Category Archives: sustainability

Playing for good?

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The Carbon Lottery claims to be the world’s first online voluntary carbon offset platform that allows users to purchase a lottery ticket and offset their carbon footprint simultaneously, giving them a chance to win real prizes – up to €4,000,000 for a £2 a ticket.  £2 offsets 100kg of carbon dioxide, roughly the amount of emitted during an average bus ride. The proceeds go towards approved and verified community based projects. These are high quality VCS and Gold Standard projects based in India, Brazil, Guatemala and Turkey.

The initiative was developed by Sterling Waterford Securities  in response to the low take-up of carbon offsetting among businesses and high levels of confusion about the role of offsetting for consumers.  The Carbon Lottery founders believe that in order to change behavior one needs to incentivise the consumer to do so. Social media, particularly Facebook, plays a major role in spreading the message and driving engagement.

The Carbon Lottery is encouraging companies and their employees to get involved. It is primarily focusing on large consumer brands which need to offset the footprint of their various product lines. I guess they are thinking of the likes of Unilever and P&G, brand owners of global scale that have also made significant commitments and strides towards sustainability.

The Carbon Lottery claims that these types of brands will benefit in a number of ways. First, by providing a fun online consumer-led offsetting solution. Then, by creating a new customer marketing tool. Third, by giving brands access to a potential new revenue stream (by selling tickets to staff and their clients), and finally, by providing the brand with added presence in the social media space by encouraging players to share their lottery experience with their Friends. In other words, they’re hoping you will brag about your carbon offsetting to your mates and potentially form syndicates to increase your carbon lottery spend and thereby offset more carbon.

The Carbon Lottery is some way down the line in attracting corporate clients. It’s using the hook of the big jackpot prize to encourage staff or clients to buy tickets. It also offers a revenue share to B2B partners, giving them a chance to become a single large lottery ticket purchaser or to ‘white label’ the concept to clients. The benefits reward responsible behaviour; in the company’s words by offering players ‘the dream’ – a large jackpot prize, currently up to €4m. Players can track the offsetting projects that their tickets are supporting at all times via The Carbon Lottery website and, of course, they can Facebook it.

Ultimately, The Carbon Lottery is confident that the initiative will take off because it makes carbon offsetting more social, and in particular, because it converts something that could be described as dull and worthy, into a game.

There’s no doubt that the company has integrity. The carbon offset projects are thoroughly verified and screened. At least three of the projects that ticket sales currently support were developed in collaboration with Eco Securities. The Carbon Lottery is licensed and regulated in Malta and falls within UK jurisdiction. The large prize is funded by insurance contracts (brokered through Lloyds of London) and the website is useful and informative. The Carbon Calculator is a useful tool for HRDs. It shows just how many tickets an employee or the company as a whole needs to purchase to offset their footprint.

Carbon offsetting is not to everyone’s taste. Although as a strategy it cuts carbon dioxide emissions and raises awareness of climate change, there is a danger that offsetting can undermine practical efforts that individuals and companies take to reduce their footprint. However, helping to reduce carbon by buying a lottery ticket is a simple and easy to grasp concept, and creating an internal market among staff or using it as a reward / incentive scheme seems like a no-brainer.

The Carbon Lottery is relatively new and lacks a profile that is commensurate with its ambitions. It has placed a lot of value on social media to engage players, but its own presence in the space is low. What it must be hoping for are a couple of things to accelerate its awareness: a large brand to take plunge and to create the first Euro millionaire from offsetting carbon. Now, that really would put The Carbon Lottery on the map.

More muscle with SuMo

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In the eighteen months since my column began in HR Magazine, I have seen an increase in the number of organisations taking steps towards being more responsible. ‘Responsible business’ is a broach church. Depending on who you talk to, it can embrace ethical, social and environmental issues, sustainability, employee diversity or investing in communities.

Most organisations have a clear idea about what they want to achieve when they start their journey and putting an employee engagement programme in place is typically a cornerstone of a responsible business strategy. None of us would debate the logic of this: value-driven individuals are like gold. Get them correctly motivated and briefed and they will go above and beyond, not only deliver the changes that matter to your organisation, but also provide ideas to drive the programmes forward.

However, organisations are not always adequately set up to capture ideas in easy, cost-effective and practical ways, which means they are potentially losing out on invaluable insight. Indeed, according to a survey by Brighter Planet, a company dedicated to the mitigation of climate change through personal action, the more an employer has a system in place to share ideas and best practice, the more likely that initiative is to succeed, almost 3 to 1.

One approach is to use technology as an enabler or driver of ideas’ sharing and behaviour change. CloudApps has developed an interesting solution for HRDs in organisations which are targeting CO2 reductions. Called SuMo (it stands for Sustainability Momentum), it is a desktop dashboard that provides each employee with all the tools to record, track and share their personal contributions to the company’s carbon footprint, and the means to propose new ideas for sustainability initiatives.

HRDs can set SuMo to compare individuals’ CO2 information to colleagues in their workgroup, in other departments and regions, or any other classification they wish in order to create some healthy competition within the organisation. The SuMo ideas tab is a key feature. Once an idea is posted, employees can vote on it and it will be ranked on a leaderboard. This allows HRDs and others to understand staff motivations, chart ideas and potentially fast-track these into development.

Already SuMo has attracted the interest of some large companies. It is being actively trialled by a major US retailer, a global construction company, one of the leading global waste management operators and a top two UK retailer. Ashridge Business School has introduced SuMo into the classroom as a teaching tool.

“Employee engagement is all too often ‘management by poster slogan’,” says Peter Grant, CEO of CloudApps. “What SuMo does is link every worker’s daily efforts to the strategic sustainability of the business in a very measurable way,” “With SuMo, each employee has personalised and verifiable targets to achieve and its effect is to increase employee engagement naturally over time as work habits change. HRDs and employees alike can now share increased visibility directly from the frontline of the business by using SuMo’s real-time feedback.

He adds, “We now have the ability to collaboratively change actual working habits, not just ‘hearts and minds’ and deliver on the corporate sustainability which many have promised, but few to date have achieved.”

There is scope too for the SuMo dashboard to play a role in rewarding green bonuses to high performing staff, structure that is gaining ground as companies turn their back on the traditional approach of linking bonuses to profits. For example, TNT has rolled out a sustainability-linked scheme, so too has DSM in The Netherlands. While all 600 executives at AzkoNobel, another Dutch company, will only receive bonuses based on how much they have contributed towards reducing injuries among staff and cutting carbon, energy, water and waste. Indeed, deployed in setting green bonuses, SuMo gives HRDs some extra muscle that its acronym implies.

Make a ding in the universe

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If you gave your employees one day to work on any project or idea that they had to make your business more responsible, the chances are that you’d get a whole load of ideas and stuff done that would go way beyond the things that you instruct them to do. Let’s all try it, we can make the world a little bit better, or as Steve Jobs would say ‘ make a ding in the universe.’

Visualising carbon, a great website for climate change communicators

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When you are taking individual, department or company-wide steps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, it’s hard to visualise the impact you are having. Certainly for an agency like us, we find that helping to paint a picture to clients and their staff about what their achievements in cutting carbon represents makes a big difference to their engagement.

So here is a really useful website to help visualise your CO2 reductions. It was created by David McCandless on behalf of GE. Just tap in your data and the website will provide a range of visual metaphors. It’s really neat and well worth sharing.

IEMA environmental skills map will help HR pick training interventions

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I came across recent research from the Institute of Environmental Management & Assessment (IEMA) showing more recruits are hoping to work in environmental roles in business.

Its June survey found 88% of employees experiencing high satisfaction levels after changing to an environmental career. Nearly 45% had made the career change either to make an environmental difference or because they have a personal interest in the subject. A further 20% said the area had become vital to the development of an existing role.

IEMA has launched a skills map that offers HRDs a framework to recruit, train and engage staff in environmental roles.

The initiative is appropriate in many ways, not least because the green economy is seen as a platform to kick-start growth, but also because UK plc needs to meet carbon reduction targets.

Defra conservatively estimated the UK would save £23 billion per annum through implementing no-cost/low-cost energy resource and waste-efficient measures.

A key challenge to organisations is how to equip their workforce with the skills required to reduce their environmental impact. IEMA claims its skills map will bridge that gap by defining the knowledge and skills required to become an environmental practitioner – one who works to deliver cost savings and environmental improvements.

Caroline Parsons, HR manager in Balfour Beatty’s sustainability working group, is convinced. Like many large private sector firms in the construction industry, Balfour Beatty takes its commitments in this area seriously. By 2020, it wants sustainability to be embedded in everything it does. Parsons says that means all parts of the business are ‘focused on the challenge – from marketing and bid teams, project management and design through to service delivery and procurement, finance and human resources.’

She said: “Balfour Beatty employs more than 50 environmental and sustainability practitioners in the UK. The launch of the IEMA skills map is timely. It will help us to develop environmental talent.”

Another advocate of the skills map is EEF, the trade association for UK manufacturing. Malcolm Bland, its head of professional development said: “By using the skills map, HR professionals will be able to identify effective training interventions and retain the best of what the environmental profession has to offer.”

When a company makes sustainability key, it’s an opportunity for HR to lead

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A survey by Accenture indicates that the majority of businesses think that the benefits resulting from their sustainability initiatives have exceeded expectations. Although, the research also showed that a hard core minority of businesses does not see sustainability as a critical or strategic investment.

Click here to read my full article in HR Magazine.

IPSO shines a light on Solar

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IPSol provides testing, certification and consultancy services to the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry writes Tim Carter of IPSO Ventures.

While its customers are the manufacturers of the solar panels you see on roofs and in solar farms, the value of what it does cascades through the supply chain all the way to the beneficiaries of the clean energy that is generated. The economics of solar electricity production rely in significant part on the long-term performance of the panels, generating day-in-day-out for 15-25 years. Such assurance comes in the shape of an international system of certification that rigorously assesses safety, performance and reliability.

IPSol has recently been recommended for accreditation to test these international standards by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service. It is the first such lab in the UK, and competes with only a handful of specialist providers around the world. Partnered with the Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology (CREST) at Loughborough University, it is also able to provide bespoke testing and measurement for clients developing new PV products, including thin film and concentrator panels. A consultancy division completes its service offering, allowing IPSol to advise on aspects of solar PV from manufacture to design, installation and monitoring.

So why did we invest?

A couple of years ago IPSO Ventures looked to make its first play in the clean energy market. While solar was and remains an attractive sector, even then there were a reported 150+ privately-backed solar PV technology companies globally. So IPSO looked further for its opportunity in this gold rush, eventually focussing on the significant unmet needs in testing and certification. IPSol was the result, and its timing could not have been better.

UK solar, long a small backwater of the fiercely growing global clean energy market, was finally poised to enter the mainstream. In April last year the government introduced a ‘feed-in tariff’ for the generation of clean energy, including solar PV. A similar subsidy in Germany has given it the largest installed PV capacity in the world, and that despite no more sunshine than in the UK. From just a few installed MW of PV capacity at the introduction of the tariff, the UK now has around 500 MW. The growth potential of IPSol lies in international growth and this massively expanding, but naïve, national market, which requires testing and advice.

IPSol did not find easy traction with the venture capital community, not being based upon disruptive technology and a 20x return. However, for those with knowledge of the solar PV market the business’s solid fundamentals, lower risk profile and high capex spend proved an attractive package. Following seed investment by IPSO, the company raised £400k in finance late last year predominantly from angel investors. The company is currently considering raising growth capital, enabling it to take full advantage of the current expansion in its customer base.

ULI signs Greenpoint for Europe-wide comms

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The ULI is a global non-profit education and research institute. Its mission is to provide leadership in the responsible use of land and in creating and sustaining thriving communities worldwide.

Greenpoint is providing strategic comms advice covering media relations, events, awards, publications, social media and membership engagement across 16 countries. The remit is also to help the ULI celebrate its 75th anniversary, which takes place later this year. The account is headed by Michael Saxton and associate director Julie Kirby.

Said Michael Saxton: “The ULI delivers leadership in responsible land use and sustainable community building. Given that members include leading cities, institutions, private and public sector organisations, the ULI has the unique ability to anticipate emerging trends and issues and propose creative solutions. For example, the Gensler/ULI Open Spaces report, which is influencing the plans to develop the north bank of The Thames as a destination in its own right.”

Greenpoint becomes Planet Positive

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Planet Positive

We’ve measured our carbon footprint – and we’ve made a commitment to reducing our emissions by 5% on an annual basis with Planet Positive.

In becoming a Planet Positive certified business, we have had our footprint independently measured and reported by Planet Positive. It stands at 8.81 tCO2e. We have joined pioneering companies like Land Securities and Deloitte in precisely measuring our carbon footprint and taking steps to reduce it.

As part of the certification, businesses make an investment into approved sustainability projects through the Planet Positive Foundation, a UK-registered charity.

Greenpoint has chosen to support the Planet Positive Schools Programme engaging children and their families with sustainability and creating links between businesses and schools.

“We believe that good business goes hand-in-hand with positive social and environmental actions,” said Michael Saxton, Director of Greenpoint.  “Achieving and maintaining our Planet Positive certification demonstrates our commitment to reduce our carbon emissions and environmental impacts.   Our employees are a major part of this activity and, along with Planet Positive, they will help us create a better way of doing business.”

The certification is based on the internationally recognised Planet Positive Protocol, which brings together sustainability methodologies from around the world.  The Protocol is administered by an independent Technical Committee of academics and experts to ensure that it is always at the forefront of best practice.

Martin Goodman, Executive Chairman of Planet Positive, said: “Planet Positive is about taking action.  We are delighted that Greenpoint PR has shown leadership and become Planet Positive certified.  They can prove their commitment to the environment by cutting their carbon emissions, saving energy and saving money.  Being green is good for employees, good for sales and good for business. Greenpoint is now part of the solution.”

Planet Positive is an international certification and environmental management system for businesses, products, buildings and services.  Certification demonstrates a company’s commitment to environmental sustainability to employees, stakeholders and customers.

Planet Positive goes beyond compliance into proof of action, behaviour change and encouraging business to support local and global sustainability projects.  The Planet Positive Foundation, a UK registered charity, has been established to develop, promote and fund sustainability projects locally, nationally and internationally.

The power of video to tell a story

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The global laundry industry is worth over £60 billion per annum. Xeros uses polymer beads instead of large amounts of water to clean clothes. The process not only saves water, but also energy, carbon, waste and costs. It’s a game-changing technology named by TIME magazine as one of the best inventions of 2010.

We commissioned The Communications Group to tell the story of “The Power of Polymer Cleaning” Click here to watch the film.

Richard Garton from The Communications Group, explains why video is a great way to clearly convey your message.

“From start to finish the sequence was designed to present the viewer with a comprehensive understanding of the focus of Xeros’ development of ‘virtually waterless’ laundry cleaning, getting close not only to the unique washing action, but the ideas behind it – visually explaining the process, the company’s ethos, and the benefits of the Xeros system.

Establishing shots of the Xeros offices and their location in a high tech industrial park, resplendent with renewable energy sources, help to set the scene of the forward looking nature of Xeros.

The video sequence goes on to lay the foundations of the company’s years of research by Professor Stephen Burkinshaw and the University of Leeds, building confidence and identifying the brand.

By introducing clear animated titles, including bespoke text transitions emulating the Xeros beads, we were able to highlight the unique technologies the company are developing.

Telling the complete story of the washing process from load to completion, gives the sequence a linear timeline which is then punctuated with on-message one liners highlighting important stages, technological advances and unique benefits.

Through the use of a Steadicam team we were able to literally ‘walk through’ the Xeros offices, from the computer aided design studio to the testing floor where the latest prototypes are put through their paces.

Close-ups and split-screen editing allowed us to focus the viewer’s attention on the special polymer beads used within the Xeros washing machine, the beads were also modelled in 3D for greater clarity and to further emphasise their importance.

The overall colour, look and feel was carefully managed throughout, presenting the viewer with a concise, clear and convincing message of the Xeros brand, tailored to leave a lasting impression.

Game-changing technology brought to life via the emotive clarity of video!”