Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
The Truth About
Green Business
Slideshow by Jean Eng
Book written by Gil Friend
Green is not a panacea. Going for the green and even getting there doesn’t guarantee business success.
Truth 1
The green market is large and growing rapidly. Green building: $50 billionEco-tourism:$24.17 billionClean tech $8.4 billion
Truth 2
Behind the big picture and the grand ideas, green business is also about basic, pragmatic business and good common sense.
Truth 3
Every day you continue to burn more energy than you truly need, to produce non-product that you can’t sell, is another day of pouring money and resources down the drain.
Truth 4
Climate change is changing the way the world gets food, does business, and lives in general, the change is global.
Unprecedented opportunities arise for business.
Truth 5
Profit is the by-product, not the purpose.
“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”
Truth 6
If you aren’t setting high enough goals, your competitors’ innovations will set them higher for you.
Truth 7
The notion that better environmental performance reduces financial performance is all too often rooted in habit, not evidence.
Truth 8
Nature’s living systems, from individual organisms to complex ecosystems, have accumulated 3.85 billion years of evolutionary “research and development” experience.
Truth 9
Eco-efficiency:
Good for business and the environment
Truth 10
“Waste” isn’t a particular kind of material, but a material out of place. “Waste” often cost a business to dispose of or treat.
Truth 11
Even the best-run businesses leave money on the table and generate unnecessary environmental impact by running facilities that are inefficient.
Truth 12
Running lean and green.
Green provides a vision and goals, while lean provides the system for effective implementation.
Truth 13
Carbon footprints are used to measure the impact that businesses, products, people, and events have on climate change.
Carbon footprints provide a common language to talk about combating climate change.
Truth 14
Carbon is going to start costing you money, or making you money.
You choose.
Truth 15
A company creates a green brand and message when it ties its identity to its impacts on environment.
Green messaging can be a powerful way to differentiate your company and product.
Truth 16
Eco-Labels are an attempt to standardize and clearly communicate the environmental impacts of a product to consumers.
Some small companies have responded by creating alternate standards to skip the certification process and rely on reputation and word of mouth.
Truth 17
Some companies have overstated their green claims and have suffered in the market.
Consumer watchdog groups and environmental NGOs are on the lookout for misleading or even weak green claims.
Truth 18
“Conscious consumers” are a $200 billion market segment of people focused on health and fitness, the environment, personal development, sustainable living, and social justice.
Truth 19
Developing green products now can keep you ahead of the game, rather than playing catch-up.
Green products should minimize their impact on the environment over their entire life cycle.
Truth 20
Many U.S. cities and states have developed their own e-waste regulations. This has provided entrepreneurial opportunities to independent recycling companies to process the equipment and divert electronics from the landfill.
Truth 21
Customers are interested in value and utility—the benefit they get from a product—not necessarily the material product itself.
Product-to-service is a business model and implementation strategy.
Truth 22
A truly green service provides value to its customers with the least amount of environmental impact.
Truth 23
Bio-mimicry means “imitation of life.”
It has the potential to change the way we grow food, make materials, harness energy, heal ourselves, store information, and conduct business.
Truth 24
Earth’s ecological footprint is about 1.3 planets. We will require the resources of 2 planets by the early 2030s.
Truth 25
The Cradle-to-Cradle framework includes the product’s life cycle, from initial resource extraction through the end of its life, while considering the biological impacts of its cyclicity and toxicity.
Truth 26
Design that consider and emulate nature are more likely to succeed.
Truth 27
Innovation is at the heart of greening, whether you see it as building a better mousetrap or driving a new industrial revolution.
Truth 28
Your business customers are increasingly looking at environmental attributes when considering your products and services.
Truth 29
Partnerships are a powerful way to green your supply chain because they help you build a network of trusted suppliers to work collaboratively across an industry.
Truth 30
Companies often use scorecards to provide a consistent and systematic way to communicate their needs to their supply chain, and to rate suppliers on quality, price, delivery time, customer service, and environmental performance.
Truth 31
Being reactive is no way to run a successful business.
If you are constantly reacting, you risk losing market share to innovators while spending more time and resource adjusting.
Truth 32
Many cities around the country are adopting policies that require new buildings to be built to the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard.
Truth 33
Despite the common perception that green building costs more, building green can help reduce your operating costs with little or no additional construction cost.
Reduced electricity, gas and water demands create a significant saves over the lifetime of a building.
Truth 34
Many companies are finding that green buildings help attract and retain top workers, further boosting productivity.
Truth 36
Integrative Design is to create truly green, high-performance, healthy buildings.
Truth 36
E-waste in the U.S. totals 2.9 million tons per year—more than 1 percent of the solid waste stream. Everyday, 112,000 computers are discarded…
Truth 37
Companies are putting a great deal of effort into designing and operating more-efficient data centers.
Rising demand for data centers puts a growing demand on energy infrastructure.
Truth 38
IT products and services, servers to software to sensors, can monitor and manage resource use from home energy consumption and industrial wastewater flows to the environmental footprint of retail products.
Truth 39
Engaging employees takes thoughtfulness, commitment, heart, and above all, respect.
Employees who are engaged in greening create value through added efficiency, waste reduction, and process improvement.
Truth 40
Some companies think of environmental stakeholders as opponents they need to appease, but active, engaged stakeholders can provide added value and momentum.
Truth 41
The challenge is that there are a million things you could measure—but people don’t pay real attention to more than a few.
Truth 42
Greening business isn’t just about changing technology; it also depends on changing behavior so that people do different things—the right thing.
Truth 43
An EMS (Environmental Management System) can give you a higher bar to aim for and help embed that bar into your standard business practices.
Truth 44
Business regularly miscalculates risk and benefit, as the result of a structural inability to accurately assign value to factors that are materials—significant but not yet monetized.
Truth 45
Every material a company produces goes somewhere, even if we pretend it’s not there, and has impact, even if we pretend it doesn’t.
Truth 46
Owners and shareholders will grow impatient, I predict, with managers who fail to capture the attractive returns and reduced risk that can result from improved environmental performance.
Truth 47
Money makes the world go around—Carbon is taking on economic value. It’s not just an environmental issue anymore.
Truth 48
Executive and directors of corporations with fiduciary duty to company shareholders now face a new challenge:
The perception that they might be violating that duty if they don’t adequately prepare for such potential risks.
Truth 49
Energy is an uncertainty—whether the concern is supply or price.
Truth 50
Scenario planning is a method for identifying and evaluating potential strategies that can help you chart your course into an uncertain future.
Truth 51
Future proofing your green business is your key to reducing risk, building strategies, and operating in ways that hold the greatest chance of viability in the face of futures that will surprise you!
Truth 52
