I've always said that sustainability doesn't make sense as a niche because we all live on the same planet. We of course need those individuals and organisations that are trying to be more sustainable, but we also need mainstream society to follow their lead. What really matters is the total impact of all of us together. If we are going to make the world of business sustainable, then we need to take the best examples of sustainable business and scale them up. We need to make them the norm.
I sometimes feel a sense of tension about scaling sustainable businesses though. Too many businesses lose their integrity when they scale too far or too fast and forget their purpose. But as I’ve said before, we mustn’t let perfection be the enemy of good, so maybe there is a way to eat our cake and have it too.
This week I’m going to look at a few examples of businesses that have talked about scaling their positive impact in ways that I found interesting.
First stop, Zakros
Last year I had a brief chat with Will Rolf from Two Fields, who I’ve mentioned before as one of the best examples I’ve found of regenerative business. Since Two Fields is an olive oil producer that operates from literally two fields in Zakros, Greece, I wondered whether the model could scale to 200 fields or 2000 fields. Will’s response was that the best way to scale their impact was probably not to scale their own farm, but to inspire and teach other farmers how to practice regenerative agriculture. By doing so, and in encouraging those people to pass on their knowledge further, there was in effect no limit to how far they could scale their impact. They could scale regenerative agriculture while staying small and avoiding the challenges of trying to become an international olive oil conglomerate. He didn’t quite put it like that, but that’s what I took away from our conversation.
What I really love about this approach is that it separates ego from impact and demonstrates a confidence to encourage what might be seen as competitors to enter the same market space.
In some ways this is what we’ve been trying to do at Wholegrain Digital, by staying small while promoting more sustainable approaches to business and digital, encouraging others to learn from us and follow our lead. It seems to be working and I’m humbled that many people even get in touch to tell me how our business has helped inspire their own. I would be lying though if I tried to pretend that it doesn’t sometimes scare me to see other digital agencies entering the sustainability space. But I guess I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t feel at least a little bit of that inner conflict.
Next stop, the grocery market
Last week, Vineeta went to order some groceries from Dizzie and found that they are closing down their zero waste online store. I had featured Dizzie in a post only a couple of months ago, as a shining example of innovation in sustainable business. To hear that they were closing down was really disappointing.
However, when I read their article explaining their decision, I was intrigued. Dizzie as a business is not actually closing down. What’s actually happened is that the founders had to make a tough decision about the best way to scale their impact in line with their mission to make zero waste grocery shopping mainstream. They concluded that while their own online store had been a fantastic platform for testing and developing the model, they were not realistically able to scale enough to compete with major grocery retailers. On the other hand, they had proven the concept and developed relationships with larger retailers who were struggling to deliver what many of their customers want, which is less packaging waste. They had the opportunity to partner with these larger retailers and reach a far wider audience.
They made the incredibly difficult decision to close their online store that they had put so much love into, and instead go behind the scenes with other retailers to scale their impact. Once again, this decision likely required them to put impact before ego.
I have no idea how successful this will be, and I am still disappointed that they’ve closed their store, but I’m rooting for them and hope that this bold decision pays off in achieving their mission.
And finally, a global masterplan
Tesla is a business that already operates at an incredible scale compared to businesses like Two Fields, Dizzie or Wholegrain Digital. Some might say that they have already succeeded in solving the scaling challenge. However, Tesla still only represents a small percentage of global vehicle sales and vehicles only make a small percentage of global energy consumption.
Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy and that transition is not happening fast enough. At their recent investor day, Tesla made the unusual move of not just showcasing progress on their own technologies and business operations, but presenting a plan for how the entire world can transition to renewable energy in roughly 20 years. Really this should have been presented by a government or NGO at a global climate summit like COP, but instead it was presented by a for-profit company at their investor day. Make what you will of that.
The Masterplan is not just a technical roadmap, but in some ways is Tesla pitching the business opportunity to other companies to invest in a renewable energy future. At the same time that they are scaling up their own business at a rapid pace, they are doing other people’s homework for them in the hope that they will start scaling in the same direction. It’s scaling squared.
The details of Masterplan Part 3 are pretty eye opening. I can't validate the details until they publish their upcoming whitepaper with their assumptions and calculations, but here are a few highlights:
80% of global energy currently comes from fossil fuels and two thirds is wasted.
We need 30TW of renewable power worldwide and this needs to be accompanied by 240TWh of energy storage.
This transition will cost up to $10 Trillion over 20 years, including all of the costs of mining, refining, manufacturing, and building recycling infrastructure.
$10 Trillion is 0.5% of the global economy, which is less than is spent on war.
It would require less than 0.2% of the land area of Earth and require less mining than the fossil fuel economy.
It includes transitioning all grid power, vehicles, heat for buildings, high temperature industrial processes, as well as global shipping and aviation to renewable electrical power or green hydrogen.
They went on to highlight how the pace of scaling the various technologies is feasible and that even though $10 Trillion sounds like a lot of money, it’s $4 trillion less than the projected investment in fossil fuels over the next 20 years.
Elon Musk concluded by saying that this presentation is not aimed at people who have invested in Tesla as a company, but anyone who is an investor in Earth. He said:
What we are trying to convey is a message of hope and optimism, based on actual physics and real calculations, not on wishful thinking.
That sounds like exactly what we need.
I hope you’ve found this weeks edition of Oxymoron thought provoking. If you have, then please share this post and subscribe to future issues. And if you’ve got any interesting examples of how other companies are trying to scale more sustainable business models, drop a comment with their story down below.
Thanks Tom. Always enjoy your reflections. On this post, the examples are interesting ones, and of course we need to catalyse many such examples to enable a world that is really sustainable. And letting go of the ego and self-interest is at the core of the work.