Sustainability strategy: five priorities for managers

1. Identify Your Company’s Focus

Effective sustainability strategy must find its inspiration in your organisation. As sustainability officer, identify an area of focus around which to coordinate your goals, decisions and efforts. You might choose resource management, packaging, or logistics, for example. Or you may focus on a specific resource, such as water or wood. 

To help choose your company's sustainability focus, consider these three intentions: 

1. Efficiency: How could you use resources more efficiently while achieving the same benefit? For example, using technology to make processes more efficient. 
2. Consistency: How could you change fundamental processes to have a more positive impact? For example, switching plastic packaging to a compostable alternative. 
3. Sufficiency: How could you reduce consumption of energy and materials? For example, reducing packaging. 

Rooting your sustainability focus in this structure is highly effective. Rather than a detached set of policies, your goals become part of the corporate culture. You will motivate employees, investors and other stakeholders whose support you’ll need to carry out the strategy. Finally, initial positive actions will breed new ideas. This creates a positive feedback loop of continual improvement towards your goals. 

2. Digitise Your Processes

Once you’ve decided on your sustainability focus, digital transformation will help you get there. Digitisation promises relevant information and efficient administrative support. This will allow you to set up new processes, adapt them and achieve your sustainability goal. 

Digital systems can reduce repeated data entry and make records easier to compare. Test the value against your own baseline: time spent collecting evidence, missing records, reporting effort and the cost of the software. A system only helps when people maintain the data and use it to make decisions.

3. Recycle Efficiently

Recycling is one part of a wider material strategy. The EU waste hierarchy puts prevention and preparation for reuse ahead of recycling. Identify what can be avoided first, then work with qualified partners to improve recovery for the waste that remains.

Connect waste types, collection locations, service providers and treatment evidence in one dataset. Resourcify can help teams organise those records; the completeness and usefulness of the results still depend on the information supplied by sites and partners.

This digital approach lets you go beyond just meeting regulatory requirements. You can optimise economically by reducing costs and generating revenue from selling recyclables. As Resourcify customer Hornbach found, efficient recycling collection can become a source of income, generating money from the company’s waste.

4. Reduce Emissions

We’ve all noticed the growing frequency of extreme weather events. Each one serves as a reminder that we must all do our bit to limit CO² emissions and protect lives and livelihoods. Industrialised nations have the most work to do.

Build an emissions inventory with a defined reporting boundary, reporting year and documented factors. Use that baseline to identify where operational changes may reduce emissions, and keep estimated avoided emissions separate from the organisation’s own inventory.

Assess emissions measures alongside cost, feasibility and your applicable obligations. Prioritise changes with a clear owner and evidence of progress, rather than assuming that any single measure will make the company ready for every future requirement.

5. Report and Communicate

For your sustainability strategy to succeed, you need cooperation from many different stakeholders. Owners and investors must support and endorse your sustainability measures. But it’s employees who have perhaps the most important role of all. They carry out changes across hierarchical and departmental boundaries. They take the little steps to achieve your big goals.

To coordinate these joint efforts, transparent communication and reporting are essential. Accurate and tangible figures support concrete targets and goalposts that create an environment for change. 

This is where these five measures come together. Reporting from digital tools to support the company’s focus and the successful implementation of your sustainability measures.

How to Set Sustainability Goals for Business-Wide Success

So, we’ve identified the five key areas of focus in your role as sustainability officer. As you establish or review your company sustainability strategy, ask yourself:

1. What sustainability focus can I set that has roots in our corporate culture? 
2. How can I leverage digital technology to make our approach to sustainability more efficient? 
3. How do waste management and recycling factor into our sustainability policy?
4. What are we doing to reduce CO² emissions?
5. How can goal-oriented and thorough reporting optimise our sustainability efforts?

By taking a proactive approach now, sustainability will contribute to your company's long-term success on an ecological, economic and social level.