Friday 5 is Good Business’s take on the weeks’ most interesting sustainability stories. In last week’s edition we discussed Net Zero Now and L’Oréal’s new corporate partnership.

Together with corporate partner L’Oréal, NZN has just announced the launch of its Net Zero Salons Programme to guide salons through the process of calculating, tracking and reducing carbon emissions. According to NZN the average salon visit produces 3.1kg of greenhouse gas emissions – a figure they hope to reduce to just 2kg by helping salons transition to renewable energy, improve waste treatment and encourage employees to travel more sustainably, among other actions.

The Net Zero Salons Programme adds to NZN’s growing portfolio of sector-specific guidance available for SMEs wanting to take climate action, which includes resources for pubs and bars, restaurants, breweries, accountants and legal firms. We’ve stressed the importance of these kinds of resources before but can’t emphasise enough how imperative it is that SMEs – which account for 99% of businesses in the UK – be supported with a credible and robust path to a net zero future.

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A new site about Sustainability Accounting in Business is available with many education resources and links to webinars on this topic. The webinar, Sustainability Accounting Overview and Hands-On, is accredited for Certified Public Accounts in the USA to earn Continuing Professional Education credits. It is the only webinar with this credential on this topic. A free version of the webinar is available online to Members of this Forum:

With carbon reporting requirements expanding around the world, 2023 will see many businesses disclosing their emissions for the first time.

To report emissions, a business first needs to calculate them using carbon accounting, a process that involves mapping operations and purchases to their resulting greenhouse gas emissions.

To help businesses on their climate journeys, Normative has released a suite of new updates for the 2023 carbon reporting season, enabling businesses to more accurately account for and disclose their full greenhouse gas emissions. Read more here: https://bit.ly/3HNy4eV

? Learning opportunity for students in Africa!

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and African Leadership University have developed a one-hour lesson plan for educators to introduce young people to the circular economy?

Submission to the accompanying design challenge is due 28 Feb ? http://ggkp.org/ZNo

An incredibly sharp and frank analysis into the plastics crediting and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes, and the misleading binary narrative created by global polluters, like Coca Cola and Unilever.

As the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) convened for the first time in Uruguay in November 2022 to develop an 'international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution', among its key measures to address the plastics pollution were implementing EPR and creating international standards for plastic credits.

Both EPR and plastic credits are in essence similar mechanisms that deploy the principle of 'polluters pay', explains the author. The key difference would lie in their legal effect; EPR schemes usually involve national and regional governments as enforcers, whereas plastic credits - much like carbon credits - operate on a voluntary basis.

Despite the 'legally binding' principle of EPR, it turns out Coca-cola and Unilver, seemed to rail against the plastic credits and instead lend strong support for the EPR schemes. The author identifies the reason to this 'misleading' commitment in their intention to exploit the procedural challenges in creating government-led legislations, and how they can attempt to impose "maximum participation in the design and development of these programs". As a result, companies like the two have contributed to creating a false narrative that EPR and plastic credits are essentially competing, mutually exclusive measures; when in reality they need co-existing to complement each other.

Recommend a read if you have been craving a more deep-dive in the technical measures which are to be deployed as UNEP and its INC moves their legally binding plastics pollutions framework forward.

Interesting case of employing a renewable energy solution to treat a waste & food security issue.

In East Africa, small-scale farmers who make up most of their agribusiness are often faced with their fresh produce going to waste, due to the lack of electricity supply, cold storage facilities, and general post-harvest management support.

Tanzania has recently come up with an increasingly effective solution to this problem. The country has made visible progress in setting up refrigerating facilities, but powered by solar energy. While benefitting thousands of farmers and traders already, the article raises necessity of scaling financing, especially from the private sector into renewable energy projects to populate such a solution across the Sub-Saharan Africa.

Kind regards from the Guatemalan Cleaner Production Centre Foundation -CGP+L-.

In May 2018, the CGP+L launched the Environmental Performance Program with the aim of providing technical tools that contribute to improving the competitiveness and performance of companies and institutions in Guatemala, starting with the DDA (Environmental Performance Assessments) that facilitates technical forms to carry out self-assessments on different environmental issues.

It is important to mention that this initiative has the institutional support of the Guatemalan Chamber of Industry and the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources.

Since the beginning of the program, we have periodically shared data, analysis and trends, with the idea of providing feedback to the different sectors of the country and identifying progress and areas of opportunity.

On this occasion we are pleased to share the executive summary of the first report on the Environmental Performance Profile - Guatemala, presenting the information that has been generated in the first four years of activity, and in which you can learn in detail the behavior of the 35 aspects defined for this methodology. This publication is based on the analysis of 296 self-assessments of companies in Guatemala, carried out between May 2018 and August 2022.

With the following link you have access to the executive summary (Spanish and English) and the full report (Spanish), we invite you to review and share the information that has been generated:

https://bit.ly/ReportesPerfildeDesempenoAmbientalGuatemala

We take this opportunity to remind you that the DDA is freely accessible through www.desempenoambiental.net. By carrying out the self-assessment, in addition to identifying the points of progress and opportunities for improvement, as well as making a comparison of the result with the general trend, the level of compliance can be identified in order to obtain the Environmental Performance seal, which seeks contribute to the strengthening and environmental differentiation of companies and institutions.

We are available for any comment or doubt in this regard, we appreciate the usual attention and support and we hope that this publication will be a positive contribution.

An interesting take on the global plastic conundrum, focused on packaging - how can we make it more sustainable?

Thanks Carmen Alonso Herr!

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