Serious about Sustainability Solutions? Learn to break the ICE…

Last week I was in New Delhi attending a “Sustainability Solutions” Summit. Organized by Confederation of Indian Industries. Attended by more than 500 participants from wide variety of Industries, academia, government officials and consultants and entrepreneurs and students, the Summit was really an eye opener in many respects as Industry experts and Government officials discussed wide variety of sustainability challenges and possible solutions. Interestingly sustainability is growing strongly in India, and New Delhi is listening and appears to favor sustainable development going forward. In a land where the environmental legislations are rampantly evaded, Indian industry appears to have woken up to the business value of Sustainable development and the need for coming up with sustainability solutions to operate in this challenging vibrant Indian economy. The fact that many Indian companies now have a global footprint, it is becoming increasingly important to embrace sustainable business models in order to sustain. Sustainability is no longer a choice and it is no longer enough to comply. This Summit sought to find enduring solutions to 2 key inter-twined aspects of sustainable growth and development: re-creation of a green economy, and inclusive innovation.


However the key takeaways of the conference as gathered by me, were that sustainability solutions emerge through Innovation, Collaboration and Education which I have coined as the ICE and embracing sustainability involves what could be called as breaking the ICE.

Innovation involves creative thinking and connecting the dots. It involves being aware of consequences of business impacts and the unintended consequences of our actions. What we believe to be a sustainability solution today may have unintended consequences. Did we know that biofuels would create rise in price of corn or biodegradable plastics derived out of palm oil will give rise to unsustainable palm oil exploitation and harm the ecosystem of the orangutan? Innovative business models are those which are sustainable and inclusive and there will be no business in future that can survive if it is not inclusive and sustainable. Going forward all innovation will be sustainable social innovation. Social innovation means thinking about the organization or the business as a part of the society and working together as humans and going with the natural flow of nature. Social innovations are source of well-being and have shared benefits.

Collaboration means listening to each other with empathy and working together. When faced with complex problems of how much we have trashed the earth, which set ways of thinking cannot solve, now we see businesses, governments, customers, competitors all sitting together and putting their heads together to come up with solutions. Collaboration involves building bridges between different kinds of stakeholders and allowing ideas to develop freely. Collaborative platforms like conferences, in person meetings will continue to exist however collaboration is and will be driven by information technology. Forums, social media, IT tools will enable sustainability collaboration and drive stakeholder engagement.

Education is the key to the realization of innovation and collaboration. In this parlance it is sustainability education and awareness that I am referring to. Making more businesses realize that sustainability is not something that you adopt because it enhances your brand, it is rather necessary to survive in this fiercely competitive, resource crunched environment, and this by itself will be an uphill task. Here again IT tools are and will continue to be widely leveraged.

Breaking the ICE is not easy and education and awareness the key to innovation brought about by collaborative efforts of passionate individuals and businesses. With representatives from GIZ, WWF, CDP, WBCSD, Bureau of Energy Efficiency, and industries like Microsoft, Infosys, ITC Infotech, Tata chemicals, Tata Steel, Vedanta, Petrobas, Rio tinto, ACC Cement, Tata Power, Kirloskar Brothers, and ministers from the Govt of India, and enterpreneurs like Harish Hande from SELCO and thought leader like Gunter Pauli from ZERI this conference proved to be a perfect melting pot for sharing ideas and joining the dots for Sustainability Solutions in the real world.

Read only if you identify yourself with the theme..

Too many months have passed and not a single post from me..that is a bad. However I did manage to do one post on Sustainable Tomorrow at Infosys website. For those who like reading my posts please do visit www.infosysblogs.com/Sustainable-Tomorrow. My blog title is Sustainability and Sustainable Tomorrow. I know few of my close friends have actually heaved a sigh of relief not to be asked by me - "have you read my latest post?", but here I am again..though may be I will not spam their mail boxes this time!

Hoping to do more frequent posts. For the time being do visit my post at infy website. Till we meet again ciao

How much Green do we need to become?

Green has a become buzz word with everyone talking or doing something about it. Business have started printing Sustainability Reports to show their commitment towards environment and green. So much that some people from my personal circle have quit jobs and have become social entrepreneurs of green activities. Really inspiring.
And above all, there are so many seminars, webinars, podcasts available on green that one cannot be ignorant about our climate and planet. However, what is most interesting to see is that any session you attend on Environment, Green Change, Water prevention etc., there would be a high chance of one speaker who would give example of having bath with one bucket of water or has switched to conventional methods of living. And I have a serious problem with such kind of unwordly remarks. What do they want/expect from common man?

• Do they expect us to go back to medival period?
• Do they expect us to think so much green that even while buying basic commodities of home one should look for carbon footprint?
• Do they mean that world which was becoming flat sometime back is getting territorial again? With the fact that buy local to go green and reduce one's carbon footprint.
• Do they expect us that anything with label green is the right choice irrespective of other important parameters to me as an individual?

and so on. The point I am trying to make here is that people should be made aware becuase that is in the common interest for our planet. We have to go green. Period. But how? Has anyone got any clear view on that. There are various means and roles each country and individual needs to play here.

Reduce carbon footprints means what? I have not been able to comprehend the right definition still. Yes, I have read the official definition but when it comes to buying products the one needs to know carbon footprint also covers the emissions from the source. Now, if I am sourcing from China because it gives me manufacturing and product pricing advantage. Shall I not go for it? Purelybecuase it involves the mode of goods transport i.e. air is causing more emissions that does not mean I should start buy locally. There are certain business challenges like speed to market, pricing, quality and service which come into play while a product is being produced.

Basic point: If I am not going to be in business and make profits, will green really matter ?

Yes, I am in agreement that we should be "responsible" and must consider impact on the environment while doing our daily jobs in life. However, just we being responsible will not help becuase we need to use the technology to our advantage to reduce the impact further. We have left behind medival period centuries ago so why quote such examples.

For example : I read about this washing machine which would use just one glass of water and one spoon of powder to wash all the clothes (http://www.xerosltd.com/). Now that's technology in use & behaving responsibly.

Another example: Grohe has come out with showers with Eco-Button which reduce water usage upto 40% (http://www.grome.com/). Not only this they have whole lot of bathroom accessories which can help save water and thus enable us to become more repsonsibly. Rather than asking us to start taking bath with one bucket of water !!!

There are some printing of paper setting which one can see in offices like double sided printing. Absolutely makes sense. Infact, I was reading some days back about some special fonts to be preferred as they use less ink while printing. Another invention in this area is the "Eco-Fonts" (http://www.ecofonts.com/). Awesome ! Mind Blowing !

Having said all this what I have realised is that we need to go green because it is the question of our survival and future of next generations. But we also have to use our common sense as well not just driven by labels proclaiming green and some NGOs coming in with big sponsors to advocate the same.