Going green and making money
We’ve all heard so much about ‘going green’ over the last few years. With the oil disaster in the Gulf looming large, finding more sustainable ways to live will come into ever greater focus. If there is a positive side to the disaster, it will be that the US reassesses a way of life heavily dependent on energy that generates 25.2% of global carbon emissions from roughly 4.6% of the global population.
For business, the challenge has always been the cost of going green. The perception is that changing the way we do business – the transporting of goods, travelling to work, heating and cooling premises, waste – will require costly and fundamental changes to our infrastructure.
About three years ago, we came up with a concept we called Greenguage. It was a web-based platform designed to allow companies to engage employees on the subject of more sustainable ways of working. Generally we always find that internal corporate communications need to be brief and to the point to work in a world where we suffer from information overload. With Greenguage, we found the opposite – users wanted rich content on the subject of sustainability. They wanted to learn about and understand the issues. The core of the application was an area where employers could set behavior objectives for employees for which they would earn points. For example, running a meeting via videoconference rather than getting everyone to travel to one location would earn points. Sharing a car with a colleague to travel to work would earn points. And so on. The platform featured a green catalog where employees could spend their points. The catalog featured sustainable things – torchlight’s you shook to make them work rather than using disposable batteries, wooden balls you put in the washing machine to reduce the amount of detergent used and charitable options such as ‘planting a tree’.
At the time I had read about one of the UK’s leading retailers, Marks & Spencer, setting the objective of totally neutralizing their impact on the environment by changing the way they worked. They called it Plan A, (because there is no Plan B). I made contact with the team at M&S and asked them if we could show them Greenguage and they agreed. They decided not to go with our idea as they had already gone some way to developing another route internally but we received an enthusiastic reception and got great insight into what they were doing. Their plans were ambitious and I must admit I was a little skeptical of their chances of success. The plans looked costly and there was a danger they would just be paying lip service to the issue for PR purposes.
Three years later M&S has just published some results of what they have achieved. They make fascinating reading.
Their own estimate was that the changes would cost them in the region of $60 million to implement. The reality is that they did incur that cost but they calculate they have made savings in the region of $70 million. Less waste, less packaging, lower fuel consumption. In addition they’ve connected with existing and new customers and developed new products and services. They launched the M&S Energy brand that supplies domestic heating energy but focuses on the proper insulation of homes. They have attracted over 300,000 customers in under a year. M&S claim they are on target to be the first retailer globally to achieve 100% sustainability by 2015 – and they’ve making money from it!
We never got Greenguage properly off the ground for many reasons. In the main companies couldn’t be convinced that the cost of implementing it would generate a payback. I think M&S have proved them wrong.
The technology that we built for Greenguage is still there. I’d happily dust it down and re-engineer it if there are any takers!
Steve
