Her company SoleRebels is proof that waste can be given a new lease of life, made both profitable and fun!    What touched me the most was that Bethlehem went further, employing disabled and marginalised people in her small factory, giving back to her to her society. 

In Bethlehem’s words, “Recycling is a way of life here – you don’t throw things away that you can use again and again….I wanted to build on that idea.”  (Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu)

This week on www.sustainability-stories.com , I found a similar spiritedness in Joanna from the UK who calls herself an Alchemist.  She takes waste from skip tips and boot fairs and transforms them into something beautiful and desirable.  Have a look at her story ‘Rubbish to Jewels’! This scavenger has an eye for beautiful things.    

And then there is Rubies in the Rubble (love the name!) and their idea stems from a personal aspiration to recycle perfectly good yet discarded food and help those less privileged.  Rubies produce premium chutneys and jams made from surplus fruit and vegetables. 

These are just some stories that we feature or that users share with us, inspiring everyone that there is opportunity, even in things that we might easily discard.

Share your stories or discover more on www.sustainability-stories.com , a home for amazing sustainability projects.

You can even join our competition to win 20,000 euros worth of consulting to 31 May or simply share your stories with like-minded people. Who knows, Logica might help make your story even bigger and better.

Oh! and don’t forget to subscribe to our blog.

Fundamentally, companies aim to sell products which are profitable. They do it, not by talking about profitability (because customers aren’t interested in companies’ profitability), but by showing how the product (which happens to be profitable) is in the customer’s interests.

‘Selling’ sustainable lifestyles/products is the same thing. We should not talk about sustainability (because most people aren’t interested in it), but rather show how the lifestyles/products (which happen to be sustainable) are in the “customer’s” interests. In effect, we have to incentivise the customer to change their behaviour (and their buying patterns).

This holds true for many organisations – companies who want to engage their customers around green consumerism, companies who seek to engage their staff around a sustainable corporate agenda, as well as public campaigns by NGOs and government. For example, anything with the terms ‘environment’, ‘climate’ or ‘carbon’ is unlikely to excite people who aren’t already interested. Many companies have Environment Weeks, or Green Champions – which often self-select for people already interested.

So how do we get the non-converted to take up low carbon behaviours?

Take a look at what we did with a Swedish Energy firm, getting a community to compete with each other to drive their energy consumption down by 30%. These are the types of challenges that I enjoy. Creating new and innovative solutions in traditional markets, making my client’s businesses more sustainable and at the same time encouraging their customers to behave in ways that support long-term profitability. It can be done.

Green may be the new black – what are you doing to get people to switch colours?

Take for example the office building in Harare, Zimbabwe which emulates a termite den and therefore uses 90 percent less energy to heat and cool than traditional buildings. And then there are lessons to learn from lotus flowers which naturally repels dust and dirt particles, an idea picked up by a German paint company, reducing the need to repeatedly ‘touch up the paint’ of buildings. And such ideas can be sold at a premium because they offer customers innovation, long term cost savings and solutions that are in harmony with their environment. As we all know, being sustainable can certainly boost brands and customer loyalty, while not being a responsible business has the potential to permanently damage a business’s reputation.

Logica has pulled together a number of inspiring sustainability examples on http://www.sustainability-stories.com/, stories we love from users and from around the world, and this week I found some stories truly inspired by nature. I love the Snail Shell System, a low cost contained home system that enables one person to live on land and water and still be hooked on to modern technologies. So I was delighted when the Dutch Tempohousing Academy shared their story with us about how they are reusing shipping crates to create modular housing in Nigeria. Nature has taught us that the best sustainable designs ensure that products and their components can be re-used many times over.
Also check out Nordea, one of Sweden’s largest banks that is looking to be inspired by the sea and use cold seawater to cool their servers and data-centres. And while there is no shortage of stories inspired by solar power, I like the way Sunny schools go out of their way to encourage pupils in London to take action and are inspiring future generations.

What examples of business ideas that emulate nature have inspired you? How do you think we could learn more?
Share your stories or discover more on http://www.sustainability-stories.com/, a home for amazing sustainability projects. You can even join our competition to win 20,000 euros worth of consulting to 31 May or simply share your stories with like-minded people. Who knows, Logica might help make your story even bigger and better.

We need to do more to convince men to be green. A recent post on The Green Market blog pulled together a wide range of research that shows women are greener than men in all spheres of life – all the way from the boardroom to the living room.

Some key facts and figures from the various reports – whose authors include the UN Population Fund, the French National Institute of Statistics and Economics, The US Department of Energy, the OECD and the Center for Women’s Business
Research – are:
- Female decision makers in the workplace are more likely to include environmental factors in their purchasing and other business decisions
- 41% of women aim to be eco friendly in their daily lives (for example by recycling, using less home energy and buying eco-friendly products) compared with just 27% of men
- Women consume less meat than men
- Women fly and drive less than men on the whole. When they do drive, they tend to do so in ways that consume less fuel

So, why are women greener than men? On the domestic level women tend to be more empowered to make green behaviour choices. On average 75% of purchasing decisions around the home are made by women and – even in these more enlightened times – women still do the majority of the housework, which makes them better placed to make decisions like whether to recycle or not.

But it’s not just about empowerment. Women are outperforming men in the workplace too, despite the fact they are vastly outnumbered at board level (figures published last year show that just 9% of Directors in FTSE 250 companies are female). So the problem is not just about empowering men to make sustainable decisions, but also about motivating them.

Messaging is key here. Most environmental communications are designed to play on basic human needs: health, safety and security. Typically this manifests itself in appeals to people’s conscience. Interestingly, the research found that women are more likely to say they feel guilty about not being green, which suggests for them this type of messaging is effective.

But what about people who are not motivated by guilt? What if we encouraged people to feel envious of other people’s green choices, rather than guilty? What if you made owning a bike as aspirational as owning a car? That’s exactly what a scheme in London is trying to do. Making Everyone Cycle’s entry into the Sustainability Stories competition says they will make people feel good about cycling rather than guilty about not cycling.

This kind of positive messaging can be built into products themselves, too. A good example of this is the Uploud Audio loudspeaker. Made in Helsinki, this product has sustainability at its heart, but that didn’t mean the designers felt the need to put ‘eco’ labels all over it. Instead they created a beautiful, minimalist product that will look just as cool in 25 years as it does now.

Creating profitable sustainable products and marketing them in ways that make them desirable will reposition green behaviours as something men can aspire to – both at work and play. It might just have a positive impact on some of the 59% of women who are currently turned off by sustainability, too.

The concepts that determine survival, sustainability and success are universally applicable to both the workplace and the mountain goats!

However, while intrepid biologists can predict susceptibility to disease and early mortality by scientifically measuring the raw components of life itself, most HR Directors struggle to determine whether their workforces are capable of delivering business success or not. Put simply, while a rare mountain goat was genetically cloned from a frozen sample of skin, the talent DNA profile of our workforces remains a frustrating mystery! Probably because we have no truly reliable scientific basis for answering why some people fail and others succeed.

Not to fear though. There are encouraging signs that HR is catching up and is capable of making reliable predictions. Recently, in workplace – not laboratory conditions -I witnessed first-hand how one HR team in a large utilities organisation had successfully identified, manipulated, re-sequenced and automatically controlled all of the variables like values, capability, motivation, skills that made talent in a sales role. This is re-writing the rules of business as HR influence in the boardroom is transformed. Intuitive decision making is now scorned in favour of intelligent prediction. This HR team has quantified its value in the best currency possible: additional sales per FTE (Full time equivalent).

To embrace such innovation though is a challenge. Technological and cultural factors often prevent HR taking such risks. Let’s remember it was the failure to adapt which did it for the poor mountain goat. Analytic and predictive innovation then must enter the HR competence framework, or in years to come we’ll all be watching how a group of biologists attempted to revive a floundering profession…

To find out more about the changing role of HR and the importance of analytics read:
Redefining the role of HR in a changing world
Making it count! A report by Human Capital Forum in association with Logica

Thousands of people travelling from far and wide (often in gas-guzzling cars) to be entertained by shows requiring vast amounts of energy while generating piles of rubbish in once green fields; on the surface, music festivals hardly appear to be beacons of environmental responsibility – and we haven’t even mentioned the chemical toilets yet.

But, beneath the surface, music festivals are making great efforts to reduce their environmental impact. Leading the way is American festival Rock the Green, which came to our attention through Logica’s Sustainability Stories campaign to highlight innovative sustainable projects. Incredibly, this one-day festival held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin generated just 10 trash cans of rubbish last year, with 92% of waste being either recycled, reused or composted.

Key to the success of the festival was the involvement of local sponsors and partners who recognised the business benefits of putting Milwaukee on the sustainability map. “The community has embraced Rock the Green,” said founder Lindsay Stevens. “Our sponsors and partners have made it clear that showcasing Milwaukee on the national stage as a leader in innovative sustainability practices is a priority.”

Music festivals in the UK have also made great strides in becoming more sustainable, including the big festivals. Glastonbury festival recycled 49% of its waste in 2010 and last year they launched the Green Traveller package, which granted access to perks such as solar showers to those who made the journey to the festival by public transport rather than car.

It’s not just the obvious candidates like Glastonbury (which has long had a close relationship with Greenpeace), either. A Greener Festival Awards was set up in 2007 to help music festivals around the world become more sustainable. Last year 47 festivals were given the award, with 12 achieving ‘Outstanding’ status. One of those was the Isle of Wight Festival, whose green initiatives go above and beyond the usual advice to refill water bottles and clean up mess from the campsite. Recycling is incentivised by offering eco-friendly freebies in exchange for cans, cycling is promoted through organized bike rides and the Let It Bee campaign highlights the dwindling bee population.

The key aspect of these initiatives at the Isle of Wight Festival is that they go above and beyond simply cutting the festival’s carbon footprint. Instead, they use the captive audience that a music festival creates to influence people’s behaviour beyond the festival’s fields. Rock the Green also took this approach, with a number of interactive areas around the festival site that aimed to educate and enable the audience to be greener in their day-to-day lives.

Of course, festivals could go even further. As welcome as a shower at Glastonbury might be, no doubt take up of the Green Traveller scheme would be higher if the incentive was a half-price ticket instead. More could also be done to involve the musicians in carrying these messages. They are, after all, undoubtedly the people best placed to influence the audience at a festival. Global Cool has produced video interviews featuring over 100 bands talking about green lifestyle choices. These videos gave the green lifestyle messages that festivals want to promote – notably public transport use – a much bigger platform and also amplified them beyond the confines of the festival’s fields via the web.

Are musicians really credible as green messengers? Many of them are working just as hard as festivals to be sustainable and, again, it’s not just the obvious candidates like Radiohead (who have stopped playing large music festivals that don’t have adequate public transport infrastructure in place). Julie’s Bicycle, another UK organisation working to make music festivals and the creative industries as a whole more sustainable, have helped a number of high-profile artists practice what they preach when it comes to sustainability. Their Industry Green (IG) certification has appeared on CD releases by Jack Johnson, Kate Nash, Robbie Williams and many more, ensuring that the environmental impact has been kept to a minimum.

As we approach festival season once more we look forward to seeing festivals following in Rock the Green’s footsteps and taking even bolder steps toward promoting and enabling sustainability.