I’m at the earliest possible stages of negotiating participating in an environmental sustainability initiative involving a large organisation with an urgent need to act on its footprint. I can’t disclose its name, but many would be familiar with its brand as it’s a major player in an industry which is an obvious target for emissions reduction. If you consider a pyramid with businesses like steelworks, aluminium smelters and miners at the top, you might conceivably rank it just one tier below. It has no environmental management processes in place. It’s a green field, if that’s the appropriate metaphor.
After agitating for many months over the need for this organisation to act, this organisation’s senior executive has finally conceded it’s time, and my colleague in an earlier iteration of this blog has just been appointed to its environmental-stewardship role. And it’s a big job, no doubt.
Over lunch, we had our first discussion of the scale of the task ahead. As I outlined to him, I consider the biggest early win he needs is to line up the power base to support him. He too conceded there would be silent dissenters more than willing to derail his efforts. What he is about to take on portends massive and continuous change, disruption even, as the industry and the customers it serves all begin to reconfigure their operations, not just to comply with the new carbon-emissions legislation about to come into force, but also for marketing gain and customer favour. Apparently, all of the (business) customers his business serves now ask for information on his company’s sustainability undertakings.
We are optimistic about being able to work together and build a program that brings about, in early stages, change in the form of an environmental policy and ISO14001-accredited environmental management system. The challenge right now however is to plan the strategy to achieve it, and the platform on which to secure senior management support.
If we get the go ahead, this experience will prove instrumental in informing the development of the Ogonogo project addressing sustainability activity among, initially, Australia’s leading companies. On which, there will be plenty more to come in due course.
First, there is a truckload of work to get on with in nutting out the challenges ahead in my colleague’s new undertaking.
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