Element Magazine - July 2014 Element Magazine - July 2014 | Page 13

The
sustainability
opportunity
Image: Joseph Kelly

By Dr. Logan Wait and Dr. Manuel Seidel, directors, ecoPortal and Caleb
Clarke, director, Morphum Environmental

With the overall benefits of sustainable business
practices growing more and more obvious, leading
companies are understandably enthusiastic about the
value sustainability can add to their organisations. But
while the long-term financial benefits are attractive, in
the short-term we all have to deal with limited budgets.
Getting started is often extremely challenging. Based on
our experience with a wide range of leading New Zealand
companies, we’ve found several low or no-cost ways to
help turn your sustainability visions into action:

Material issues are the ones that matter the most. Make
sure you identify what these are by proactively engaging
with your stakeholders. This isn’t just your management
team and staff, but includes your customers, suppliers, and
regulators. While it may seem obvious that focusing your
time and budget on material issues is the most effective
approach, some businesses try to measure and manage
too many issues and ultimately dilute the effectiveness
of their sustainability efforts. There are a number of
different approaches to help identify material issues such
as The Natural Step Framework, the Mauri model and risk
assessment tools.

A picture is worth a 1000 words, and as people are
becoming less inclined to read 1000 words, imagery is
becoming increasingly important. We’ve found creating a
visual map of a strategy, rather than keeping it locked in a
document or spreadsheet is the best way to communicate
a shared sustainability vision. You can take a ‘Post-It note’
approach or use the ‘ecoWheel’ (pictured right) which we
have developed specifically for this purpose.

Low-hanging fruit are easiest to access and deliver the
fastest rewards. Picking these quick-win projects helps
raise the awareness of the value of sustainability and goes
a long way to securing the budget for bigger, longer-term

projects. A great place to start is to celebrate the good
things that are already being achieved in the organisation
as this creates momentum and inspiration to motivate other
sustainability initiatives.

Sustainability shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of any
one person in an organisation. However in many cases we
have seen very ‘lonely’ sustainability managers. Creating
a team of sustainability champions is key – all you need
to do is provide the staff that are engaged in sustainability
issues with opportunities to create improvements. Your
team will help achieve targets and naturally embed
sustainable business practices into the culture of your
organisation.

At the coal face, sustainability often means effectively
managing health and safety, environmental and quality
issues. Systems to manage these issues are all based on
the ‘plan’, ‘do’, ‘check’ and ‘act’ principles and they can
often be combined into one integrated system. This will
streamline the processes people use on a daily basis,
reduce frustration, save time and lead to a happier auditor.
ecoPortal has developed a suite of solutions to
help companies achieve their short - and long-term
sustainability goals. These solutions are delivered to
organisations through sustainability, Health & Safety,
Environmental and Quality (HSEQ) experts such as
Morphum in New Zealand. Together, Morphum and
ecoPortal have helped Unitec raise the awareness of
environmental sustainability amongst staff and students to
67% with a collaboratively tailored sustainability strategy.
The solutions have also helped Autex reduce energy costs
by 50%, achieve zero waste to landfill and helped halve the
time Fonterra Brands spends preparing for environmental
audits.
• ecoWheel is a sustainability strategy visualisation
tool. It illustrates the current position of a company’s
business practices, shows where they should be in the
future, and presents a road map highlighting the way to
get there.

• ecoPortal turns sustainability strategy into action.
It is an easy-to-use online management system
which includes all the tools to measure, manage, and
report on complex sustainability and health & safety,
environmental and quality issues.
The team at Morphum ensure that organisations
maximise the benefits of ecoPortal by embedding
sustainability into all operational systems and processes.
They achieve this by customising each implementation,
recognising the existing attributes, culture and systems of
the organisation. They bring a collaborative stakeholderfocused approach to developing strategy, and have a
deep technical capability to create ideas and resolve any
environmental certification or compliance issue quickly and
efficiently.
For more information see ecoportal.com and
morphum.com

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