Using the TECK method to improve your supply chain sustainability and resilience, from our host Katherine Ann Byam, Business Resilience Strategist & leadership Coach.
TECK Stands for Transparency, Energy, Circularity and Knowledge. Tune in to learn more, and share your thoughts with us! We are on instagram @whereideaslaunch
Katherine Ann Byam 0:01
Today's session is about sustainable supply and sourcing. And before I get into what we could be doing to solve this problem of sustainable supply and sourcing, I need to tell you why this matters.
Now, we are using resources at 1.7 times their rate of natural regeneration. We have become less efficient at converting those resources that we extract from the ground than we were, let's say in the 1980s compared to today. And part of this is because we have changed the source of supply. Most of the world aspires to be at the level of wealth of let's see, for example, the US.
Now as people aspire to have more and to grow more in terms of wealth on an average scale, we're going to demand more of those resources than we have in the past. Climate change will also render many places uninhabitable, starting, let's say in the 2040s, to 50s. And this will invoke mass migrations and a number of other economic and social challenges that we expect will emerge. Technology can give us solutions if we use it in the right way. And there are also projects underway all around the world to rewild nature in some form or fashion in order to get us to a point where we can move the needle on what we've been putting into the atmosphere in terms of carbon with a very, very urgent timescale for change that we need to commit to.
A lot of customers are becoming more savvy. So as we get into the marketplace, we're starting to see a greater demand for a greater need for knowledge around things that are sustainable. I think customers since the global pandemic, have really started to reflect on what it means to them to live on this planet. The recognition that there's only one blue planet that we have that we can currently inhabit makes this need to do something that much more urgent.
We have also seen things like vaccine capitalism come under real attack because still, we are developing the world and we're developing this planet on the notion of nation-states, where the situation that we're in today, it's so globally interconnected that some of these decisions can no longer be taken on a national level. realistically. Yes, we can still take it on a national level. But will we have the impact? Will we have the same efficacy if we take decisions on a nationalist level?
So these are questions that consumers are starting to ask. Now, in some countries, there are no furlough protections like we have in some of the Western countries. So there's no social protection around the issues that have emerged from the pandemic, including the loss of jobs, the loss of tourism, etc. Now, wealth inequality is rampant and growing.
There are something like 2700 billionaires who own enough to be the biggest country by GDP. And it's only getting worse. The number of people that represents 2,700 billionaires is less than .0005% of the planet. Netflix has been doing a great job of educating people around the topics of sustainability, with independent films such as “Seaspiracy” and “Cowspiracy.” And there've also been a number of interesting films on Amazon, for example, “Living the Change.” And what these are doing is creating a movement in people's minds that they need to do something different, that they need to be more responsible, and that they need to make different choices about their food, and about their repurchase of things and how many things they want to accumulate, how they dispose of their things.
But we're going to talk a little bit about how we can make our supply chains more sustainable for this purpose so that we can address the needs of our customers. Another anecdote that I'd like to share with you, I was talking to a friend of mine who runs a group on Facebook, and he told me that he started his group, it's called Sustainable Living in 2014, and by 2020, much he had 3000 people in his group by September 2020. He had 65,000 people in his group. Today, he has 75,000 people in his group and this shows that there's been a huge shift of people looking for sustainable solutions groups that have sustainability in their name on Facebook have been growing exponentially.
My own group of women who are running sustainable businesses has grown by 100 a week for the last month. And it's starting to accelerate. So this is really becoming a thing. There are ways for us to go about checking our carbon footprints, etc, as people as individuals, freeways, which is also helping to expand the knowledge and make people more aware.
So now I want to get into exactly what we can start doing in our supply chains to think through this sustainability equation. I think about it as tech. And I will explain what tech means it has four elements to this sustainability puzzle. It is transparency, energy, circularity, and knowledge. And I'm going to go into each of these topics so that you understand what you could be doing differently in your supply chains to make a difference.
The first point you need to know about transparency. It's about making a statement; making a statement to see what you definitively stand by when it comes to elements of the whole sustainability puzzle. Sustainability, as you know, it has many different angles, we can start with the human side of the thing. Are we against modern slavery in all of its forms? Are we paying our workers a living wage? Are people able to survive based on the contracts that we're giving them? Is all contracting fair?
That's a key part of the transparency debate, and we should be having that publicly available on our websites. How is the ratio of CEO pay to the lowest-paid worker in organisatio? What's that ratio like? And how we preserve certain reasonableness with that ratio also dictates how transparent and how respectful we are of the human side of the story. Then we have revealed things about our suppliers themselves. So as we supply, we also have suppliers and our suppliers should also be following some of the rules that we have determined are necessary to be an ethical company. So we need to think also about our suppliers.
We also need to think about the way our products are disposed of. Transparency is about communicating what solutions are there to recycle the products that we sell. Getting into this further, you can go the certification route. And the certification route gives other people, your customers and suppliers etc, an idea of who you are if you have a certification that states basically the rules that you have agreed to comply with. This already goes part of the distance, I say part of the distance because certifications have been challenged through their ability to truly verify what's happening.
There are two certifications that are very popular at the moment in this space, which are the fair trade certification and the B Corp certification. Both of these are useful in terms of progress because they do assess quite a wide variety of topics. You can become certified without having all of the boxes ticked. And this is where these certifications can come in the challenge at times. But the idea is that you set a roadmap for yourself as to the things that you want to accomplish. And as you accomplish them, your ranking will increase. So it's a good idea to get involved with finding good ways to be transparent about the good things that you're doing and also to be transparent about the things that you're still progressing. Both sides are important. It's not just a topic of greenwashing. Now we get to energy. Energy is the second in the tech framework and energy for us. - it's really about where you're sourcing the energy to convert your products, how aware you are about the usage of energy in your organisation, and how efficient you are on the usage of energy and the things like your website. So it's not just about the physical product itself, but it is about what's happening in your offices and your website, how heavy is it to load for customers. All of these things need to be validated and checked before we can see that we are truly energy efficient.
So it's not just about the choice of our energy provider. It is also about how we're returning energy to the system. It's also about how efficient our entire systems are to carry out the work that we asked of it. To see in tech is about circularity and the key question here is how are you sourcing your materials, and can your sources be recycled? And this is essential because we need to be able to communicate to our customers what they need to do to dispose of that product. We also need to think about how we can create a second-hand market for that product. And a number of companies have done this. So they do buy-backs, they do sell secondhand versions of their products. And this needs to be something that we go deeper and deeper and further into, especially if we can make that product more efficient to use in terms of energy. So as much as we can recycle and reuse and change and shift even if it is, you know, scrapping the thing for parts and Using that into the process. Minimising waste is a key part of what we need to do.
Also, using different types of plastics will allow the things to be able to return to the earth, for example, and break down more efficiently as well as being able to reuse them in other products. The other bit of circularity is about your supply chain responsiveness to being able to collect things.
So I have a great business model. Someone I've interviewed on this podcast, the model that she uses is that she gives her product in bottles, and then she's able to collect the used bottles when you make a reorder. All of this is important to your customer, they need to know how to end the life of that product that they've purchased. If you have a circular model designed or some links to other companies who will provide that recycling for you, you need to communicate that. The last letter in the tech framework for supply chain resiliency is knowledge.
Knowledge is about how you're communicating with your employees, your customers, and all your stakeholders about what's key to be measured in your space around sustainability and its goals. So if we think about the UN Sustainable Development Goals and that framework of 17 goals, there's a lot there that we could be sharing and tailoring to our organisation. And this is about real education and real change as opposed to greenwashing. So it's not about CSR and PR featuring what you're doing. Because that comes under real attack. It's about making real changes, communicating but making real changes, and also communicating where you have not yet made changes and what you're planning to do.
This is where we start winning the respect of people who are interested in purchasing our products. So this brings us to the end of the tech framework. I hope that was useful in setting up how you can think about your supply chain for the future. Please follow my future episodes where I will be talking about the supply chain in more detail. Thanks so much for listening.
Thanks for listening. This podcast was brought to you today by career sketching with Katherine Ann Byam and The Space Where Ideas Launch. Career Sketching is a leadership development and coaching brand offering personalised career transition and transformation services. The Space Where Ideas Launch offers high-performance group leadership coaching and strategy facilitation to businesses in the food and health sectors.
To find out more contact Katherine Ann Byam on LinkedIn.