Lesson 1 - Sustainability Thinking #1: Life Cycle Thinking

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Do curso por University of Colorado System

First Steps in Making the Business Case for Sustainability

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University of Colorado System

First Steps in Making the Business Case for Sustainability

10 ratings

Curso 1 de 4 em Specialization Become a Sustainable Business Change Agent

The Business School at the University of Colorado Denver wants to help you become a change agent for sustainable business. We hope that with the skills and concepts you gain from this specialization that you will help your business reduce its social and environmental impact. Being a change agent is hard. It takes courage and passion and knowledge. To implement change also requires being able to make the case for that change in terms that people in your company or organization respond to and understand. After completing the specialization, you will be able to: * Discuss the threats and opportunities that major global trends such as climate change present to businesses; * Identify ways a company can improve its environmental and social performance; * Evaluate and compare companies’ sustainability activities and products; * Develop a business case for implementing sustainability investments; * Identify key criteria of green businesses and product design; * Be a change agent in your organization; * Understand emerging topics in sustainable business, including those in the public policy space. We're very excited about offering this MOOC specialization and hope it gives you the first step toward learning about and taking action to make the places you work and the products you buy more sustainable. Sustainable business changes daily with new products, innovations and ideas, so you will be important in keeping the class current. We look forward to learning from you as you take this green journey! ______

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Sustainable Thinking

The Business School at the University of Colorado Denver wants to help you become a change agent for sustainable business. We hope that with the skills and concepts you gain from this specialization that you will help your business reduce its social and environmental impact. Being a change agent is hard. It takes courage and passion and knowledge. To implement change also requires being able to make the case for that change in terms that people in your company or organization respond to and understand. We begin our journey to being a change agent by introducing sustainability thinking. Sustainable business requires a new way of seeing and thinking about how business operates. By beginning to think sustainably you will be better able to identify ways that your company can improve and explain those changes to decision makers. We will look at 6 ways of thinking related to sustainability: • Life-Cycle Thinking • Long-Term Thinking • Circular Thinking • Resilience Thinking • Systems Thinking • Context Thinking

Sustainability Thinking Intro (Start Here)1:26

Lesson 1 - Sustainability Thinking #1: Life Cycle Thinking7:40

Lesson 2 - Sustainability Thinking #2: Circular Thinking6:49

Lesson 3 - Sustainability Thinking #3: Long Term Thinking7:37

Lesson 4 - Sustainability Thinking #4: Resilience7:44

Lesson 5 - Sustainability Thinking #5: Systems Thinking7:10

Sustainability Thinking #6: Context-Based Thinking8:44

Assignment Intro: About the B-Lab Assessment - Oxana Trotsenko7:11

Conheça os instrutores

John Byrd
Senior Instructor
Managing for Sustainable & Finance

Hi, I'm John Byrd, and this is the first video lecture for

the MOOC specialization, Become a Sustainable Business Change Agent.

We're starting the class by looking at six sustainability concepts or

ways of thinking.

These are a little different than the standard way that people think when making

business decisions, so what we're really doing is learning a new way of thinking.

We're learning sustainability thinking.

You might think that you know what sustainability is all about,

you have a definition in your head.

But I want to tell you a story about why spending some time learning these concepts

is important.

Everybody knows Walmart, biggest retailer in the world.

In 2005, the CEO, Lee Scott,

challenged employees to help make the company more sustainable.

Walmart had been going through a rough period in terms of how it

treated employees and other labor and supply chain issues.

Mr. Scott wanted to make Walmart a better company.

Within a year, employees found millions of dollars worth of savings.

They found ways to reduce energy use, to change how merchandise was transported,

how things were packaged, and how waste could be turned into something valuable.

All of these changes could have been made at any time, but

it was only after employees started to think sustainably

that they could see where improvements could be made.

Learning about sustainability thinking is learning to see things in a different way.

So I think these concepts, this new way of thinking,

is very important, because it creates a foundation or a base for

your efforts to make your company or organization more sustainable.

The first concept or

new way of thinking we're going to talk about is life cycle thinking.

If you've studied marketing,

you've probably learned about a product's life cycle.

Introduction, growth, maturity,

decline, that's not the life cycle that we're talking about.

We're talking about a product's material life cycle, from the extraction of raw

materials, to manufacturing, to distribution, consumer use, and disposal.

I call this the material life cycle.

So you know that we're concerned with the materials used to make the product and

the energy and human effort involved in transforming those raw materials

into something useful and valuable.

Let me show you what we mean by the material life cycle of a product.

The first stage is the extraction and creation of raw materials.

The second stage is manufacturing,

where raw materials are turned into finished products.

For this lecture and most of the class, I'm going to assume that you work in

companies in the manufacturing or the retail sales phase.

The third stage Is consumer use, the use, and disposal, and

maybe the recycling of the product or its components.

Companies are mostly concerned about what happens within the company.

So they focus on activities from the time that raw materials arrive at the company

until the finished goods leave the company.

Now, there's a lot going on within a company's boundary, so

this is a very reasonable approach.

Improving the sustainability within a company is very important.

It's also where the company has the most control.

So it can most easily make changes.

After you complete this course,

this is probably where you're going to begin making changes.

Some impacts that companies can address internally are things like reducing energy

use, reducing waste, both in manufacturing and in offices.

Redesigning products to be greener, safer, or so they use less energy, less material.

Improving the employee experience with flexible hours and

changing procurement to purchase more sustainable products.

But to become truly sustainable,

we have to look at what's happening beyond the company's boundaries.

That is, the company, or someone in the company, like you,

has to look at the entire life cycle of the products it makes and

it sells to identify the biggest impacts and figure out ways to reduce them.

Procurement is where companies interact with their suppliers.

This leads us to the upstream phase of the life cycle.

This is everything that happens before the raw materials get to the company.

The purchasing function within a company can look for

suppliers with the best record for environmental and social care.

By doing this, the embedded impact and

the materials used in your products would be reduced.

This phase gets a lot of press for its impact.

That's because this is where the extraction of oil, and

minerals, and ores, the harvesting of lumber,

and the chemically intense growing of cotton occurs.

Then, these basic materials have to be refined, or smelted, or milled,

or woven in dye into the intermediate materials that companies like yours

can use to make finished product for consumers.

These basic industries can have a lot of possible impacts on water, land,

air, and communities.

Pollution, biodiversity loss and habitat destruction, greenhouse gas emissions,

worker health and safety, and community impacts, are some of these.

Now let's look at the downstream phase of the life cycle.

This is everything that happens after a product leaves the company and

goes to consumers.

Surprisingly, this phase can have very high impacts even without blast furnaces,

open pit mines, clear cuts, and lots of chemicals.

Consider some things that everyone has, clothing.

Clothes need to be washed and dried.

Washing machines require hot water and energy.

Dryers need heat and energy to tumble the clothes.

If those appliances aren't designed well, they're going to use more energy and

water than is really necessary.

And clothes that aren't durable enough to be washed many times will

have to get thrown out, wasting cotton and the energy required to make the clothes.

This is the fast fashion problem.

The greatest impact of a pair of jeans isn't growing the cotton or sewing and

transporting the finished product,

it's the consumer use phase because of washing and drying the jeans.

And most products have to be disposed of because they can't be recycled easily.

We'll return to this topic when we talk about circular thinking and green design.

Disposal means new raw materials have to be produced, and landfills,

especially older ones, can create a lot of pollution.

We say we throw things away, but there is no away.

They go someplace, and we or someone has to live with the effects of that waste.

If a company does everything right inside the company, more efficient lighting,

less waste, no dangerous chemicals, good employee benefits, and so on.

But it uses raw materials with a big environmental or social impact, or

it designs and makes products that need lots of energy or water to use and

that can't be recycled.

Then, despite its great efforts and its best intentions,

it's still going to have a big impact on people and the planet.

Only by looking at the entire life cycle of a product's creation and

use, can we identify the total impact of our products.

We have to think outside the boundaries.

So, Sustainability Concept #1 is life cycle thinking.

Next, we'll talk about circular thinking, thanks.

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