According to Keenan Hahn from Verteego Carbon, the inventory, measurement, management, analysis, reduction and reporting of green house gas (GHG) emissions is an increasingly important business issue in the United States, even though adopters of software solutions still belong to a club of happy fews that will drive tomorrow’s economy. Corporates and large public sector organizations increasingly invest in GHG footprints to assess their climate change impacts. Keenan believes demand for carbon management software will take off seriously in 2010 as soon as the Environmental Protection Agency will have officially passed its GHG Inventory law at Congress right before the Copenhagen Summit in December 2009. The payback for early adopters will then be massive since income statements will be hit by the regulation.

Keenan goes on by stating that companies can justify investing in Verteego Carbon due to the growing financial costs of environmental compliance, operational risks associated with the need to prepare a potential surge of oil and energy prices once the economic crisis will be behind us, reduced costs compared to manual processes and a desire to demonstrate industry leadership on climate change and foster a long term competitive advantage. Keenan Hahn thinks Verteego Carbon also helps businesses streamline their operations and become more efficient, resources-wise.

In a nutshell, Verteego Carbon is about creating value for their customers by enhancing carbon management capabilities with a fully-fledged carbon management software solution.

Sustainability and reducing our impact is in our blood here at Verteego, and the results of our carbon assessment were low, as expected. Highlights of our report include:

1) Extremely low home-work travel emissions of 208 kg carbon equivalent due to the fact that all employees take the subway to work.

2) Very low emissions from electricity consumed on-site (544 kg carbon equivalent) due to minimal use of heating and lighting.

3) Exceptionally low emissions from business travel by car (47 kg carbon equivalent) due to the use of lower-emission options, such as rail travel.

Because we are conscious of our impact in the VerteegOffice, we have picked all the low-hanging fruit in terms of reducing our impact. We are very conscious of making use of natural light, minimizing heating, reducing the waste we generate, and choosing low-impact transportation. Nevertheless, calculating our carbon footprint with Verteego Carbon has helped us identify some areas where we can reduce our impact further.

For instance, depreciation of the office, hardware, and furniture accounted for over 60% of our total footprint, and business travel by air accounted for over 80% of our total business travel emissions. It is clear that these are areas where we should focus our reduction efforts in the coming year.

Actions we are looking into for 2009 include better insulating the windows of our office to reduce heating needs, extending the life of our electronics to decrease amortized emissions from depreciation, using more tele- and video-conferencing to reduce business travel, and replacing air travel with train travel, which will save both emissions and costs.

To learn more about Verteego’s carbon management software and carbon consulting options, visit us at Verteego Carbon.

With the debate and growing consensus about the drastic effects greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will have on the planet, our quality of life, and the economy, it is surprising how little research has been done to identify practical and sensible solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

There is very little information available on what steps should be taken first to reduce emissions on the global or even national level. There is even less information about the estimated costs or reducing emissions.

In a study on sustainability and reducing carbon emissions in the US, McKinsey & Company has identified abatement solutions with marginal costs of less than $50 per ton of CO₂e. While some of the abatement options require “strong, coordinated, economy-wide action,” there are some negative marginal cost options that can be effective on the business or residential level, including updating lighting and electronic equipment and improving the building envelope.

The study concluded that using technologies available today, the US could achieve reductions of 3.0 to 4.5 gigatons of CO₂e in 2030 using abatement options with marginal costs less than $50 per ton.

Additionally, efforts to reduce GHG emissions would be good for the economy in the long run, saying:

A concerted nationwide effort to reduce GHG emissions would almost certainly stimulate economic forces and create business opportunities that we cannot foresee today and that may accelerate the rate of abatement the nation can achieve, thereby reducing the overall cost.

Source: Reducing US Greenhouse Gas Emissions: How much and at what cost?

As a start, we chose alongside with 3 highly motivated student-engineers from Ecole Centrale Paris, Matthieu Boutin, Cédric Siéwé, and Denis Pierre, as well as their academic supervisors Christophe Rittano, Olivier Ezratty, and Alexandre Otparlic, to Keep It Simple Stupid and focus on an ERP we know very well at Verteego for being a (very satisfied) customer of them: Entreprise-Facile.com. Indeed, our business operations and back-office are successfully supported by Entreprise-Facile.com. The connector enables Entreprise Facile customers who choose to become customers of Verteego as well (to enhance and manage their sustainability issues) to save time by not having to input data twice! Relevant data from the Entreprise-Facile database is securely and automatically transferred to Verteego Report or Verteego Carbon to help organizations assess and communicate their sustainability, or measure their carbon footprint. Entreprise-Facile.com is omnipresent amongst small businesses and solos, and we are proud to help these companies reduce the sustainability and carbon reporting gap with larger, more powerful corporations. It is even the very essence of Verteego’s mission.

As soon as this first connector was ready to go, the team went on, hand-in-hand with the Verteego’s product development team led by my partner Rupert Schiessl, to a second connector, with world-leader open source ERP solution Compiere. Now, all organizations that make us of Compiere to run their accounting and finance, manufacturing, logistics, sales, and purchasing efforts can automatically feed Verteego applications and save time as well as reduce the risk of human error when typing in data. Moreover, data is automatically updated, on a frequency that the customer defines directly from the connector interface plugged into Verteego! Compiere is the world-leading ERP on-the-cloud software in the manufacturing, distribution, retail and professional services industries. It is a great information system and company that shares many of the values we have here at Verteego.

Our software architect Vianney de Villemeur has had for a few weeks his team work on a number of new connectors to enlarge the scope of connectors available in the Verteego ERP library. Connectors for applications like SAP (Finance, Manufacturing,…), SAGE / Adonix, Open Sugar CRM, and a number of LDAPs (to import users automatically) are ready-to-go, modulo some time to parameterize them upon requests from our clients. We are seriously thinking of extending our library to Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics Navision and Axapta, Microsoft Active Directory, CEGID, Salesforce and other SAGE software before the end of 2009.

I hope you guys share our enthusiasm of delivering the very best value to our customers by integrating Verteego within their information system and help them make of sustainability a hassle-free commitment!

My question is: Is this the most efficient use of the funds to get AIG back on track?

The public outcry all the way up to President Obama himself has made it clear that many people feel bonuses are not the most efficient way to get the company back on track.

The general consensus is that the funds would be better spent improving and building up and stabilizing the insurance giant, not enriching its employees. At least part of the public outcry comes from the perception that taxpayer money was funneled into AIG, glanced off the CEO’s desk, and went directly into the hands of employees, without serving any real purpose other than to make already wealthy higher-ups even wealthier.

But maybe the bonus payments are serving a more important purpose; perhaps they are acting to stabilize and strengthen the company.

AIG says that the bonuses are part of an aggressive retention plan that aims to stem the loss of employees who are critical to the business’s success.

And this is where AIG, without anyone realizing it, may actually be adopting some sustainable business practices. The fact is AIG needs to keep some employees around to get itself out of this mess, but due to the long days, public outrage at AIG, and in some cases even death threats against employees, many employees have very little incentive to stay at AIG.

Finding new employees is a lengthy and expensive process, and time and money are two things that are working very strongly against AIG. The bonuses may provide the necessary incentive for employees to remain with the company.

If the amount spent on the bonuses is less than the company would have lost if certain employees had left the company, then perhaps the bonuses were an efficient use of the funds.

Apparently, however, AIG failed to consider the reputational impacts of paying bonuses at such a sensitive time. AIG is has been demonized in the media, and the public perception of the company is terrible.

The extremely negative reputation of AIG may prove to hinder future profitability of the company as customers will be reluctant to get involved with a company so closely associated with failure and greed.

Additionally, the decisions made at AIG are affecting more than just AIG. The unpopularity of the bonuses and the realization of how some of the bailout money is being spent will make finding support for future bailouts much more difficult. This could prove to slow the recovery of the economy as a whole, which will further harm AIG’s profitability.

While AIG’s decision to pay bonuses to increase employee retention may help them in the short run, the company’s reputation and potentially the entire economy will suffer in the long run.

Sustainable or wasteful, this is what has been done.

Ben and Jerry’s recently held a conference in Paris to promote their line of fair-trade ice cream. Ben Cohen, the Ben behind Ben and Jerry’s, discussed the economic downturn, saying that fear and greed have proven to be poor and unsustainable business practices and that we must build a new economy based more on compassion.

He elaborated on Ben and Jerry’s sustainable practices and the culture of sustainability that exists within the company. He specifically discussed their fair-trade ice cream program, in which they pay a small premium to farmers and producers in developing countries. By paying a small premium, Ben and Jerry’s profit margin is slightly reduced, but that little amount makes a world of difference in the lives of farmers, their families, and their communities.

Ben and Jerry’s has a long history of social and environmental sustainability, dating back to long before it was fashionable to do so. Since in 1988, an inner-city bakery in New York City that trains and counsels the homeless has provided the brownies for Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

Ben also mentioned that in the early years of Ben and Jerry’s, when the price of milk and other dairy products fell below levels where it was profitable for farmers to produce dairy products, they continued to pay farmers prices above market value. This practice kept farmers in business while still allowing Ben and Jerry’s to make a healthy profit.

Some of Ben and Jerry’s environmental initiatives were also touched on, such as their efforts to reduce carbon emissions in every step of their production process, from cow to cone.

Clearly, compassion and sustainability, not greed, have been working just fine for Ben and Jerry’s. As Ben said during the conference, corporations are supposed to serve public interest instead of the public serving corporate interests, as has been the case recently.

It is time to start building a new economy - one based on compassion and public interest, rather than corporate interests, where the goal is not profits at any cost, but rather sustainable profits.

For detailed information on all of Ben and Jerry’s sustainable practices, visit their site:

http://www.benjerry.co.uk/ourvalues/

The popularity of sustainability reports among larger companies has increased rapidly in recent years. Back in the 1980’s, only chemical companies issued “sustainability reports.” Those reports were really just environmental impact reports. Today, over 50% of the Global Fortune 100 and more than 2000 companies worldwide from every imaginable industry issue sustainability reports that focus not only on environmental issues, but also on economic, social, and governance issues.

As sustainability has become mainstream, critics of CSR have raised concerns about the usefulness of the reports. Are CSR reports just a marketing tool and greenwashing, or do they actually provide useful information about a company’s performance? Does CSR increase shareholder value? Can CSR coexist with or even enhance capitalism? But one of the most frequent questions raised is: Who, if anybody, actually reads CSR reports?

A survey conducted by GlobeScan found that about half of the general population in North America, Australia, parts of Europe have read, looked at, or at least heard of a CSR report. The survey also showed that “Opinion Leaders - people who are the most likely to be engaged in and speak out on corporate issues - are twice as likely as the general public to say they have looked at a report, suggesting that even more people will be reading these reports in the future.”

A separate study by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) showed that about two-thirds of readers are in business or consulting and many of the rest are government employees and academics. Let’s take a more detailed look at who reads sustainability reports and why.

Employees

A company’s employees are one of the major readers of its CSR report. Particularly in larger, multi-national companies, employees use the report to learn more about their company’s practices and performance worldwide.

Potential Employees

A sustainability report is a great source of information about a company for prospective employees. CSR reports give a an idea about the priorities, practices, and culture of a company, which can say a lot about what it might be like to work in a given company.

Worldwide, 80% of people said they would prefer to work in an organization that has an environmentally-friendly reputation. People want to work at companies that have progressive policies and practices, and sustainable/green practices are becoming an effective recruiting point that can help attract and retain top talent.

Students

Like potential employees, many students use sustainability reports to learn more about the practices of a given company or about sustainability in general. Some students may use the information for projects on sustainable business and socially responsible practices while others may be looking for internship opportunities.

Investors

Socially Responsible Investments account for about 10% of all the money invested in US markets. Sustainability and CSR reports are an extremely important source of information for SRI investors. A CSR report is an SRI investor’s window into a company’s practices and performance. Investors usually scour the reports for key performance indicators that can be used to compare companies, key challenges, potential trouble areas, and progressive practices.

Customers

It is becoming increasingly common for customers to put some emphasis on sustainability and environmental performance when making purchasing decisions. For this reason, it is important for companies to be transparent about their sustainable policies, practices, and performance (both good and bad) with consumers through a CSR report.

Note: A CSR report should not be seen as a marketing tool. While it can increase trust and loyalty among existing customers and attract new ones, a CSR report should explain a company’s performance honestly and openly, sharing challenges in addition to achievements.

Purchasers

Purchasers - companies with many suppliers - are putting more emphasis on corporate social responsibility in their supply chain. Purchasers seek reliability and low risk in their supply chain. They use the CSR reports of their suppliers to determine how well adapted the supplier is to exist into the future and if involvement with that supplier poses a reputational risk.

Suppliers

Suppliers use the CSR reports of purchasers to learn about the culture and practices of the company. Before doing business with a purchaser, it is important for suppliers to understand what standards they will be held to and what responsibilities they must fulfill.

Government employees

Government employees use CSR reports to understand the impacts of organizations on the local community and the steps that organizations are taking to improve that impact.

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Sources:

CSR Network Inc. 2001. The State of Global Environmental and Social Reporting: The 2001 Benchmark Survey. Cutter Information Corp.

Ipsos MORI. October 2007. Corporate Environmental Behavior and the Impact on Brand Values.

KPMG International and SustAinability Ltd. 2008. Count me in: The readers’ take on sustainability reporting. Global Reporting Initiative.

http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/csr04_gri_PR.html

http://www.socialfunds.com/news/article.cgi/1459.html

http://www.ivci.com/pdf/corporate-environmental-behaviour-and-the-impact-on-brand-values.pdf

A new rule proposed by the US Environmental Protection Agency will require just over 13,000 facilities accounting for nearly 90% of US greenhouse gas emissions to report their greenhouse gas emissions. The plan would require companies in a broad range of industries that emit at least 25,000 metric tons of CO₂e per year to report their emissions.

The EPA is proposing that companies report emissions on a facility level, and then aggregate the information into a corporate profile. In this way, the information can be easily broken back down into facility-level data so that the emissions can be analyzed in greater detail.

While the plan would cover nearly 90% of GHG emissions in the US, the reporting threshold of 25,000 metric tons of CO₂e means that small businesses will be largely unaffected by the regulation change. According to EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, “This is a critical step toward helping us better protect our health and environment - all without placing an onerous burden on our nation’s small businesses.”

EPA estimates place the cost of compliance to private sector industry at $160 million in the first year. The cost in the second year is estimated to fall to $127 million as companies establish their reporting framework.

“This is an important foundation step toward regulating greenhouse gases and reducing them,” said David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The proposed rule means that many companies will begin actively measuring and reporting GHG emissions for the first time.

First time reporters would be required to report their emissions annually, and the first reporting period would be the calendar year 2010. The emissions data would be self-certified by the reporting entity and then the EPA will verify the data to ensure quality and accuracy.

Companies that take a proactive approach to measuring and managing emissions are likely to find that they can reduce costs by cutting wasteful processes. The new rule may be a sort of forceful ushering of companies into discovering the financial benefits of energy and resource efficiency.

The first time reporters will need a framework in which they can organize their data collection and plans of action. For the proposed regulation to encourage emissions reductions rather than acting as merely a tally of a company’s CO₂ footprint, companies will need a framework that allows them to easily report, analyze, and track emissions.

The proposal is a step toward the Obama administration’s goal of a cap-and-trade carbon emissions program, and it is a certainly welcome initiative for those who wish to see business reduce its impact on the environment.

For more information on the proposal: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ghgrulemaking.html

The ten-part series The Sustainable Office is now available for download so that everyone can benefit from the cost-saving, impact-reducing tips. Improving the performance of your office in each of the 10 areas is guaranteed to make your workspace a bit greener while making your employees happier and more productive. The ideas suggested are cheap and easy-to-do actions that will increase your business’ sustainability and reduce its carbon footprint.

I hope you enjoy the green tips and that you put them to good use! (Tip #1: Don’t print this PDF!!!)

Click here to download The Sustainable Office now!

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