the recently announced collaboration
between two corporate giants, General Motors and General Electric, in a new energy-efficiency programme that uses GE software to synchronise the conveyors at
GM factories with lights, generators and other equip- ment. The gains in energy efficiency are significant, with GMestimating that the payback period is just sixmonths. “The world has changed. Energy was fairly cheap fun-
damentally for most of our history but it’s not anymore, and it’s turning out that we’re incredibly wasteful. The payback in the GE-GM example is estimated to be six months. Tome, to call something like this ‘expensive’ – or even an ‘investment’ – is just not understanding your income statement. “I mean, if it saves money in less than a year then, in
that same income statement, that’s a profit. Yes, you may need to come up with the capital to put in the software but everybody has a capital expenditure budget. If you don’t then you’re almost in liquidation. “When people say ‘Oh it costs money’, I don’t even
understand the criticism,” continues Winston. “Everything in life is an investment; we’re making deci- sions in business all the time about where we put resources, and initiatives like that which pay back fast are ridiculous not to do. It is also a hedge against future energy price rises. These scenarios are not out of the realms of possibility that oil reaches US$300, US$400 a barrel. That could sink entire companies.” We act like we can do one thing at a time, but this is far
more urgent, arguesWinston. He cites EU Commissioner for the environment at the time, Stavros Dimas, in an open letter to Barack Obama in his first week in office: “If someone’s basement floods and they lose their job on the same day it is certainly an unlucky day. But they would not wait until they found a new job before pumping the basement and fixing the leak.”
If you wish to learnmore about green recovery, the annual Business & Leadership briefing on The Green Economy takes place in the Four Seasons Hotel, Dublin on 31May 2011, with keynote speakers including former UN climate-change chief Yvo de Boer.
For further information, go to
www.businessandleadership.com/greeneconomy
62 Irish Director Spring 2011
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84