The Path To Sustainability Runs Through Service

By Tom Paquin, IFS

Let’s start with the obvious: There’s a moral imperative for businesses to increase their sustainability. While individual waste and pollution certainly has a greater-than-zero effect on the health of our planet, businesses, by virtue of their scale, have an outsized effect on our ability to impact our environment, and while these organizations may not have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to be conscious of their waste, they certainly have a duty to humanity. And many firms have chosen sustainability as a practice for that reason, but in reality, there’s not just a moral imperative, but an economic imperative as well.

For our purposes, we’re going to focus on managing, and mitigating waste, and the catalyst for minimizing waste is the well-covered concept of the Circular Economy. For the uninitiated, the circular economy is the process of eliminating the linearity of delivery by rethinking supply chains, workflows, and delivery cycles.

This is obviously a multi-year process that requires significant investment and organizational restructuring, but at its heart, it is aided by rethinking the compact that you, the supplier of goods, makes with your customer. Specifically (and no surprise here!) I’m talking about service.