There isn’t only one Green and Gold campaign in Manchester at the moment.
At this week’s Insider Sustainability event, “The £72bn question”, business leaders such as Chris Matthews of United Utilities and Jason Meers of Energi told a packed audience at the Bridgewater Hall of the great business savings that can be made from a commitment to ‘going green’.
With the general public currently losing patience with the efforts of the Green Agenda , and a growing cynicism on the long term value of recycling and lowering carbon footprints (“like turning up at a earthquake zone, with a brush and dust pan” as Sean Lock once put it), it may soon be up to UK plc alone to drive green policies and move sustainable practises forward.
And how do you convince big, medium and small business to act now and get their collective hands dirty to prevent far off, ambiguous problems from occurring? Point to the bottom line of course!
United Utilities are already looking to sift through the muck to find the pot of gold – literally! Chris Matthews spoke about how the company currently converts our human waste into renewable energy used to keep the water system in the North West powered, providing the company with significant cost and energy savings of up to £8m a year.
Enworks programme director Todd Holden then told the audience that “those companies that continue to tackle climate change as a risk or threat will ultimately go out of business, because energy and material prices are only going one way. The case studies invariably focus on corporate giants because big numbers grab attention, but small businesses are equally important. A florist we work with is harvesting rainwater and now only stocks seasonal flowers. Because of this, it is now winning public sector work where it once didn’t get a look in.”
The key, it seems, is not to try and painfully remove the use of resources from businesses, but to make the resources we have work harder and more effectively through innovation.
Tags: green agenda, insider, sustainability, United Utilities