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Where Next for the Circular Economy?

Where Next for the Circular Economy

Article by Wayne Visser

An International Sustainable Business column for The Guardian

It is not hard to make the case for a circular economy, ie one where closed-loop production brings us closer to the goal of zero waste; according to Hunter Lovins, author and founder of Natural Capitalism Solutions, our global economy is so inefficient that less than 1% of all the resources we extract are actually used in products and are still there six months after sale.

Not only is this unbelievably inefficient, it is also profoundly unsustainable. As Richard Heinberg says in his book, Peak Everything, “The 21st century ushered in an era of declines”, from global oil, natural gas, and coal extraction to yearly grain harvests, climate stability, population, fresh water and minerals like copper and platinum.

The idea of a circular economy is not new. In the 1960s, US economist Kenneth Boulding called for a shift away from “the cowboy economy”, where endless frontiers imply no limits on resource consumption or waste disposal, to “a spaceship economy”, where everything is engineered to be constantly recycled. Mariska van Dalen, a circular economy expert at the consultancy and engineering firm Tebodin, captures the essence of the concept as: “Waste is food, use solar income and celebrate diversity.”

One of the most prominent advocates for the circular economy is Michael Braungart, co-author of Cradle to Cradle (with Bill McDonough). Today, Braungart holds academic chairs in Cradle to Cradle innovation and quality at Rotterdam School of Management and for design at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, where Braungart has found his intellectual home.

When I interviewed Braungart for the Top 50 Sustainability Books a few years ago, I found out that he regards the Netherlands as most likely to become the first circular economy. “The Dutch never romanticised nature, so it’s different to the United Kingdom or Germany,” he said. “There’s no ‘mother nature’, because with the next tide they would just swim away. It was always a culture of partnership with nature, learning from nature, and that’s what we need. We can learn endlessly from nature, but it’s not about romanticising nature.”

The Netherlands also have a culture of support, whereas the Americans, Germans, British and Swedish have a culture of control, Braungart said. “They assume human beings are bad anyway and we need to control them to be less bad. But the Dutch culture is a culture of support, because if you don’t support your neighbour, you will drown (because your neighbour couldn’t take care of your dyke). Even if you don’t like your neighbour, you need to support your neighbour. So Cradle to Cradle is a culture of support.”

I was interested to find out whether experts working on the circular economy in the Netherlands also shared Braungart’s confidence. Krispijn Beek, who worked at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Innovation and Agriculture on sustainable business policy, said “Cradle to Cradle was a big hit in the Netherlands, including government.” Apparently, the trend really took off after a 2006 television documentary, Afval = Voedsel (Waste = Food).

However, at a later point the idea stalled – at least in government. Beek claims that “one of the showstoppers was the commercial certification process, which made it impossible to use Cradle to Cradle in public procurement.” …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/article_netherlands_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] Where Next for the Circular Economy? (article)

Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-quest-for-sustainable-business”]Link[/button] The Quest for Sustainable Business (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2012) Where Next for the Circular Economy? The Guardian, 10 December 2012.

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The Future of CSR

The Future of CSR

Towards Transformative CSR, or CSR 2.0

Paper by Wayne Visser

It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities – Josiah Charles Stamp

Abstract

This paper argues that CSR, as a business, governance and ethics system, has failed. This assumes that success or failure is measured in terms of the net impact (positive or negative) of business on society and the environment. The paper contends that a different kind of CSR is needed if we are to reverse the current direction of many of the world’s most pressing social, environmental and ethical trends. The first part of the paper reviews business’s historical progress over the Ages and Stages of CSR: moving through the Ages of Greed, Philanthropy, Marketing and Management, using defensive, charitable, promotional and strategic CSR approaches respectively. The second part of the paper examines the Three Curses of Modern CSR (incremental, peripheral and uneconomic), before exploring what CSR might look like in an emerging Age of Responsibility. This new CSR – called systemic or radical CSR, or CSR 2.0 – is based on five principles (creativity, scalability, responsiveness, glocality and circularity) and forms the basis for a new DNA model of responsible business, built around the four elements of value creation, good governance, societal contribution and environmental integrity.

Taking Stock on CSR

My starting point for any discussion on CSR – by which I mean corporate sustainability and responsibility, but choose whichever label you prefer (corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, sustainability, business ethics) – my starting point is to admit that CSR has failed. The logic is simple and compelling. A doctor judges his/her success by whether the patient is getting better (healthier) or worse (sicker). Similarly, we should judge the success of CSR by whether our communities and ecosystems are getting better or worse. And while at the micro level – in terms of specific CSR projects and practices – we can show many improvements, at the macro level almost every indicator of our social, environmental and ethical health is in decline.

I am not alone in my assessment or conclusion. Paul Hawken stated in The Ecology of Commerce (1994) that ‘if every company on the planet were to adopt the best environmental practice of the “leading” companies, the world would still be moving toward sure degradation and collapse.’ Unfortunately, this is still true. Jeffrey Hollender, founder and CEO of Seventh Generation, agrees, saying: ‘I believe that the vast majority of companies fail to be “good” corporate citizens, Seventh Generation included. Most sustainability and corporate responsibility programs are about being less bad rather than good. They are about selective and compartmentalized “programs” rather than holistic and systemic change’ (Hollender & Breen, 2010).

In fact, there are no shortage of critics of CSR. Christian Aid (2004) issued a report called ‘Behind the Mask: The Real Face of CSR’, in which they argued that ‘CSR is a completely inadequate response to the sometimes devastating impact that multinational companies can have in an ever-more globalised world – and it is actually used to mask that impact.’ A more recent example is an article in the Wall Street Journal called ‘The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility’, which claims that ‘the idea that companies have a responsibility to act in the public interest and will profit from doing so is fundamentally flawed’ (Karnani, 2010). This is not the place to deconstruct these polemics. Suffice to say that they raise some of the same concerns I have and which I discuss in this paper …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/paper_future_csr_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] The Future of CSR (paper)

Related pages

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”info” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.kaleidoscopefutures.com”]Page[/button] Kaleidoscope Futures (website)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”info” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Page[/button] CSR International (website)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2012) The Future of CSR: Towards Transformative CSR, or CSR 2.0, Kaleidoscope Futures Paper Series, No. 1.

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South Korea Notes 2012

12 March 2012

Flying to Seoul tonight. Speaking at a conference on ISO 26000 & CSR. It is my first visit to Korea so extra exciting.

13 March 2012

Clues that you are in Seoul:

  • Clue #1 – there is a pre-installed laptop in the hotel room.
  • Clue #2 – the flat-screen TV is nearly cinema size.
  • Clue #3 – the toilet has a console with 13 buttons … I’ll let you guess what they are all for 🙂
  • Clue #4 – the desk lamp is touch-sensitive.
  • Clue #5 – plug sockets fit all international plugs; no adaptors required.
  • Clue #6 – there is a free-to-use mobile phone in the hotel room.
  • Clue #7 – “vegetarian” includes fish & chicken.

14 March 2012

korea_2012_speakers

The ISO 26000 & CSR conference in Seoul was good. Delish veggie dinner at Sanchon temple restaurant, with exquisite traditional Korean dancing.

15 March 2012

Talking with CEO of Citibank Korea the other night, he admitted that 60% of the global financial crisis was caused by greed, pure & simple. Another interesting lesson: the Korean government is funding social enterprises – but subsidisation increases failure rates and lowers productivity.

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Women and Sustainability

Women and Sustainability:

Taking a Lead in China

Article by Wayne Visser

An International Sustainable Business column for The Guardian

A few years ago, on one of my visits to China, I was invited to speak to a group in Shanghai called Women in Sustainability Action (Wisa). The organisation was set up by a former academic colleague, Jacylyn Shi, as a global network of professional women working in sustainability.

This got me thinking about the relationship between women and sustainability – and especially how this dynamic is playing out in China.

According to professor Kellie McElhaney, founder of the Centre for Responsible Business at University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, companies that empower women are more likely to be companies that act sustainably.

A research paper written by McElhaney and Sanaz Mobasseri found that businesses with more women on their board of directors are more likely to: manage and improve their energy efficiency; measure and reduce their carbon emissions; reduce their packaging impacts; invest in renewable power; improve access to healthcare in developing countries; have strong partnerships with local communities; offer products with nutritional or health benefits; proactively manage human capital development; offer transparent financial products; have anti-corruption policies and programmes; have a high level of disclosure and transparency; and avoid controversies such as accounting fraud, price fixing, criminal behaviour among top executives, controversial customer practices and insider trading.

But why is this? It’s a topic for hot debate and there are probably as many opinions as there are commentators. Do men have inherently unsustainable ways of acting in the world? Does testosterone fuel the exploitation of our planet and its people? Are women our best hope for creating a sustainable future.

Elle Carberry, co-founder and managing director of the China Greentech Initiative believes that women may be drawn to sustainability because of its social angle. “From all my 20 years in business, I have met more women in this area than in others [areas of business],” she says. “Be it in China or the United States.”

She adds: “It does strike me that women come to this with a view about society and business.

In China, women also appear to be playing an increasingly important role in sustainability and for one Chinese woman in particular, this “view about society and business” turned her into the wealthiest self-made woman in the world. Zhang Yin, also known by her Cantonese name Cheung Yan, is the founder and director of Nine Dragons Paper, a recycling company that buys scrap paper from the US, imports it into China, and turns it mainly into cardboard for use in boxes to export Chinese goods.

In 2006, she topped the list of the richest people in China and by 2010 her $4.6bn (£2.9bn) fortune placed her ahead of the likes of Oprah Winfrey and JK Rowling. She has said that she built her entire business empire on some simple advice that she received in Hong Kong in 1985: “Waste paper is like a forest – paper recycles itself, generation after generation.” …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/article_china_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] Women and Sustainability (article)

Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-quest-for-sustainable-business”]Link[/button] The Quest for Sustainable Business (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2012) Women and Sustainability: Taking a Lead in China, The Guardian, 26 October 2012.

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A Test for Future-Fitness

A Test for Future Fitness:

Make it Safe, Smart, Shared, Sustainable and Satisfying

Article by Wayne Visser

Are you fit for the future? Will your product, organisation, community, city or country survive and thrive in 10, 20, 50 or even 100 years?

We live in a world that is changing faster and challenging us more than ever before. Great progress has been made in lifting people out of poverty, advancing scientific frontiers, connecting the globe with technology and making knowledge more accessible. At the same time, there are disturbing trends of increasing inequality, catastrophic destruction of ecosystems and loss of species, pervasive corruption, increasingly volatile and dangerous climate change, waves of forced migration and floods of refugees, a rise of religious extremism and the omnipresent threat of terrorism.

The question is: how can we – as individuals, businesses, communities and policy-makers – prepare for the future? How can we maximize our chances of success, not only by being ready, but also by helping to shape the future that we desire? I think it helps to view future-fitness in two ways: in terms of alignment – i.e. fitting, like a jigsaw piece, into the bigger picture of an emerging world; and in terms of agility – i.e. building up the kind of fitness that allows quick reflexes and strong performance in response to future conditions.

The biggest trends in society and our most enduring ideals suggest that there are five key criteria for future-fitness: our products, organisations, communities, cities or countries must be safe, smart, shared, sustainable and satisfying? These 5-Ss of Future-Fitness are summarised in the table below and then briefly defined in the subsequent sections …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/inspiration_future_fit_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] A Test for Future Fitness (article)

Related pages

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”info” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-age-of-responsibility”]Page[/button] The Age of Responsibility (book)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2012) A Test for Future Fitness: Make it Safe, Smart, Shared, Sustainable and Satisfying, Kaleidoscope Futures Inspiration Series, No. 1.

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Family Friendly Enterprise

Family Friendly Enterprise:

Slovenia leads the way

Article by Wayne Visser

An International Sustainable Business column for The Guardian

Only 14% of employees in the UK (compared with a 21% global average) are fully engaged in their work and one in four (24%) are not satisfied with their job, according to a Towers Watson global workforce survey. Furthermore, nearly one in three (30%) do not feel engaged by their employer.

This is no trivial matter. Gallup estimates the cost of employee disengagement to the UK economy to be somewhere between £59.4bn and £64.7bn. Part of this cost is sickness-related absence; engaged employees in the UK take an average of 2.7 sick days per year, compared with 6.2 for those who could be described as disengaged.

The Centre for Mental Health estimates that employers loose around £8.4bn a year this way. However, nearly double this amount (£15.1bn a year) is due to productivity loss from people not feeling well in the workplace, so-called presenteeism.

Turn the trend around, however, and there are big upsides to having an engaged workforce. Research by the Corporate Leadership Council suggests that engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their organisation. According to the IES/Work Foundation, if companies increased investment in workplace engagement by 10%, they would increase profits by £1,500 per employee per year. That is because engaged employees generate 43% more revenue than disengaged ones and highly engaged organisations have the potential to reduce staff turnover by 87% and improve performance by 20%.

Given these statistics, it is hardly surprising that issues of wellbeing in the workplace are on the rise. In the UK, Business in the Community (BITC) promotes this agenda through their Workwell campaign, while globally the Great Place to Work Institute partners with more than 5,500 organisations with around 10 million employees to conduct the largest annual set of workplace culture studies in the world.

According to their research, employees believe they work for great organisations when they trust the people they work for, have pride in what they do and enjoy the people they work with.

Great Place to Work’s annual surveys and awards give kudos and some PR-driven reputational payback for companies that are investing in workplace wellbeing. For example, Microsoft topped the leader board in 2011 for the best multinational to work for globally, as well as in Europe.

“For us that means greater creativity, greater productivity and, ultimately, continued success as a market leader,” says Michel Van der Bel, managing director for Microsoft UK says. Kimberly Clark scored top in Latin America and the Admiral Group leads in the UK. Importantly, Great Place to Work also recognises large national companies and small and medium-sized enterprises.

Awards are one way to recognise best practice. Another is certification of management systems, which tends to encourage greater embedding of the values in the organisation. One place where this is happening is Slovenia, where the Ministry of Labour, Family and Social Affairs, in partnership with auditing firm The Ekvilib Institute, has run a family friendly enterprise certification scheme since 2007 …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/article_slovenia_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] Family Friendly Enterprise (article)

Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-quest-for-sustainable-business”]Link[/button] The Quest for Sustainable Business (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

Cite this blog

Visser, W. (2012) Family Friendly Enterprise: Slovenia Leads the Way, Wayne Visser Blog Briefing, 1 October. First appeared in The Guardian.

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Practising Social Responsibility Without the CSR Label

Practising social responsibility without the CSR label

Article by Wayne Visser

An International Sustainable Business column for The Guardian

Mexico’s small and medium sized enterprises account for more than 99% of the four million businesses in the country, generate 52% of GDP and provide 72% of employment. The government’s business accelerator programme supports these SMEs by funding institutions that can help the sector grow by improving competitiveness, business opportunities and market scalability.

One such business accelerator is the IDEARSE Center at Anahuac University in Mexico City. The centre’s business model for SME acceleration is built around CSR, incorporating environmental impacts, human rights, self-regulation, social impacts and community involvement and stakeholder engagement.

More remarkable still is that, by working with the supply chains of big brands such as Sony, Coca-Cola and Cemex and having trained more than 150 SMEs since 2007, the SMEs achieved sales growth of between 5% and 37% and jobs growth of between 5% and 19%. At the same time SME performance across all six CSR areas has improved between 23% and 46%. These numbers debunk several popular myths, most notably that CSR is not relevant, too expensive or not incentivised for SMEs. Let’s look more closely at these myths.

Is CSR relevant for SMEs?

The issue of relevance largely hinges on whether you adopt a very literal and narrow interpretation of CSR. Laura Spence, director of the Royal Holloway, University of London’s Centre for Research into Sustainability, says that the terminology of CSR is both inaccurate (as small firms are unlikely to be corporations) and off-putting jargon for SMEs.

“Also since CSR practice is often associated with reporting, SMEs don’t stand a chance. They are unlikely to have external financial reports, let alone the time resources or need to produce a glossy CSR report,” says Spence.

So first, we need to get the labels and definitions right. The IDEARSE centre, for example, describes CSR as “a permanent and continuous commitment, voluntarily adopted by the business, to respond to the economic, social and environmental impacts of its activities, and to guarantee the sustainable and human development to all its stakeholders.” No doubt, it helps that CSR in Spanish (responsabilidad social empresarial or RSE) translates more accurately as socially responsible ‘enterprise’.

Explicit or implicit CSR?

The second issue – whether CSR is too costly – is a real concern, but once again, it depends what we mean by CSR. Work by CSR academics Dirk Matten and Jeremy Moon distinguish between explicit and implicit CSR. Explicit CSR refers to many of the formalised practices we associate with large corporates, such as CSR codes, standards, managers, systems, reports and audits. These are resource intensive and mostly not feasible for SMEs …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/article_mexico_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] Practising Social Responsibility Without the CSR Label (article)

Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-quest-for-sustainable-business”]Link[/button] The Quest for Sustainable Business (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2012) Practising Social Responsibility Without the CSR Label, The Guardian, 12 September 2012.

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Water Footprints

Water Footprints:

Lessons from Kenya’s floriculture sector

Article by Wayne Visser

An International Sustainable Business column for The Guardian

There are flowers to fit every occasion. But if you are celebrating World Water Week (26-31 August), you might want to think twice. A single rose – grown in Kenya, as many of the world’s cut flowers are – takes around 10 litres of water to produce, with the so-called water footprint, or virtual water export, of Kenya’s floriculture industry having more than doubled over the past 15 years, mostly to supply the Netherlands (69%), the UK (18%) and Germany (7%).

This notion of virtual water – the water embedded in the things that we trade – is gaining visibility as awareness of our global water crisis increases. I remember first getting to grips with the idea a few years ago when I interviewed Fred Pearce, author of When the Rivers Run Dry, for the University of Cambridge Top 50 Sustainability Books project. According to his calculations, to get us through the day, it takes about a hundred times our own weight in water.

Of course, water footprints are not the only impacts we find in our global supply chains. There are issues of labour rights, climate change, transparent governance, biodiversity loss and economic development, to mention but a few. The challenge is to manage and minimise the negative impacts. This is where I believe the example of Kenya’s cut-flower industry can help us to tease out some hard-won lessons, starting with the story behind the Horticultural Ethical Business Initiative (HEBI).

The seeds of the HEBI process were sown in November 1999 when local civil society organisations mounted a successful campaign against workers’ rights violations in Cirio Delmonte, one of Kenya’s largest pineapple growers. The success of this campaign raised concerns in the flower industry, prompting stakeholders to develop the Kenya Standard on Social Accountability and a Voluntary Private Initiative to oversee its implementation.

However, the real impetus for HEBI came from the pressure exerted by transnational alliances of NGOs and consumer groups. The Kenya Women Workers Organisation (KEWWO) was funded by the UK-based Women Working Worldwide (WWW) to gather evidence of the Ethical Trade Initiative Base Code violations. Their report catalogued various unacceptable conditions, from pesticide poisoning to sexual harassment and rape, and spurred a campaign dubbed Produce Safely or Quit. At the same time, the Kenya Human Rights Commission issued a three month ultimatum to flower producers to improve working conditions, failing which they would go international in their campaign.

When the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) was alerted to these serious labour rights violations in 2002, several of their corporate and NGO members visited Kenyan flower producers. In fear of losing their most significant market, Kenyan stakeholders came together for the first time to lay the groundwork for the formation of HEBI. What I find particular interesting is that the Horticultural Ethical Business Initiative (HEBI) did not arise from a vacuum of voluntary codes. On the contrary, there were already seven different international ethical codes being applied. However, they seemed to lack effectiveness and credibility …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/article_kenya_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] Water Footprints (article)

Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-quest-for-sustainable-business”]Link[/button] The Quest for Sustainable Business (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2012) Water Footprints: Lessons from Kenya’s Floriculture Sector, The Guardian, 20 August 2012.

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2012 Sustainability Leaders Poll

CSR International is partnering with Kaleidoscope Futures to create a 2012 Top Sustainability Leaders list, based on the surveyed opinions of CSR & sustainability experts from around the world – people like you!

There is only one question in the poll and making your selection should only take 2 minutes. Please only vote once. Thanks!

To register your vote, visit our Sustainability Leaders Poll page:

http://www.csrinternational.org/2012/07/16/sustainability-leaders-poll-2012/

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