Is “The Right Thing To Do?” the right thing to do?

Posted on December 12, 2012 by David Tebbutt

Last December we embarked on this blog with little idea where the journey would take us. We just felt that a lot of people of good will were out there with good ideas about how to make our world better. All we had to do was find them. Or, better yet, for them to find us.

And, through a mix of word of mouth and downright cajoling, they delivered their thoughts, based on their life experiences, for us to share with a wider audience. And, for that, we are truly grateful to every one of them. Here they are:

As you probably know, this site is non-commercial. Everything is voluntary and the most anyone gets is the opportunity to see their words published and to give themselves a slight exposure to a wider audience. Some benefit from this more than others. No names, no pack drill.

I’d just like to say “Thank you” to every contributor and reader and wish you all seasonal greetings and a happy new year. We’re going to take a bit of a break now. I’ll leave you with a list of the contributions and perhaps you’ll enjoy reading some of those you missed.

Why things will get better - from a Matt Ridley TED talk
Entrepreneur Extraordinaire, Felix Dennis, on Good Fortune
Never mind GDP, what about Gross National Happiness? - from a Chip Conley TED talk
Reconnecting kids with the school curriculum - Ray Maguire
Has the Khan Academy found the right way to educate? - from a Salman Khan TED talk
Why green makes business sense - Ben Goldsmith
Is sustainable growth a myth? - Clive Longbottom
Rag and bone men of the information world - Euan Semple
The power of community Mark Chillingworth
Where’s the ‘social’ in ‘accountancy’? - Martin Banks
Mind the gap - Hussein Dickie
Inhumane HR behaviour - Tracey Poulton
Listen! (To the right people) - David Tebbutt on Cognitive Edge work
Get on the trust trajectory - Rob Wirszycz
Baby, bathwater, beware … - Anne Marie McEwan
Is green the new gold? - Tarquin Henderson
Hunters got us into this mess – will farmers get us out? - Dr. Bill Nichols
Fairtrade, Organic or Me-Me? - Andy Redfern
How sticky are your labels? - David Tebbutt
Reputation is deeds, not words - Tari Lang
Passion + talent = magic - From Sir Ken Robinson’s work
Authenticity vs perception - Dr. Bill Nichols
Could the fly save humanity? - Jason J. Drew
Ignorance and prejudice - Ibukun Adebayo
Superstorm Sandy: what would you have done? - David Tebbutt
Doing the right thing – even when no one is watching - Neil Crofts
Stubbornness – The Nailhouse Principle - Drew Buddie

So, what do you reckon? Is “The Right Thing To Do?” the right thing to do? Do you know anyone who would like to share their learnings from real life for the greater good?

Please point them at me trttd@tebbo.com. Thank you. (PS It could be you too!)

Could the fly save humanity?

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Jason j. Drew

We take for granted the fact that we should recycle our glass, newspapers, tin and more recently plastic and water. Businesses and services have sprung up to enable us to achieve this. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Creating and discarding nutrients in the form of sewage, manure and abattoir blood has a far higher environmental impact. When we start to recycle these we will be truly on the path to some sustainability for our planet. As the old Yorkshire saying goes – where there is muck there is money. Let me explain.

Nearly one third of the fish we take from our seas – some fifty million tonnes a year is used in our industrial agricultural and pet food industries. Yet at the same time we dispose of hundreds of millions of tonnes of nutrient-rich waste.

It is not just our human food waste – from supermarkets and food processing businesses – discarding unsightly but perfectly good apples and oranges or out of date but edible foods. It goes much further – it takes as much land, diesel, water and our precious seas to make the bits of a chicken that we eat as the bits we throw away. This waste is as full of valuable nutrients as the bits we eat. Our manure – both animal and human – is also a key source of valuable nutrients. Most animals only take in a small percentage of the nutrients that pass through them – in nature this is recycled.

An animal would drop its manure on the field or die in the bush and nature would recycle the waste nutrients using insects. A fly would lay its eggs on the waste nutrient source, the eggs would hatch into larvae and birds and fish would eat many of those larvae or flies – recycling the nutrients – as well as cleaning up the bio-hazard. It is a case of horses for courses or rather flies for waste. Each species of fly and its larvae are naturally adapted to different types of waste.

A few years ago, I realised that this natural process could form the heart of a new business. I decided to industrialise fly farming. We take waste nutrients from slaughterhouses – blood and guts – and feed this to the eggs laid by our fly breeding stock. These eggs hatch into larvae and grow at an enormous rate once you take away the environmental factors that stop this happening in nature.

One kilo of fly eggs turns into 380 Kilos of larvae in 72 hours. Larvae are what free range chickens in fields and fish in streams eat as part of their natural diet – ask any fisherman! This natural source of protein has been increasingly replaced in our industrial farming operations with the more readily available fishmeal. The chemical composition of fishmeal is almost exactly the same as that of fly larvae – which is why it was chosen as a substitute.

So we’ve copied nature and led the process of making protein from waste nutrients profitably, sustainably and on a large scale. We are already in production and we believe that we can produce Magmeal at scale for around $900 per tonne which compares favourably with fishmeal – which is currently around $1350 per tonne, and likely to rise unless the oceans can be better managed.

The world urgently needs new and sustainable sources of protein. Fly larvae fed on existing waste nutrient sources is one of these. Perhaps the adage is true – where there is muck there is money – and sustainability!

Is green the new gold?

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Tarquin Henderson

Sadly the Environment seems to be increasingly one of Westminster’s favoured battlegrounds. A place where the Treasury can show who really is boss while the Department for Energy and Climate Change (led by a Lib-Dem) attempts to grapple with some of the most challenging issues facing our country today.

I say grapple but I could also (again sadly) say fumble or stumble as there has been an alarming amount of dilly dallying at times on the timing and structure of key environmental policies – but that’s the theme for another post. The key point here is that despite all of this political posturing, the green agenda is not going away and nor can it.

We’ve all heard the view that now we are going through the economic wringer, any thoughts of doing something good for the planet have to take a back seat. That is a view fostered in the main by never-knowingly-under-lunched City types who much prefer to assess business on the levers they best understand and to avoid harder to assess, in number terms, contributory factors like social and environmental responsibility. I think they are missing the point and not just because we all need to ‘save the planet’. (A euphemism for ‘save ourselves’, by the way.)

Environmental issues need to be put into a stronger business context because they are just as relevant to many businesses’ balance sheets as the cost of raw materials, payroll or competitive pricing. That might seem a bit of a stretch but this is really not the warped view of the strident environmentalist lobby. Managing energy use in business today is about making your business more competitive.

A number of factors are at work. Here are three of them:

Firstly, the simple cost of energy. Despite some recent decreases, the general trend is for a steady and inextricable increase in energy costs – to heat the factory, power the machine tools, light the call centre, turn the turbine.
Then there is an increasing trend towards supply-chain compliance. If you make sandwiches (or trucks for that matter) for a supermarket, the chances are that they will be placing increasingly punitive penalties in place if you don’t cut their environmental mustard. Or they may just choose to work with someone else. While that is a factor already with some clear precedents in the Food & Drink sector, we are seeing signs of other markets adopting this strategy – manufacturing, aviation, entertainment and leisure.
Also, while there is a lot of carrot in the Government’s approach to encouraging consumers to be more efficient in their energy use, it’s the big stick that is being used increasingly with businesses. The Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) is already causing disquiet among the UK’s largest businesses – it’s effectively designed to place an energy tax on the country’s biggest energy users. My colleagues and I believe that this approach will begin to filter down towards SMEs before too long. The basic message being, “if you haven’t got your energy act together then the Government are going to strongly ‘encourage’ you to do so …”

What many businesses are missing is the will to do something about all this. To date, unless you are a power user of energy there has been little compulsion to do anything. It’s simply not been that important. My view is that those businesses, no matter how small, who grasp the concept that good energy management can be good for business, will improve their competiveness and their bottom lines. So green can be made into gold.

Rag and bone men of the information world

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Euan Semple

We are all aware these days of the need to make better use of our available resources, whether this is recycling our domestic waste or minimising our use of energy guzzling technologies. We apply these green principles to our physical environments – why shouldn’t we apply them to our intellectual environments as well?

In the world of business we waste an awful lot of our existing and available knowledge. We reinvent the wheel on a regular basis when we have perfectly good, well documented wheels available to us. We don’t tap into the accumulated experience of our staff. We store vast amounts of information at considerable expense, often making it hard to find in the process, and then feel overloaded with the trivial bits of information that seem to get in our way on a day to day basis.

The main tools currently for business communication are the email and the Word document. Email is commonly cited as one of the main sources of stress and frustration in organisational life. This is largely because it gives priority to the sender of information. The amount of information coming into our inbox is not in our control and we still feel an obligation to respond to things that have been sent to us. Mostly what we are sent are Word documents which have become very formulaic with multi-page reports the norm simply because they are written to a formula and a template.

We could do so much better by than this by using social tools which can add immense value both in the reduction of daily noise and in a greater ability to reuse our existing knowledge. Blogging and Twitter are teaching us collectively how to point and as more of us do this we develop networked sense-making which enhances our ability to learn and improve. We build networks of people to follow who are good at finding, and sharing, the good stuff. Our networks filter the web for us on a daily basis and they dig into our old information to retrieve the gold dust.

These tools are also teaching a more concise form of writing, potentially a whole new form of business literacy. They require us to give context to information and to add value. Unlike email, this time the control is with the receiver of information and they know it. If you don’t make a difference for someone else with your use of social tools no one will subscribe to you – they will tune you out.

Bloggers are the rag and bone men of the information world. They root around in the rubbish tips of information, picking over the bones and finding the good bits. They combine discarded writing in new, innovative and productive ways. They re-discover long forgotten information and breathe life into it by giving it context and meaning. When they combine in networks they offer the possibility of increasing the usefulness and longevity of your information as never before.

Is sustainable growth a myth?

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Clive Longbottom

As politicians continue to try and face up to the worst economic conditions for close on a century, the constant refrain from them seems to be around how we need to create something called “sustainable growth” – a term that is never actually defined, yet which has the benefits of hitting two main topics within a single, woolly, statement.

The presumption has to be that through some form of magic, the economy can be picked off the floor, that money will come in from wealth creation activities without this having any deleterious impact on the finite raw resources such as oil and metals, as well as the less finite resources such as water and food that we have tended to overuse or misuse in the past.

A few problems with this. For every new person in an environment there will be a need for more basic resources such as water and food. And a concomitant growth in ‘need’ for things like fuel and luxury goods. To fund these needs, more money is needed, which requires more growth, which requires more people, which requires more growth, which… Well, you get the picture. Even at the most basic level, there is no sustainability around growth that involves more people, unless a completely different thought process is brought to bear around resource usage and re-use.

Next is around the wealth creation process. A services-led economy is not wealth creating; it is wealth shuffling, generally from the bottom to the top. To create true wealth, something has to be taken, turned into something else that has intrinsic value and sold on to someone else, preferably in a different geography so that the wealth is drawn in from outside.

The problem here is that the main constituent of most manufacturing is on the human resources involved. Those geographies with low-paid human resources have shown how they can draw manufacturing to them, leaving higher cost geographies with higher-end, extremely skilled manufacturing and service-based economies. To get around this involves a mature economy not using human resources, but aiming for as much automation as possible – which means fewer employees, less pay and the need for a larger and more expensive benefits safety blanket.

I don’t believe that “sustainable growth”, no matter how defined by the politicians, is achievable. However, a move towards greater sustainability can work. A more macro view on the economy has to be taken; how can we cut down on the food miles for non-essential foodstuffs by growing more of what we need closer to us? A move towards a barter-based economy, where the physical and mental capabilities of individuals can be well utilised through a non-cash based system, would remove the dependence on financial growth to fund a less manufacturing-focused economy. A concerted approach to energy usage based around facts, rather than lobbying, would lower the overall energy usage across a whole range of areas while optimising how energy is created and distributed, through the use of technologies such as ground heat pumps, community combined heat and power systems and stored hydro power.

This leaves us with the thorny population problem. Seven billion people and growing is completely unsustainable, and population growth has to be faced up to. A greater part can be done through education and allowing choice, but I’d better stop now before I begin to rant…

Why green makes business sense

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Ben Goldsmith

Our energy sector, unlike almost every other aspect of life, has barely changed in the past hundred years. Across that same time span, our talent for wasting energy, water and raw materials has reached monumental proportions. I’m sure you know of buildings that run air conditioning and heating units at the same time. And I don’t even need to remind you of our mountains of potentially valuable waste.

Climate change has been eclipsed in the public mind by our recent financial woes but these things are connected. How many trillions of dollars are moved from democrats to despots in exchange for fossil fuels?

Depressed? Don’t be. While politicians dither, businesses and other private organisations don’t. After some experimentation with ‘greenwash’, often led by the well-meaning Corporate Social Responsibility department, green has moved to the boardroom. Companies have woken up to the fact that a more efficient use of resources and a reduction of waste saves them money and prepares them for future regulatory demands and inevitable increases in commodity prices.

Look at DuPont. Its energy efficiency efforts delivered a net saving on its energy spend of more than $3 bn in ten years. And Walmart is a company that always does things for sound financial reasons. Its stated environmental aims are: to be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain people and the environment. (Taken from its ‘sustainability’ web page http://walmartstores.com/Sustainability/.)

I believe that the next wave of business successes will comprise green technology entrepreneurs, green service providers, renewable energy developers and project financiers. I also think that the smart people are quietly getting on with their ‘green’ projects, thus placing themselves well ahead of the game when we emerge from the present turmoil.

The Right Thing To Do

Business leaders and thinkers share their knowledge

Category Archives: Pollution and waste