The Universal Climate-Impact Playbook: Initiatives Any Company--Even Yours--Can Take Today to Strengthen Your Business (Part I)
Proven Opportunities to Build a Competitive Advantage While Becoming More Sustainable
Some climate innovations are super-specialized to a specific industry. If you’re a medical device manufacturer that wants to make your products more sustainable, you might get into cutting-edge polymers and new biodegradable plastics that are only a few steps away from the lab.
This is a “deep science” or “deep engineered” innovation. Chasing those opportunities can benefit from a product & innovation generalist (like me!), but you also need deep, specific knowledge to bring it to market.
But, did you realize that 80% or more of the sustainability innovations that will drive real cost improvements and differentiation in your business are fairly universal? How you implement them though is critical, and how you combine them into a holistic solution is where you’ll develop a sustainable competitive advantage.
But first, what are the areas of climate impact and sustainability that impact almost any business (even yours)?
This is Part I: The “traditional” areas for environmental impact. The non-traditional areas that everyone can benefit from are coming next week!
Energy & Infrastructure
Typical Impact: Medium / High
Investment Required: Low
From the smallest neighborhood coffee shop to General Motors, your business has a physical presence (even if you’re 100% remote, your employees are still working somewhere). That physical presence uses resources (water, electricity, heating & cooling…), all of which generate carbon and contribute to climate change. reducing
If your business exists, it generates a climate impact that falls into this category.
BUT this is also the most exciting category because ANY climate-friendly improvement in this category will likely directly reduce your costs!
Cut down on electrical usage? Your power bill goes down.
Improve the energy efficiency of your office space? Your heating bill goes down.
Reduce your water consumption? Your water bill goes down.
This is a great starting point if you want to immediately make your business more profitable.
Does that grab your attention?
Waste & Materials
Typical Impact: Medium
Investment Required: Low / Medium
Want to know exactly how un-sexy climate work can get? Let’s talk about waste streams!
Broadly speaking, every business (even yours!) uses physical materials and tools. From laptops and monitors to printer paper and markers to coffee in the break room, your employees need and use things that, in turn, require carbon and have a climate impact.
The good news?
Tackle opportunities to reduce waste in this category and you’re likely to drive down your overhead costs. Bonus? You’ll also probably tighten up your firm’s corporate and digital security.
“Universal” Product & Operations Improvements
Typical Impact: High
Investment Required: High
This is one of my favorite categories because it starts to get at the heart of improving your product offering, but it doesn’t require a tremendous amount of specialized knowledge to implement.
Things like outbound product packaging, fleet management improvements and vendor management fall into this category. They’re improvements that make a huge impact on your business, but can also require coordination across a lot of suppliers and internal stakeholders to achieve. But they’re also often low-risk—others have figured out how to improve the environmental sustainability of their packaging. You should too.
Tackling a challenge in this category also starts your team thinking about how to improve the climate impact of your products themselves—developing that specialized knowledge that your team will need to tackle the specifics of your product. But by starting with a “Universal” opportunity in the product & operations category, you can start to see a return immediately while you learn the details and get better at sustainability.
See opportunities to make your business stronger in the list above? You should—opportunities to improve your company’s sustainability while making your business stronger are everywhere.
Your competition is likely tackling some of these. Shouldn’t you?
(A note to my fellow accounting dorks out there—I’m munging Scope 1 vs Scope 2 impacts here, but doing so intentionally. If addressing only Scope 1 emissions matters to you, focus just on those.
But if you’re worried about climate-friendly perceptions of your brand, remember that your customers likely don’t understand the difference in the technical scopes. They’ll just hold you accountable for, say, flying your entire team to Bali for 2 weeks, even though that’s technically a Scope 2 and not Scope 1 emission. Better to address as much as you can and leave the carbon accounting to the folks who have to do the reporting!)