Barbara Nebel, CEO, thinkstep-anz

This year has seen a significant rise in consumer concern around environmental and social issues, and a corresponding demand for better information about products and business practices.

Colmar Brunton’s Better Futures report[1] in February found that New Zealanders had the highest levels of concern about climate change in a decade, but also that how companies talk about their social and environmental commitments is confusing.

The In Good Company report[2] in November – commissioned by the Sustainable Business Council, Porter Novelli and Perceptive – found that New Zealanders wanted more transparent communication on sustainability from all industries and considered sustainability in their purchase decisions.

It is more important than ever for manufacturers to be able to tell the story of product sustainability. We look back at how government and businesses alike have stepped up to this challenge.

Government changes 

Single-use plastic bags were banned from July this year, signalling a watershed moment for plastics use. The Government has recently announced[3] the next steps to tackle plastic waste, starting with moving from single-use packaging and containers made of hard-to-recycle PVC and polystyrene, towards high-value alternatives like HDPE and polypropylene.

In November, New Zealand made headlines overseas as the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill passed with cross-party support, committing the country to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050. The passage of this bill gives businesses certainty of the long-term framework for reducing emissions and will make it easier for them to plan their own transition.

The Ministry for the Environment, accredited product stewardship managers and the Sustainable Business Network have collaborated on Fuji Xerox’s roadmap[4] to develop a product stewardship scheme. Companies and other organisations participating in accredited product stewardship schemes have diverted more than 1/3 million tonnes of waste from landfill to date.

How are companies responding?

In July, the Climate Leaders Coalition celebrated its first anniversary. The Coalition is made up of over 120 businesses who are pledging to keep warming to below 1.5°C.

Since its launch in 2018, the group has become a focal point for businesses wanting to take climate change seriously. Signatories who reduced their emissions over the previous year did so by a combined 569,000 tonnes of CO₂.

In August, the Sustainable Business Network annual conference ‘The end of plastic as we know it’ brought business leaders and experts together to tackle the issue of plastic. My key takeaway for the manufacturing sector was that we need life cycle thinking – it won’t be enough to just address waste, we also need to watch out for unintended consequences. Sometimes the solution may not be changing the packaging, but rather the whole product. For example, Ethique has created an entire business around a shift from liquid shampoo to solid.

In September, the New Zealand Green Building Council launched the Net Zero Carbon Roadmap for Aotearoa, which sets out the pathway for new buildings to be zero carbon by 2030 and all buildings zero carbon by 2050. A supporting report by thinkstep-anz identified opportunities to reduce the embodied emissions in the building and construction sector by 40%.

Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) help manufacturers evaluate the impact of their products. In the past 5 years, 60 EPDs have been published in Australasia. Notable EPDs published in 2019 include steel, wool, solid and laminated wood products as well as paper towels and napkins.

A circular year ahead

Our vision is that 2020 will be the year of a truly circular economy. This will require looking beyond recycling to “upcycling”, turning the materials of one product into something more valuable and ensuring that we can reuse the resource without loss of quality. This all starts with product design and the cradle-to-cradle concept.

We’ll be talking more about these topics in our regular series on sustainability in 2020.

www.thinkstep-anz.com

[1][1] https://www.colmarbrunton.co.nz/latest-thinking/better-futures/

[2] https://www.sbc.org.nz/resources/reports/sbc-reports/in-good-company

[3] https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/govt-pledges-next-steps-plastic-waste

[4] https://www.fujixerox.co.nz/en/Sustainability/Product-Stewardship-Roadmap