Stepping up to the sustainability challenge

By Katherine Horsham

King’s was one of the first universities to declare a Climate Emergency in 2019. Here at the Entrepreneurship Institute, we have pledged to support the university’s commitment to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We’re building sustainability into our model for venture development by piloting a new Expert in Residence – ‘XiR’ – focused on sustainability for start-ups. We also plan to use our influence with our partners – be they a student society, another university or business – to co-create in ways that reduce our environmental impact.

We can all do more personally and collectively, but big brands that encourage consumption have more to do than most. Curious to discover what good work is happening in this space, Start! took a look at what some wellknown brands are doing to step up and act in the fight against climate change.

‘In 2016, Gucci unveiled its ‘culture of purpose’ strategy under the title Gucci Equilibrium. Commitments include guaranteeing 95% traceability of raw materials and being 100% powered by renewable energy by the end of 2020. ’

Gucci

In 2016, Gucci unveiled its ‘culture of purpose’ strategy under the title Gucci Equilibrium. Commitments include guaranteeing 95% traceability of raw materials and being 100% powered by renewable energy by the end of 2020.

As part of this series of pledges, Gucci also shifted to using Environmental Profit & Loss accounting – an approach which measures greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, water consumption, land use and waste production along the entire supply chain, and then calculates the approximate cost to society. This means Gucci can look to reduce the cost of its environmental impact, and track progress against targets.

The Kering group, which owns Gucci, has also created an app called My EP&L that allows customers to do the same on a product by product basis and make more informed choices. This is quite a bold move, as it may prompt customers to question whether or not they should purchase an item at all.

More recently in May 2020, Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s creative director, announced that the brand will be dropping from five to two shows a year. Announcing the decision on Instagram, Michele said: “We understood that we went too far. We burned the house that we lived in.” As Gucci is such a high-profile fashion house, it is likely to prompt other fashion brands to take notice and reconsider their approach – hopefully leading to reduced waste from runway to retail.

Adidas

At the end of 2019, Adidas launched a new 100% recyclable shoe – the Futurecraft.Loop – under the tagline ‘Made to be remade’. Fully recyclable and infinitely reusable, it’s made of a single material, thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), meaning that at the end of its (first) life, it can be ground up into pellets and reused. The shoe represents the brand’s first major move to shift the sports industry towards closedloop design and a circular production model.

As part of Adidas’s wider mission to ‘End Plastic Waste’ in its supply chain by 2030, it’s built a multidisciplinary team by joining forces with US-based environmental organisation Parley for the Oceans. Together, they created PrimeBlue, a high-performance material made of at least 40% of plastic fished out of the ocean. Eleven million shoes containing ocean plastic were sold in 2019 alone.

Adidas will next scale the use of recycled plastics across its products and make them all easily recyclable, and ultimately aims to switch to biodegradable materials. This is a great example of a brand picking a particular issue to focus on and really going for it!

IKEA

In 2018, IKEA announced some demanding goals for the business, such as its aim to cut 2.72 million tonnes of CO2 from a baseline of 3.4 million tonnes by 2030. This pledge forms part of its ambition to become a ‘People and Planet Positive business’, which it defines as an enterprise that gives more back to the environment and society than it takes in the course of running its operations.

Recognising that a consumer shift was also urgently needed, IKEA ran an innovative behaviour change project to better understand how it could help its customers to live more sustainably at home. Live Lagom ran from 2015-18 as a partnership with the environmental charity Hubbub UK and researchers at the Centre for Environment & Sustainability at the University of Surrey.

The project delivered more than 400 workshops on topics like fermenting, growing food and making homes more energy efficient. Having proved successful, Live Lagom is now a corporate programme in IKEA UK and Ireland.

‘11 million shoes containing ocean plastic were sold in 2019 alone.’

If you’d like to do more personally, we suggest starting off by understanding what your current environmental impact is, as change starts with awareness. WWF’s footprint calculator is a great free resource to get your baseline and uncover where you can start reducing your impact: footprint.wwf.org.uk