Browse posts by category
Paint your business green with sustainable innovation
Chris Sherwin, January 27th 2010, Built environment, Business, Innovation, Procurement
Innovation is famously described as one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration – great ideas are rarely enough, the challenge is to execute them.
Sustainable innovation can be a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process. Our latest report Paint the Town Green has been more than three years in the making but what a story we have to tell.
The report is about a multi-year innovation collaboration which set the goal of creating sustainable paint systems, and about the new products, services and processes which came out of it. It explains how to conduct innovation driven by environmental and social responsibility and why it makes good business sense.
Its not that I’m especially excited by paint – though I must confess to a soft spot after working on it for so long. Essentially the report shows how to use sustainability as a new lens to reinvent and rethink every aspect of our life. If we can do this with paint, imagine what you can do with cars, mobile phones, homes and holidays.
The three-year project set out to study the entire lifecycle of paint – from raw materials through to manufacturing, use and disposal - to find ways to make it more sustainable. It brought together ICI Paints AkzoNobel, a manufacturer and supplier, construction group Carillion, a major user of paint, and Forum for the Future.
Here are a few of the innovations:
- Dulux Ecosense, a new range of eco-paint with half the carbon and water footprint of the standard paint sold two years ago and 40 per cent less waste.
- Improved cans which use less plastic and are easier to clean and recycle.
A recycling scheme in which vehicles delivering paint to Dulux Decorator Centres bring back used cans. - Envirowash - a mobile brush and roller cleaning station for building sites: instead of pouring contaminated water down the drains it is captured for reuse with the paint residue filtered out.
- Manufacturing improvements that save millions of litres of water used in cleaning production equipment by using it to make new paint.
We also developed new tools for the project like our Streamlined Lifecycle Assessment (SLCA) method and Environmental Impact Analyser – a tool to measure the key impacts of a proposed new formulation and compare them against an existing product. This was the key which allowed ICI Paints AkzoNobel to develop both Ecosense and Ecosure trade paint, which won Green Product of the year in the Green Business Awards 2009.
Paint the Town Green marks a unique point in Forum’s innovation work. Some years ago we resolved to only work on practical innovation projects and not write any reports. We caved in on this project, but that’s only because we’re convinced there’s a great story we want to share with others. We hope it provides the one per cent inspiration you’ve been looking for.
Cut carbon with our award-winning smart procurement tool
Anna Warrington, December 3rd 2009, Procurement
What you buy shapes your carbon footprint. Procurement decisions determine how much electricity you use when you email, how much water you flush away when you use the bathroom, and even how much stuff you chuck in the bin.
That means procurement professionals have the opportunity to make huge cuts in their organisations’ carbon emissions. They can buy equipment which is more energy efficient, which requires less water in its use, and which produces less waste.
And by happy coincidence, often these more sustainable choices will save you money, resulting in lower utility bills and cost reductions under the Carbon Reduction Commitment.
But knowing what supplier or product will help you reduce your emissions most, and whether this will save money over time, can be tricky, especially when working within the EU procurement rules.
That’s why Forum for the Future and Fife Council teamed up to develop the award-winning Whole Life Costing + CO2 tool (WLC+CO2).
The tool helps procurers to understand the CO2 cost as well as the whole life financial costs of a product. It calculates how much CO2 will be emitted by different products during the contract period, and how much these emissions will cost under the Carbon Reduction Commitment or other carbon pricing schemes.
The new tool has been piloted by Fife Council and is now in use by their central procurement team. “It will be of great assistance to all organisations which are trying to reduce their carbon footprint and green the supply chain," believes Keith Grieve, the council’s Procurement and Supply Chain Management Team Leader.
He says the tool is “allowing us to compare individual products in terms of carbon emissions and to apply a value to those emissions which in turn can influence the award of the contract.”
Fife’s pilot confirms that the tool is simple to use and covers only verifiable information - making it acceptable under EU rules. The council was awarded the Government Opportunities Sustainability Award for its use of the tool in October 2009.
The WLC+CO2 tool builds on the whole life costing module of Forum’s popular Sustainable Procurement Toolkit, which allows procurers to calculate costs across the whole life of a product. It adds the ability to calculate the costs of CO2 emissions from the product.
We’d recommend using both tools to fully embed sustainability into procurement – the Sustainable Procurement Toolkit to help you review the demand for your product and to plan what actions you will take during the procurement process to maximise sustainability, and then the new WLC+CO2 tool to help you evaluate your tenders.
Both tools and the accompanying guidance are now available to everyone.
Please email Anna Warrington for your copy or for more information.
Forum wins green procurement award
John Bishop, October 29th 2009, General, Procurement
At Forum for the Future we like to think we know a bit about sustainable procurement, and our guide Buying a Better World is a buyer’s manual in many organisations.
It’s a simple concept, spending your money on goods which improve people’s quality of life and enhance the environment, but putting it into practice has its challenges, even for an organisation like us. So we were delighted to win an award for green procurement this week.
The Mayor of London’s Green Procurement Code awards showcase the achievements of London businesses that have reduced carbon emissions, saved energy and diverted waste from landfill through their procurement activities. Forum took the title of best performing small or medium enterprise.
Our work is all about embedding the principles of sustainability in businesses and the public sector. On procurement, we offer support at both the strategic and operational level. Our Buying a Better World report explains the benefits of sustainable procurement and details practical steps to take. Our Sustainable Procurement toolkit is recommended by the UK Audit Commission and the National Health Service and has been requested by public and private sector organisations around the world including the UN.
That’s why it is so important for Forum to be seen to practice what it preaches and understand the practical challenges of developing more sustainable business practices.
Saving more than our bacon
Fiona Dowson, January 30th 2009, Procurement, Public Sector
The way the public sector spends its money has been under fire from all angles this week, particularly where it comes to food. First it was the NHS on Monday sparking off furious debate about whether meat-free hospital menus had a place in its carbon reduction strategy, and inevitably reigniting tempers about the quality of hospital food. Then came Jamie and his pig-shaped spotlight naming and shaming government institutions that are chomping on imported bacon and hastening the demise of British pig farming.
2009 is supposed to be the year the UK government achieves its goal of becoming a leader in sustainable procurement – essentially making spending decisions that help create a better future. The idea of ‘investing for a better future’ has risen sharply up the agenda since the Government set this goal in 2007. The debate about how to, or whether we can, spend our way out of the recession is still in full swing. Late last year, plans to bring forward spending on schools, hospitals and roads were top of the agenda, more recently replaced by ambitions of bringing broadband internet to the masses. These are great opportunities for the government to use spending as a force for good – but will they pull it off?
Jamie’s programme highlighted a massive issue that sheds some doubt on this: the divide between government policy and its spending decisions. Farmers have to maintain high animal welfare standards but the government doesn’t put its money where its mouth is by demanding that the meat it buys meets the same welfare standards.
It’s easy to point to many similar examples of this kind of double standard. Last year the Government committed extra funding support for the Fairtrade Foundation. Just before that the then trade minister Gareth Thomas publicly called on three retailers to join the Ethical Trading Initiative and take responsibility for ensuring that their suppliers pay a living wage. The NHS is testing out a new ethical procurement framework and the Greater London Authority group asks suppliers to pay a London living wage but few other public sector bodies go beyond Fairtrade tea and coffee.
More important perhaps, given the current investment plans, is that in 2008 fewer than half of new government buildings achieved the sustainability standards the government set itself. This makes me think that the government isn’t fully prepared to make sure that, as we spend our way out of a recession, we also help ‘save’ our shared future – by making our money work harder, creating infrastructure fit for a low carbon future, and making sure that the jobs this creates both here and overseas, give people a dignified livelihood.
In my time in local government I remember there being heated debate between the Mayor and the sustainability officer about what new mayoral car to buy. These days it isn’t inconceivable that the debate would be between a mayoral bike or bus pass in some cities. Things are moving on but it’s really time to up the ante on government spending. The public sector needs to put its money where its mouth is if we’re going to save a lot more than our bacon.
Buying a better world
Fiona Dowson, March 5th 2008, Procurement, Public Sector
Our new report on sustainable public procurement, Buying a better world, is deliberately detailed. And there’s a good reason why.
It’s clear that many public sector buyers now feel that considering the sustainability goals of their organisation, when making spending decisions, makes sense. However, our experiences with buyers over a number of years suggest that knowing how to do this in practice still remains a stumbling block.
There needs to be a shift from having the right policies in place and knowing it’s a good idea, to actually taking some bold spending decisions. Decisions that will contribute significantly to a better future for us all.
The report goes into some detail about practical actions that buyers can take to improve the sustainability of any area of spend. The accompanying Sustainable Procurement Toolkit, is designed tohelp public sector organisations start taking action straight away.
I was pleased to hear Nigel Smith, the new Chief Executive of the Office of Government Commerce, talking at the Public Sector Transformation Summit last week about how sustainability should be considered in government procurement. Being last on the agenda I was starting to worry that there would be nothing left for me to say – most other speakers had already highlighted the need to consider sustainability. The tide of opinion has turned…its now time to take action.
In some ways the collaborative buying organisations that are tasked with driving down costs in the public sector, have a real opportunity. It makes sense for them to source good value, sustainable solutions - saving their customers time and money. And, like most suppliers, they listen to their customers. If local authorities, NHS Trusts and government departments don’t start being choosy customers, don’t start asking both individual suppliers and collaborative buying organisations "what sustainable products do you offer in this category?", very little is going to change.
It is important to remember that if you don’t ask, you’re unlikely to get. Its unlikely that the the big names on the high street would have spent time and money examining their supply chains and sourcing Fairtrade clothing, recycled toilet roll and local food without consumer pressure. The public sector needs to start using its power as the biggest customer in the UK, to create a better world.
Registered charity number 1040519