Johnson Matthey Plc, along with many similar companies and institutions, have found that sustainability can and should form the basis for their business of the future. These companies are setting aggressive targets for reducing the resources consumed in producing a unit of product, and finding these targets achievable when the whole workforce is engaged in addressing the issues.It starts with simple resource efficiency: turning items off when not in use, conserving energy and heat, and reducing waste to landfill. Then it moves into designing new products that perform just as well as (or indeed better than) the ones they replace, but need less resources to produce: production efficiency. Waste products from a particular process become the raw materials for another process. The near term target is not zero consumption, but experience shows us that it can be much nearer to zero than anyone contemplated (1).The pure business motivation for a sustainability effort is therefore cost control. Using less resource to make the same product saves money. But experience tells us that this is not the biggest benefit to a sustainability initiative. The biggest benefit is that sustainability has the potential to engage and motivate every employee, to harvest ideas and changing behaviours, and to give employees another reason to value their work for the company. Everyone agrees that this activity is helping the planet and is what the responsible company should be doing, and success makes employees proud of the company they work for.
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