Sustainability Needs To Become Sustainable
In the last few years, the corporate world has witnessed a great shift towards focusing on sustainability, and rightly so. If we have a look at the WEF Global Risks Report 2022, Top five global risks in terms of impact are social and environmental, unlike the previous decade, where four out of top five risks were economic. Sustainability is not a new word for businesses or people, but the extant paradigm has changed especially after the Covid-19 pandemic. It has definitely helped ignite a deeper understanding of human vulnerability, the importance of health, our environment and its resilience.
The impact of climate change with growing emissions, escalating levels of plastic waste, scarcity of resources, and associated risks need much more attention by all the stakeholders at the individual, collective, or at policy levels. This completely explains the rationale behind stakeholders, specifically investors seeking more and more information on environmental, social, and governance (E-S-G). Governments are coming up with regulations on enhanced disclosures and focusing on impact metrics. The Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) regulations for listed 1000 companies from SEBI from FY 2022-23 set the tone for ‘close to standardized disclosures’, of course this is a beginning and we can anticipate more standardization, more quantitative disclosures over time, and the good sign is that businesses have taken it well. For responsible corporations, this is an opportunity to step up their efforts even more and create long term ‘sustainable’ equity.
Considering the magnitude of issues and time, resources needed, this is the time for collective action. While the Governments can play an important role to facilitate and enable the ecosystem for this collective action. For Corporations, it will definitely be helpful to make sustainability an intrinsic part, a transformative enabler of business and growth strategy. Sustainability itself has to first become sustainable and that can happen when we craft business growth and sustainability roadmaps together by supplementing each other. It has to become an intrinsic part of strategy, processes and initiatives. Right from the design stage of manufacturing facilities, important aspects of zero water discharge, opportunities to use renewable power, zero waste solutions, even efficient technology needs to be taken care of. Similarly, every step of the value chain needs to be integrated to ensure sustainability is at the core of business decisions, which can then help reduce costs or we could term it as cost avoidance principle. Let’s be pragmatic here, business at any cost are not sustainable. There is definitely a need to be innovative about alternate opportunities, technology solutions, data analytics.
and collaborations, which do not necessarily incur significant costs. The ROI model of costs also works well but in today’s time, there is a need to find alternate, better approaches and ways. Innovations can definitely prove to be game changers and I can proudly share the example of Colgate India, where we are the first oral care brand in Asia to launch recyclable toothpaste tubes. As a pioneer, Colgate is also sharing its recyclable technology with others to achieve a circular economy. Our other initiatives such as the Recyclean toothbrush - made from recycled plastic or the Keep toothbrush - made with a metal handle, thereby using 80% less plastic are all successful due to it being design level business decisions. Our bold commitments to have 100% recyclable, reusable or compostable plastic packaging by 2025 demonstrate our actions.
To sum up, innovations, collaborations, and technology can bring breakthrough solutions for sustainability. Having a sustainability scorecard, cost-avoidable financial model, and measurements can help in taking a conscious call across the value chain and can have a cascading effect on business partners. For a purpose-driven brand, this is surely the way to align its business decisions around purpose and create a better impact. This lets everyone have an opportunity to revisit their leadership strategy and positioning. Sooner or later this needs to be done, the sooner the better.
Surely there is a lot to be done yet and at an unprecedented pace. One can be optimistic to see how our younger generation is far more conscious about the choices they make around social and environmental impact and this is going to evolve further. We are in both the worst and best times for sustainability - worst for the damage that has happened to climate change and best where an individual or consumer conscience is high, policymakers are making efforts to incentivize enabling ecosystem and infrastructure, and countries are putting accountability on each other for visible measurable impact disclosures. Encouraging all to be part of this transformation process today is the only way to help our future generations have a future to smile about.
