A Question of Sustainability: What does it mean and what is important?
A discussion with Dr. Eleni Iacovidou, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Management at Brunel University
Steve:
Eleni, why don’t we start off with a brief introduction to you and your work?
Eleni:
My background is in chemistry, and from there to environmental engineering, where I studied how we can promote a cleaner environment. Then for my PhD, I focused on the areas of resource extraction and usage, with a focus on wastage and waste management. Of course, sustainability is at the heart of these topics. My work now is concerned with the lifecycle sustainability assessment of resources and waste to promote circularity in our economy from a systems-based approach.
Steve
We’ll come to your thoughts on these topics soon, but it would be good to get your definition of sustainability, and whether you see it to be the same as ESG.
Dr Eleni
I think that I would keep the two separate. Sustainability is a vision and a mission, it’s everything that we need to strive for to balance the social, technological, economic, and political aspects that impact the environment and societies. Crucially, if we want to be successful in achieving sustainability, we will have to find a way to balance the trade-offs across all these domains. In a sense, Sustainability is the art of creating trade-offs that minimise impact on any one dimension whilst extracting maximum value for society, and the planet.
ESG stands for environmental, social, governance. Is this the same as sustainability? For me, It's more about the models that businesses are using to show that they're doing something beneficial for the planet, for the people, and their shareholders. At the same time, they are using these models as a way to attract funding and investment. Whether sustainability and ESG actually go hand in hand is something that is not clear to me yet. However, the fact that companies have started to look into, and try to measure, their environmental impact and social policies and the responsibility they should take for the governance or their supply chains is definitely an encouraging step forward.
Steve
It's an interesting distinction. I think ESG is about how businesses internalise the conversation about sustainability in a way that can be signposted in internal and external measures and controls. So, I think it's putting a lens on sustainability and saying “how can we demonstrate this in a way that's meaningful to us as a management team and to our roles and responsibilities people reporting”.
Dr Eleni
Yes, I can see your point there. It also can’t just be a tool that businesses choose to use to strengthen their brand credentials or gain a competitive advantage. By showcasing their efforts to improve the sustainability of products and services they are at the same time helping those same businesses become more prepared for a more ‘sustainable’ future.
“Sustainability is a vision and a mission… [ESG is] more about the models that businesses are using to show that they're doing something beneficial for the planet, for the people, and their shareholders… Whether sustainability and ESG actually go hand in hand is something that is not clear to me yet.”
Steve
There’s also the significant increase in new regulations related to sustainable practices, and a much heavier burden of reporting requirements proposed globally. All businesses are potentially looking at significant increases in costs to meet the demand for more information and more visibility to what’s actually happening in global supply chains.
Dr Eleni
I think that the scrutiny over what businesses are doing is going to be very important in the future, especially as the trajectories show that the amount of waste that’s produced at different steps of the system is still increasing. Targeting businesses and the way they work is a starting point. There also have to be practices established along the value chain for all businesses to follow that deliver better visibility of what's happening in the end-to-end system. Having this visibility means we can intervene more effectively at the right points and help potentially promote sustainability long term.
Steve:
You’ve talked a little about waste. What is waste? How would you define its scope?
Dr Eleni
Actually to me, waste is something that has value. When I speak to my students, for example, I always tell them there is no such thing as waste. It depends on how you perceive the value of something. What we have is materials, components and products produced at different stages of the value chain. There is a journey that all these materials, components and products make in the system that suddenly comes to an abrupt end when they become waste – then another journey begins which may or may not transform these materials, components and products into something that bears value. Of course, you have materials that need to be treated as waste for safety or hygiene reasons, but many components and products that are used in the system aren't becoming from one moment to the next waste, but the way we perceive them does, as well as the way in which they function that could be due to damages visible and invisible. The more we realise that, the more prepared we will be to actually capture the value embedded in them.
Steve
So, is process waste in the system not in scope for you? At Virifides, we see the increasing use of technology to automate and simplify commercial and supply chain processes as a big opportunity to build more sustainable, and less ‘wasteful’ value chains.
Dr Eleni
I’ve defined waste in relation to products and components, but in reality, you have waste in every process. You can reduce processing waste by better planning and using better machinery/tools but you still have some ‘waste’ created through the consumption of primary resources. For example emissions from electricity consumption and wastewater from water usage. What’s important is to look at the whole system and see how it operates as a whole to identify points where ‘wastefulness’ can be reduced.
Steve:
So if we need to look at the whole system, how should we think about responsibility? Is there an equal responsibility for waste between all parties in the value chain or do you see certain actors being more responsible for waste than others?
Dr Eleni
I would like to use the word shared responsibility. I cannot comment on whether it's equal or not because one needs to understand how responsibility should be allocated to different parties. But I do feel certain that the responsibility of all stakeholders involved in the system should be shared. We should all try, together, to eliminate the number of resources we use and the wastes we produce. So, we can’t keep pointing fingers at each other, we need to see how we can all work collectively.
Steve
Collectively working implies some level of consensus, and we all know how difficult it is to secure, and more importantly perhaps, sustain, collective shared decision making across any group of stakeholders. If you just take the example of blockchain, a technology that depends on consensus between parties in a distributed network, the biggest challenge is never the technology, but getting stakeholders to agree on the business rules needed to make it work.
Turning to technology, what is your view on the role it has to play in sustainability?
Dr Eleni:
I think that technology bears a lot of value in promoting sustainability, it just depends on how it’s used for different products, components, and materials. You can use good technologies and advanced technologies to cut down waste at the processing facilities, you can use technologies to track and trace components and products in the system that can give you visibility and manage stocks and flows, you can use technology to store data and manage data in a way that gives you better evidence and insights into different processes. The list goes on. So, I think that technology is crucial to what we're trying to do to promote sustainability, but it has to be used in a way that actually does that, rather than just creating more profit for companies.
Steve
Yeah, important point. There is a temptation to use technology purely for efficiency or cost saving purposes rather than the greater good. Have you seen any good implementations of technology aimed purely at sustainability?
Dr Eleni
One area I think progress has been made is in packaging. With the increase in delivery to home, which was accelerated due to COVID, consumers are growing increasingly reliant on online purchasing of fresh products and other goods. I think that the packaging waste that is produced from that has become a huge problem because consumers are not always aware of how to properly dispose of it in their households.
Steve
One of my personal bugbears is picking up a piece of packaging that says if you want to recycle it, you've got to take it 300 miles to the one centre in the country that processes that particular type of plastic, or you’ve got to trawl through website pages to find out your options.
Dr Eleni:
I actually work a lot with plastic packaging as it’s been the focus of my research in the past. There have been a lot of discussions about whether plastic is needed for certain products, especially food products. Packaging is necessary because it keeps food fresh for longer. But then the question is what type of packaging do we actually need and for which products? How should it be designed so that it can be recycled? The purpose of the latter is to prevent packaging going to landfill and rather capture its value by recycling it so that it can be returned into the system. To aid that we need to look into the changes in the design of the packages, the adhesives that have been used and the inks, printing labels and so on. We started seeing these changes happening at the upstream part of the value chain. And these changes don’t really seem to influence consumers' preferences, so the fears that companies felt about changing packaging appeared to be misplaced.
Steve
So start with product design. Get that as optimal as possible and consumers generally won’t be concerned as long as the product looks attractive.
Dr Eleni
The bigger issue of course is that our current system is not typically designed to take the whole product lifecycle into account, resulting in unnecessary waste in the way that materials flow into the system and what happens to them when the consumers or stakeholders no longer need them. However, once we start designing with recyclability, with reusability, repairability in mind, the use of components and products can be optimised, which supports sustainability without having all the bad outcomes we have today.
Steve
I agree. One company I think does ‘live and breathe’ this philosophy is Ikea. In their process, the design and sourcing stages take into account the lifecycle and suitability of all inputs, including packaging, used in the whole product lifecycle. This approach is starting to catch on, but it seems still to be in the early stages of development for most companies.
There seems to be some confusion created by people describing sustainability from different perspectives. What’s your view on this? Is it helpful?
Dr Eleni
There are three buzzwords that are out there, environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, and social sustainability. Each one suggests that they are focusing on just one aspect of sustainability without integrating the others. This is not sustainability.
I think that the use of these terms really takes attention from the elephant in the room; that we cannot address environmental, economic or social impacts properly if we don't incorporate and integrate all of them together. That's my opinion.
“I think that technology is crucial to what we’re trying to do to promote sustainability.”
Steve
Let me play devil’s advocate. I can do lots of good things promoting environmental sustainability for example. Why do I also need to change anything from a social sustainability perspective? What impact will that have on my achievements in environmental sustainability, if I don't address social challenges?
Dr Eleni:
I'm going to have to return the question back and ask what does environmental sustainability mean to you?
Steve
It means that resources, inputs, anything to do with, as you say, the manufacturer of the product or the component. Something that is made or harvested. Those are things that have environmental impacts because I'm digging it up, I'm planting it, I'm fertilising it or whatever I'm doing. All these components can be improved. I can recycle water to the trees, let's say I can spray crops with pesticides which aren’t harmful to the environment. I can do lots of things which will improve the environmental sustainability of the products I'm producing or selling. I haven't got to do anything on the social sustainability side to achieve those aims.
Dr Eleni
That’s an interesting example. You’re focusing solely on the environmental impacts but not thinking about the surrounding neighbours or the community that relies on the stream that goes across your field, for example. So, while you're trying to increase your yield and protect the environment, you’re not aware of the impacts your activities could be creating, e.g., via runoff of nutrients or from the pesticides that you may use. This could have implications for wildlife and pets, ruin the aesthetic quality of the stream with algae and so on.
Remember how I said sustainability is about balancing trade-offs? Sometimes you have to sacrifice a few of the environmental impacts in order to make sure that you have a balanced outcome. That’s why it's important for us not to just focus on environmental, economic or social aspects, but consider them all together to see which and where trade-offs can be tolerated. The metrics that you're going to include from any group (i.e., environmental, economic, social, technical) at any time differ according to where you are and/or what kind of processes you have in place. Nonetheless, if you try to keep an open mind as to the trade-offs that you might be creating, that’s the key to creating long-term benefits.
Steve:
So if I’m developing solutions to help businesses address sustainability challenges for example, I should ensure that we have measures that capture environmental, economic and social performance and change, even if the business focus is not initially on what they can do in social sustainability?
Dr Eleni
I think one of the reasons we have so much confusion today is that everyone is deciding to focus specifically on what’s important to them right now, and then trying to respond to what others may be doing more successfully. But maybe we should start providing measures that are holistic even if we are not asked to. Okay, depending on their focus businesses may ask for guidance on either environmental sustainability or economic sustainability or social sustainability. In addition, to the measures they’re interested in right now, one should also be able to provide insights into the other aspects as well which might be important in the future. At least this helps to change their mindset, because the more insights they have on other aspects, the higher chance of them to consider the implications on their business and think about how they should address them. It always comes down to the approach we use. How do we approach something that has been met with resistance in the past? We need to start thinking about how we change the current ways of doing things.
“Sometimes you have to sacrifice a few of the environmental impacts in order to make sure that you have a balanced outcome. That’s why it’s important for us not to just focus on environmental economic or social aspects, but consider them all together…”
Steve
You’ve made your point very powerfully Eleni!
Coming to the conclusion of the session, in terms of sustainability, what do you think will be the key changes we’ll see have happened in five years time?
Dr Eleni
That's a very good question. I always ponder about that point because I wonder what the world will look like in two, three, five years from now. It’s true we are moving in a very fast pace, in all directions, and we are just not taking enough time to digest what's happening. For me that raises the alarm because if we want to promote sustainability, we need to start making time to understand things better in order to address them properly; and I don't think that we have the time.
Look what's happening with the plastic packaging, just to give you an example. Conventional plastic packaging has been criminalised, and so bio-based and biodegradable alternatives are rapidly introduced. We are now having to deal with something that we barely understand, whilst we are still learning about the impacts of the conventional ones. Basically, we're introducing a new problem to the system. Meanwhile, there is investment in recycling facilities, but the introduction of biobased/ biodegradable materials could affect the balance between the investment that goes into recycling, all the EPR regulations and their compliance.
Of course, there are good things happening and that's where technology comes into the picture, and that’s why I love the work that you are doing at Virifides. I think digital passports and new frameworks for sharing more information are going to be critical in helping us to see what’s happening and helping us predict the value of changes in the system.
Taking the food sector as an example, I think there’s a huge learning curve ahead and I think what you're doing is absolutely fantastic. But, if I had a request it would be that you expand to other industries because they need this ability to track and trace the journey their materials, components and products go on because it's the only way to see what they have and what they can do with it, how they can maximise efficiency, effectiveness and capture value.
Steve
Many thanks Eleni. I appreciate your feedback. Duly noted! Many thanks for for taking the time to discuss sustainability with me. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you on the subject.
Dr Eleni
Thank you, Steve. Likewise, I've thoroughly enjoyed it.