As corporations go green, SMEs could hold lessons

It has nev­er been more impor­tant for com­pa­nies to show a pos­i­tive envi­ron­men­tal impact. But when a busi­ness tries to clean up its act, it can often meet with con­tro­ver­sy, open­ing itself to accu­sa­tions of ‘green­wash­ing’.  

Green­wash­ing is the prac­tice of mak­ing an organ­i­sa­tion seem more envi­ron­men­tal­ly respon­si­ble than it is. For exam­ple, Nestlé Waters Cana­da was crit­i­cised for a 2008 ad which claimed that “bot­tled water is the most envi­ron­men­tal­ly respon­si­ble con­sumer prod­uct in the world”. And in 2019, ener­gy giant BP ran an ad cam­paign cen­tred on its low-ener­gy prod­ucts, when 96% of its annu­al spend was still on oil and gas; the ad was with­drawn.

Green­wash­ing is a par­tic­u­lar con­cern at big cor­po­ra­tions, as is ‘blue­wash­ing’, the prac­tice of mak­ing an organ­i­sa­tion seem more social­ly respon­si­ble than it is. How­ev­er, it seems to hap­pen less at small and medi­um-sized enter­pris­es. They often have a clos­er con­nec­tion to the areas in which they oper­ate, help­ing them run more effec­tive envi­ron­men­tal and social­ly sus­tain­able ini­tia­tives. What lessons might SMEs have for larg­er oper­a­tions?

Passion into action

Fin­is­terre has pro­duced eth­i­cal out­door cloth­ing since its incep­tion in 2003. The com­pa­ny has a rep­utable sup­ply chain and uses inno­v­a­tive sus­tain­able fab­rics and nat­ur­al fibres, along with leave-no-trace pack­ag­ing. 

“Today, every brand has a ‘con­scious range’,” says Lawrence Stafford, com­mu­ni­ty brand man­ag­er at Fin­is­terre. “And while leg­is­la­tion is get­ting bet­ter at deal­ing with green and blue­wash­ing, we’ve nev­er had to change our busi­ness mod­el to a sus­tain­able one, as we’ve been like that since the begin­ning.”

In recent years the St Agnes-based com­pa­ny has fur­ther evolved. It’s moved beyond sim­ply guar­an­tee­ing the eth­i­cal prove­nance of its prod­uct lines and instead focus­es on what Stafford refers to as “action, inspi­ra­tion and access”. This means deliv­er­ing con­crete envi­ron­men­tal change and encour­ag­ing oth­ers to do the same, build­ing on its exist­ing con­nec­tion to grass­roots ini­tia­tives.

These efforts include fund­ing and ampli­fy­ing the work of Project Sea­grass, a marine habi­tat restora­tion pro­gramme in Scot­land, and City Kids Surf­ing, a char­i­ty that intro­duces inner city chil­dren to the ocean. Fin­is­terre also set up an online ocean activist train­ing camp called Sea7 dur­ing lock­down with the envi­ron­men­tal char­i­ty Surfers Against Sewage.

“Those rela­tion­ships with the grass­roots were always there but what we’re doing now is putting in place some­thing that has a real tan­gi­ble impact,” says Stafford. 

In 2021, the brand launched the Fin­is­terre Foun­da­tion, a com­mu­ni­ty inter­est com­pa­ny, cen­tred on improv­ing access to the sea. “In the UK, you’re nev­er more than 70 miles from the coast, yet to so many peo­ple it’s such an unknown. Even in Corn­wall, you have kids who live three miles from the beach who’ve nev­er been there,” says Stafford.

The foun­da­tion aims not just to enrich people’s lives through surf­ing, sea swim­ming or sim­ply being on the beach, but also to fos­ter a deep con­nec­tion to coastal envi­ron­ments, with the goal of nur­tur­ing future marine stew­ards. “If you don’t have a rela­tion­ship with the ocean, why would you care about pro­tect­ing it?” Stafford says.

Link ethics to business goals

When Bris­tol-based brew­ery Wiper and True launched in 2012, the com­pa­ny didn’t have cli­mate objec­tives at its core. How­ev­er, it always had employ­ees who want­ed to min­imise their impact, includ­ing two direc­tors who’d pre­vi­ous­ly worked at the renew­ables firm Good Ener­gy. But it wasn’t until 2019, when they cre­at­ed the first sus­tain­abil­i­ty man­ag­er posi­tion, that envi­ron­men­tal ini­tia­tives became embed­ded in the busi­ness.

Sus­tain­abil­i­ty man­ag­er Joseph Watts pre­vi­ous­ly worked in pack­ag­ing and oper­a­tions at the brand. At first, he found the role daunt­ing and didn’t know where to begin. He realised he need­ed to define it for him­self. “Am I deter­mined to get to net zero, or more holis­tic in terms of think­ing about peo­ple, cul­ture and finance?” 

Watts did a course at the Cam­bridge Insti­tute for Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Lead­er­ship to help stream­line his think­ing. “It was inspi­ra­tional. They throw so many stats at you which make you con­cerned about where the world is head­ing. It drove an uncom­pro­mis­ing pas­sion in me to do this well and find a path through the com­plex­i­ty of it,” he says. 

Watts began look­ing for ways to tie the finan­cial and envi­ron­men­tal objec­tives of the busi­ness togeth­er. Brew­ing beer is incred­i­bly ener­gy-inten­sive, so when the com­pa­ny moved to a new brew­ery site, he encour­aged it to install solar pan­els on the roof, mean­ing as much elec­tric­i­ty as pos­si­ble was gen­er­at­ed on-site. 

He also col­lab­o­rat­ed with a waste start-up called Wase to turn Wiper and True’s brew­ery waste into bio­methane as an addi­tion­al ener­gy source. “It will help make us finan­cial­ly sus­tain­able and resilient to the gas price spikes as we’re see­ing now,” he says.

Brew­ing gen­er­ates a lot of car­bon diox­ide, which the com­pa­ny was releas­ing into the atmos­phere. Watts acquired a small-scale car­bon cap­ture recov­ery unit from Den­mark, one of very few in the world, so Wiper and True can cap­ture the gas and reuse it to car­bon­ate beer or even sell it to oth­er com­pa­nies. This is some­thing large brew­eries already do, fur­ther­ing the busi­ness case for these cli­mate ini­tia­tives through direct finan­cial ben­e­fits.

Watts says it isn’t hard to con­vince his col­leagues on such ini­tia­tives, espe­cial­ly the new­er mem­bers of staff, many of whom were attract­ed to the com­pa­ny for its bold sus­tain­abil­i­ty ambi­tion. “They help dri­ve things and make sure we’re not green­wash­ing,” he says. “They’ll pull us up if a pro­pos­al doesn’t stand up to scruti­ny. It’s a com­pa­ny-wide push, with every­one behind it.”

But even in a larg­er organ­i­sa­tion, Watts believes that prov­ing a direct finan­cial ben­e­fit is the best way to embed sus­tain­able prac­tices. “Even the CEOs who don’t care that much about [their envi­ron­men­tal impact] are going to lis­ten to that,” he says.

Share knowledge and collaborate

Dur­ing COP26, Watts set up the Brew­ers’ Cli­mate Forum to share envi­ron­men­tal learn­ing across the indus­try. All the brew­eries in Bris­tol got involved, includ­ing big play­ers like Bath Ales. “Start­ing com­mu­ni­ties of dif­fer­ent peo­ple is real­ly impor­tant as we’re only going to solve these things togeth­er,” he says. “Peo­ple had vary­ing lev­els of resource of course but there was a real appetite for change and enthu­si­asm for col­lab­o­ra­tion.”

Kari­na O’Gorman is head of force for good at Inno­cent Drinks, which has tran­si­tioned from an SME to a larg­er cor­po­ra­tion of 900 employ­ees. She says col­lab­o­ra­tion has always been key in cli­mate ini­tia­tives with­in the busi­ness. “It’s not pos­si­ble to do it all alone,” she says. “You have to look to work with NGOs, envi­ron­men­tal spe­cial­ists, your indus­try or wider busi­ness net­works to learn and col­lab­o­rate to achieve greater change.”

O’Gorman believes brands can play an impor­tant role, help­ing trans­late these com­plex issues in engag­ing ways for con­sumers. 

Stafford thinks it’s their respon­si­bil­i­ty to do so. “We don’t have time to soft­ly lean into these things any­more. There’s an urgency now from the busi­ness to put our­selves out there.”

For exam­ple, they can help ampli­fy the voic­es of sci­en­tif­ic experts and ocean experts who have been cam­paign­ing on these issues for decades. “You only real­ly tune into an NGO or organ­i­sa­tion like Green­peace if you’re that way inclined already, but brands have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to engage their audi­ences with these issues. That’s why we’re step­ping up to the plate.”

So are SMEs more effec­tive at run­ning mean­ing­ful cli­mate ini­tia­tives than larg­er com­pa­nies? “Small­er chal­lenger brands can often have a new per­spec­tive on sus­tain­abil­i­ty-cre­at­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties that can help dri­ve cli­mate action in new direc­tions; they can be more inno­v­a­tive and agile,” says O’Gorman.

How­ev­er, she notes that large organ­i­sa­tions have more sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing pots for cli­mate ini­tia­tives and greater lever­age in the sup­ply chain due to their scale. “All busi­ness­es have a role to play in cli­mate action.”