34. Breaking the catch 22 Supply of capital Company Company Not interested Not interested Regulator
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39. Would you lend to a project extracting wood in Indonesia?
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42. Customer fairness We try to let customers know our rates and fees as clearly as possible, and we invest in our teams so they can offer better financial assistance and recommend the most suitable products or investments for your needs.
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Editor's Notes
By challenging his employees to create a fully sustainable company, Ray Anderson set out an extremely ambitious goal. His vision has literally transformed the company ’s philosophy and business model, pressing everyone to rethink all of our actions, developments and innovations. Today Mission Zero is an integral part of the company ’s culture, and sustainability is embedded across all business functions and throughout the entire lifecycle of our products. I will describe how this is done a little later.
Take something simple like a T shirt Imagine you want to buy the one with the best environmental performance. Three brands all make different claims: 100% organic cotton 100% natural dyes 100% carbon neutral So which one would you choose? The only reliable way to compare T shirts is to obtain life cycle assessment results for each of them – and importantly they must all have been conducted to the same method You can’t tell which is best from the three labels alone
Beware of green claims! Conventional marketing is about strong, simple claims like ‘cheapest’, ‘fastest’ and ‘biggest’. That’s why it is very tempting for marketers to come up with single benefit claims about a product and the environment. Sustainability is too complex to be treated as a single product benefit . Public concern about the environment is leading to a wave of green claims in marketing. In the UK the Advertising Standards Authority has reported a rise in complaints about ‘greenwash’, and published guidelines for making green claims.
Knowing where the main impacts are, the next step is learning from the LCA and taking action to reduce the impacts. So once a manufacturer recognises that yarn is the biggest obstacle to producing a sustainable carpet tile, there are three key things they can do about it… 1 - Reduce the amount of yarn used Can you create a carpet with less yarn per square metre? 2 - Use more recycled yarn in the composition Minimising use of virgin yarn can save embodied energy at multiple levels 3 - Invent a new yarn Can you offer a low-impact alternative to virgin nylon with similar quality and performance?
