At the first annual Corporate Sustainability Summit in Austin, Texas last week, much of the conversation and many of the seminars centered around overcoming hurdles to sustainability. At one point during the conference put on by The Center for Corporate Sustainability, the moderator asked all attendees to write down their top 3 hurdles. The three that emerged most frequently were as follows:
1) Culture, culture, culture - One attendee actually wrote this as all three of his hurdles. What he meant was that at his organization, sustainability simply wasn't a priority. He was an "insurgent" (as opposed to a "champion") in the lingo adopted by the summit after a fantastic presentation by Kit Tuveson of Tuveson and Associates on how to present to the C-suite. One way to overcome this hurdle, Tuveson explained, is to find a fellow insurgent in the C-suite. It may surprise you to find that there is a C-suiter just as interested in sustainability as you are, but hasn't made that known because s/he didn't recognize it as a corporate priority either. The other component of culture is employee buy-in. Many facility folks are surprised to find that once any sustainability initiative is begun, support from the bottom up arrives from every corner of the business. People want to do this, and just need a leader. So, the best advice: Find other insurgents, start a grass roots campaign, begin making some noise!
2) Time and money - Of course, right? In between hot/cold calls and driving cost out of your department after a recession-induced budget cut, who has time to consider sustainability also? Regarding time, sustainability simply must become a priority - cordone off some time each week to work on it. Regarding money, well, you've no-doubt heard the mantra that sustainability doesn't cost, it makes money. Start with some simple operational changes - or very low-cost upgrades (like vendor-misers on vending machines) and get some success stories under your belt.
3) Measuring and reporting results - Much of the discussion around this came down to attendees being daunted about where to start and how to collect data to report. The first presentation of the conference was by Ron Herbst, head of energy management and sustainability for Deutsche Bank, who showed how he had put together an incredibly comprehensive carbon emissions reporting and reduction plan in just over a year and a half. As impressive as it was, the presentation almost was counterproductive in that some attendees looked at Herbst's plan as an impossible standard to live up to. But the advice that emerged throughout the conference was simple: "Just start somewhere." Even if it's just putting your utilty data into a spread sheet, or calculating your Energy Star score, or checking off a few of the credits in the LEED-EB: O&M rating system. Just...start...somwhere.
So, do you agree with these three hurdles? Are there other ones you've experienced? Please comment below.