Examining How ‘Sustainable’ Our Businesses Really Are
B the Change Weekly: April 20, 2018
Delivered on Fridays, B the Change Weekly delivers the most important and most relevant stories about people using business as a force for good. The newsletter features a weekly note from the B the Change team alongside insight and context on the stories we share here on Medium. Below is our latest roundup. To receive these insights directly in your inbox, sign up for B the Change Weekly today. Now onto the good stuff:
This Sunday is Earth Day, when people are encouraged to take time to examine their environmental impacts and consider ways to shrink their ecological footprints. Businesses have the opportunity to do the same, from reviewing resource use and the impact of their supply chains to instituting composting and recycling programs at the office.
It’s important to check assumptions: Are digital tools really sustainable? How much energy does the business actually use? Could its products contribute to reforestation to partially offset resource use? This week, we take a look at companies asking — and attempting to answer — these very questions.
What Grade Does the Internet Get for Sustainability?
“People don’t think much about the potential impact their website, smartphone or internet use in general have on the environment. We mostly take these things for granted. Yet pixels require electricity,” shares Tim Frick, co-founder of B Corp digital agency Mightybytes.
Mozilla’s recent Internet Health Report for 2018 notes: “Global communication technologies will be responsible for more carbon emissions in 2025 than any country except China, India and the United States.”
Mightybytes’ free Ecograder tool grades websites on sustainability criteria, providing users with a report for making their website more people- and planet-friendly. This Earth Day marks the tool’s fifth birthday, during which time the following data have been collected:
- Ecograder has crawled nearly 1.7 million URLs.
- Ecograder generates a total score on a scale of 10 to 100 (100 being the best possible). An average score of 52 leaves significant room to improve most websites.
- Less than half of the URLs crawled by Ecograder were of responsive websites, which scale to fit the size of the screen being used to view the site. (Responsive sites use less energy.)
- Mightybytes partnered with The Green Web Foundation to assess whether the sites it crawls are powered by renewable energy. Of the 21.5 million websites the GWF has crawled, only 14 percent were powered by renewable energy.
Learn more about what Ecograder can tell us about how businesses’ websites can reduce their resource use and save energy — and steps you can take to improve your own website’s environmental impact — in Frick’s article on B the Change.
Powering the World on ‘Smart Energy’
Let’s start with the numbers: For nearly a decade, energy generation has been the largest single source of global greenhouse gas emissions. The average U.S. home energy use requires the burning of more than 8,000 pounds of coal every year. That’s the equivalent of 4 tons of coal, which is the equivalent to the emissions burned by leaving three cars running continuously in your driveway every day, every year. Multiply that by the 127 million homes in the U.S., and you start to see how the energy use in our homes quickly adds up.
And, nearly nine out of 10 people believe we should move toward a clean energy future.
This data combination led to the founding of B Corp Inspire, which is building a “smart energy” platform that buys renewable energy credits and makes them available through a monthly subscription service to homeowners and businesses. The company explains, “Smart Energy is designed to improve the efficiency of the home, eliminate environmental impact, and automate energy savings. It’s a combination of clean energy with smart technologies, allowing us to reward members for the energy they don’t use.”
For businesses, it can create an energy-use reduction (read: money savings on utilities) of up to 25 percent.
The Difference a Tree Makes
Yaya Ba, a farmer, lives in Kongheul, Senegal, with his family. For most of his life, the 60-year-old had been struggling to support his family, pay for medical expenses and buy school supplies for his 10 children. Even their meals were meager and lacking nutrition with no vegetables. Ba and his family faced daily challenges.
This background sets the stage for B Corp Eminence Organic Skin Care, who partnered with global planting organization Trees For The Future, to plant trees and create new food sources in Senegal. Under its Forests For The Future program, Eminence started planting trees in 2012. The company recognized it could build positive social and environmental outcomes through its product sales: For every product sold, the company plants a tree in Senegal, Uganda or Tanzania.
Eminence Organic Skin Care recently reached the momentous milestone of 10 million trees planted, which produce a whopping 2.6 trillion pounds of oxygen per year.
As part of the Forests For The Future initiative, Eminence committed to a project in Senegal that helps train and support farmers to build productive and sustainable Forest Gardens. The development of these Forest Gardens in rural communities empowers local people to restore their environment, grow their own food, and build a sustainable income and future for themselves, their families and their communities.
Without the Forest Garden, Ba says his life and the lives of his family members would be much more difficult. The 10 million trees planted have generated food stability for more than 10,000 people and provided a sustainable source of income for over 2,000 families, the company says.
B the Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
