How to evolve from Green Washing to Green Cleaning.
Despite numerous efforts by countless policy-makers and authorities, sustainability remains a difficult subject to sell in the business world.
For quite a few entrepreneurs, the topic remains a distant one and that is exactly why there is a need for a visionary assignment that demonstrates that sustainability is indeed relevant for every business, including in DIY & Trade.
At this juncture in the post pandemic recovery, the major challenge is to build a better future with short-term goals into a sustainable agenda. Together we all need to find a pathway into a genuinely better society, a better planet and a better economy.
With that in mind, Thierry Coeman, regular contributor to The Hardware Journal, met with an expert who makes the concept of sustainability accessible to everyone, especially managers involved in DIY & Trade. He is someone who can support anyone in charting a simple course that leads to measurable results in all parts of the business: from employees, organisation, products, services through all processes.
We meet in the suburbs of Antwerp, in ‘Green House’, the biotope where Professor Dr. Hans Verboven and his team are pioneering every day to promote sustainability as a source of efficiency gains for any business model.
Sustainability does not just mean improving and optimising with the aim of providing a greener planet. Sustainable business is first and foremost a mental attitude in which a person wants to make a fundamental commitment in order to start a process, a strategy that can enthuse an entire organisation and set it in motion for a better world.
Green Washing versus Green Cleaning
In essence, Green Washing means making statements about sustainability without sufficient and correct substantiation. The better approach commences with a strategy that focuses on both the positive and negative impact of your core business on the environment. In such a strategy, you map out both dimensions. All aspects that have a negative impact, by definition, necessitate improvement; all aspects with a positive impact can be leveraged to contribute to each company’s social responsibility. It comes down to developing scalable business cases that in the end generate profit and give you a multiplier effect,” explains Hans.
Challenges for DIY, Building and Trade
The Green Deal, a vast recovery plan for Europe, conducted by the European Commission, states that we need to achieve a 55% carbon reduction by 2030.
In addition, the EU will soon introduce Taxonomy, a categorisation system that divides business activities into green and non-green activities/processes.
Taxonomy will help determine to what extent companies can or cannot benefit from European subsidies. Seen from this perspective, the key concern for any operator active in DIY, Pro and Build should be precisely to understand how green their processes are or are not. “For the construction sector and by extension the entire DIY market there are two challenges.
Firstly, to use at least 30% by weight of circular recycled material in every project and secondly to precisely determine the CO2 impact of every infrastructure.
In addition, new European directives such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) determine what the ‘licence to operate’ in the field will be.
Such standards will provide the profession with a framework and a rating for greener buildings, allowing all stakeholders contractors, architects, builders, general contractors, manufacturers, distributors – to slowly but surely achieve sustainable action.
The digital transformation, including BIM (Building Information Modelling), ensures that all these processes are supported by technology,” Professor Verboven adds.
Meanwhile, those standards are now seeping through to interior design, home improvement and renovation, which means that DIY can learn very quickly from the building sector.
More with Less
“The term sustainability still frightens precisely because it is an umbrella term so that quite a few business leaders – out of ignorance – still associate sustainability only with cost and regard it as a threat. Sustainability must be embraced as an opportunity. While today it is still promoted as a social responsibility, sustainability should be an integral part of the marketing strategy, whereby a green policy makes the USP and the distinctive capacity stand out. Sustainability can be part of an earning business model where the growth of the economy goes together with less negative impact on the environment. Sustainability is all about creating added value whilst reducing waste: putting the focus on more with less.
We are approaching an era where being unsustainable becomes an expensive business”, says Hans.
Best Practice ‘No Roof to Waste’
In the meantime, several companies have followed in the footsteps of the Belgian Professors’ pioneering work. This includes the well-known Belgian market leader in roofing, Derbigum Imperbel, which has developed a circular project in which roofers, via their distributors, are provided with big bags in which the waste from demolition work ends up and is collected. Roofing is made of, among other things oil; Imperbel conceived this sustainable initiative with the prospect of eventually having to find a solution for the shortage of fossil raw materials.
A double partnership between distributors and end-users that ultimately leads to a circular economy.
Missionary work
In addition to his academic duties at the university and as an inspiring speaker, Professor Verboven has both feet firmly ‘green’ planted in the business world. His consultancy company Sustacon design simple and accessible models for business leaders to ‘scan’ their processes in order to develop various forms of eco-solutions. “I hand them a toolbox with various tools – e.g. a PDCA cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act) which together create a green economy of scale, linked to a label.” Hans Verboven is an affable man who provides business leaders with a purpose that transcends their social responsibility, thanks in part to three dynamics: inspiration, enthusiasm and guidance.
Three dynamics that avoid the pitfall of green washing.
It is appropriate in featuring this editorial for ‘A View From Europe’ to mention that our heartfelt thoughts are with those who are so severely impacted by the tragic situation in Ukraine.
Hans Verboven is Professor of Sustainable and Ethical Business Practice at the Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Antwerp. His expertise is at the service of companies in the planning and implementation of their sustainability policies. In addition to his academic work, he also runs the consultancy activity Sustacon for which he has designed tools and models to support companies in their holistic approach to sustainability.
Prof. Dr. Hans Verboven is also the author of ‘Better Entrepreneurship’, a practical management book with numerous high-profile business cases from the (construction) industry.
His second book, ‘Better Building’ (25,000 copies), will soon be available. Its aim is to provide every student in training within the broad sector of the construction industry in Flanders, Belgium, with a manual free of charge – that will make sustainable construction and renovation part of his or her future engagement.
