my lessons in advocating sustainability to business

I am currently in the process of winding up in my current job and having been giving a lot of thought to my key learnings in advocating sustainability to business over the past few years. What is interesting is that when I started I almost had a directive to demonstrate that sustainability in business had nothing to do with the environment.

While you could argue this by looking at the environment as any other business input, output or risk factor, I think in this current landscape, business actually doesn't want to separate itself from the environment. I think more than anything they just want some honesty in advertising... ie, sustainability and triple bottom line is all well and good, but why don't we just say, "helping the environment?"

So anyway, in a nutshell, these are my four key learnings after 2+ years of advocating sustainability to businesses:

• You can't divorce the environment from sustainability
• If a business says they want to be sustainable, they are talking about environmental sustainability.
• Once a business actually starts measuring their resource use and comparing it to industry benchmarks they realise how much money they wasting and take action to reduce this.
• Sustainability innovation in product/service offerings and/or business models generally flows from the lessons of reducing inputs to meet industry benchmarks.

So based on this, and as I have recommend to the organisation I work for, anyone advocating sustainability or climate change should embrace the environment in their sales pitch, they should also concentrate on outlining the benefits of business measuring its resource use. If they can get business to do this, the battle is as good as won!

And just in case anyone is wondering, some of the benefits of resource measurement in business are:

• identify excess costs and waste (in turn saving the business money);
• produces a good PR story which has obvious benefits in the current climate;
• reduces the impact of on-coming regulation which will mandate businesses of nearly all sizes report their resource use;
• will contribute to the future success of an Australian Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) by helping to reduce miscalculation of Australia's carbon footprint, and by extension, an ETS starting with an oversupply of carbon credits which will only lead the carbon price to fall;
• will off-set the increases in electricity and other costs that will arise from an ETS;
• its a practical action which makes employees feel like they work for a progressive company and provides opportunities for them to engage in something different from their day-to-day operations;
• will make it easier to meet current and future procurement conditions being included in major supply contracts by big suppliers (ie Westpac, Woolworths, Coles, Wal-Mart, Tescos, Corporate Express, just to name a few).