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.
