In my previous post about aligning a sustainability and corporate strategies
I used an example of how an organization might be getting pressure from
external stakeholders such as consumers to address an issue (such as
toxic components in toys) while the internal stakeholders are focused on
other sustainability initiatives such as changing light bulbs.
This challenge of competing priorities is tough, but it can actually get worse!
How many of us have seen our offices
upgrade from the fat, desk-hogging CRT monitors to the sleek,
energy-efficient LCD displays? And our companies get brownie points for
upgrading to more energy efficient IT assets, but what happened to those
old CRTs? Well, as a recent NY Times article uncovers, they are sitting in massive stockpiles of e-waste, quickly becoming a monumental environmental disaster!
There are also systemic challenges to
this problem. Let’s take another example, this time from a consumer
product perspective. Retailer XYZ is trying to be a good corporate
citizen by implementing a consumer product take-back program. Lots of
sustainability professionals (myself included) have advocated these
programs because they reduce the amount of trash sent to landfills, and
valuable resources can be extracted from reclaimed products. These types
of take-back programs can range from simple product returns for
unwanted purchases (that weird gizmo your Aunt Edie got you for
Christmas – yeah, you know what I mean!) to e-waste and Household
Hazardous Waste collection events.
However, when retailers implement these
programs, they find themselves in a quasi-waste management business,
collecting items for recycling or refurbishment, and shipping them back
to the vendor. And, as recently happened with several big box retailers,
if these products have any sort of toxic component (and you would be
SHOCKED at the number of household products that do!) this makes them
subject to hazardous waste laws and opens them up to being sued by
federal or state environmental protection agencies. Since 2006, several
of these retailers including Target, Wal-Mart, Walgreens, CVS, and The Home Depot,
have been subject to almost $80 million in penalties due to improper
handling of hazardous materials in their “reverse logistics” operations.
This is no longer just a strategic
alignment problem, it is a systems thinking problem, where making
changes in one place in a larger system (like the office or your house)
has ripple effects and unintended consequences in other parts of the
system. No single company can solve this type of problem on its own. It
requires the coordinated thinking of product designers, manufacturers,
advertisers, retailers, consumers, regulators and waste experts, just to
name a few.
So try an experiment, the next time you
find yourself thinking about a sustainability program that you like or
want to implement – ask yourself, what is the bigger system at play
here, and is this program going to be a net gain for the environment or
society all the way through the broader system?