Leadership And The First And Last Mile Of Sustainability
nce a year, employees at Burt’s Bees, the maker of natural, personal care products, sort through two weeks’ worth of the company’s trash. CEO John Replogle believes that the lessons learned from this company-wide “Dumpster Dive,” where all employees have a chance to identify missed recycling and reuse opportunities, build the company’s culture of sustainability in addition to saving tens of thousands of dollars a year. When the company first measured its trash in 2007, it was creating 40 tons of waste a month. By the end of 2009, Burt’s manufacturing facility achieved its zero-waste goal, an important milestone in its quest to be a zero-waste, zero-carbon company by 2020.1
Wal-Mart is taking a closer look at its trash, too, and like Burt’s, discovered how to make a profit from managing it better. In 2006, using 10-ton semi-compactors at 4,400 locations, the company was paying tens of millions of dollars to haul the trash away. It felt that there had to be a more efficient way to manage its waste. Today, using a process called “sandwich bailing.” Wal-Mart bundles layers of shrink wrap, garment bags and grocery bags between layers of cardboard into bales that are sold on the open market as a commodity to paper mills and other processing facilities. Wal-Mart estimates that sandwich bailing has diverted 182 million pounds of plastic from landfills.2
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The efforts of companies as diverse as Burt’s Bees and Wal-Mart represent the many successes and challenges of the increasingly popular and mainstream movement towards sustainability. In 1983, the Report of the World Commission on the Environment and Development defined sustainability as “that which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” In this article, we expand on this definition, focusing on how sustainability is a strategic commitment and cultural change spearheaded by company leadership, one that leads to a positive impact on the environment and society, while protecting the company’s bottom line.
Sustainability is a leadership challenge
The experiences of both Burt’s Bees and Wal-Mart illustrate that sustainability is first and foremost a leadership challenge, not a technological one, as popularly believed. To highlight the leadership challenges associated with sustainability, we find it useful to draw attention to what we call the “first mile” and the “last mile” of the sustainability journey.
The first mile comes before a company or organization can institute technological change, when there is low-hanging fruit that individuals can tend to, that helps create a culture of sustainability within the company. But after companies have made small changes and technological innovations have been found, the novelty and associated enthusiasm of sustainability will have likely worn off, and achievement can occur only if there is deep commitment within an organization, and the company engages its other stakeholders. The key leadership challenge in the last mile of a corporation’s sustainability journey involves reaching outside one’s own organization to influence the sustainability practices of customers, suppliers and even competitors. While the buzz-word on everyone’s lips, ‘green technology,’ may be able to take us a long way towards sustainability, the first and last mile of the sustainability journey, and many in-between, will be traveled by man, not machine.
Below we highlight a number of important elements of successful sustainability efforts in both the first mile and the last, as shown by two companies that could generally be considered opposites: Wal-Mart and Burt’s Bees. In 2007, the former brought in approximately $400 billion dollars in combined revenue from its affiliates Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart International and Sam’s Club3. Burt’s revenues were a fraction of that, $23 million. Wal-Mart has more than 2 million employees4, while Burt’s Bees has about 400. Although Burt’s has its roots in natural, rustic processes, Wal-Mart only embraced sustainability after coming under attack for decades.5 Even though the two companies are so different, they both are grappling with many of the same sustainability issues. In response to their challenges, the two companies’ strategies and tactics for fostering commitment to sustainability and leading outside constituencies are similar in many aspects. We believe that some key best practices can be gleaned from comparing and contrasting their examples.
Creating a sustainable culture within the organization
Any company’s sustainability quest has to start inside the organization. Key leadership elements in this first mile of the journey include setting and communicating sustainability goals, articulating how they will be achieved, and engaging all levels of the organization in problem solving and implementation. No one individual alone, nor piece of equipment, will be able to complete this journey. Sustainability efforts make all employees at all levels in an organization necessary and interdependent.
Setting goals: The most effective first step in any sustainability effort is to set goals. For example, in 2008, Burt’s articulated an ambitious set of goals for 2020, including being “a zero-waste, zero- carbon company, operating on 200 percent renewable energy in LEED certified buildings.” To achieve these goals, the company required each employee to be creative and to make a commitment. As such, one of the 2020 goals was 100 percent employee engagement in Burt’s sustainability activities.
Wal-Mart began its sustainability initiatives the same way. Company leaders looked at their business comprehensively and set goals. Wal-Mart calls its approach “Sustainability 360.” It sought to 1.) Eliminate waste, 2.) Be powered by renewable energy and, 3.) Sell sustainable products.6 It’s important to note that these goals are indeed socially, ethically and environmentally inspired, but that they are also tied directly to Wal-Mart’s bottom line.
The above practices teach us that leaders need to articulate how sustainability fits into a company’s mission and profit, and to show how these efforts can literally fit into a day’s work. Paid days of company-wide volunteering, such as the Dumpster Dive at Burt’s Bees, are smart initiatives for showing your people that sustainability is truly important to the organization’s central mission. When sustainability goals are conceived at the top, they often cascade down and become contagious, leading employees to think twice about throwing their recyclable trash in the wrong bin or leaving the water running for longer than necessary.
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