Collaboration is key to climbing Mount Sustainability!

“There are a million business decisions made each day in Canada, but only a tiny percentage take the environment into consideration,” says Frances Edmonds, Director of Environmental Programs at Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Co. “We need to do business differently.”
Doing business differently is at the heart of the Living Planet @ Work  program, an initiative spearheaded by HP Canada and WWF. An integral part of the initiative is the Change the Equation  contest that draws in fourth year Business and Environment students at the University of Waterloo. And it seems to be working.
Sustainability reporting is at its foundation.
“I’m a big believer in sustainability reporting being a key component of the journey up mount sustainability,” says Frances. “In business, what gets measured gets done. For the average business the only metrics used to determine success are financial. We’ve had a couple hundred years of getting financial reporting right, but we’re in a “baby steps” stage in terms of establishing sustainability metrics and bringing them together in a comprehensive way.”
Most businesses, says Frances, are “flying blind” when it comes to the impact they have on the environment. And they usually don’t have budgets for in-house professionals committed to asking the big questions — and the thousands of little questions — that help a company reduce their environmental impact.
“We started off by saying, well okay… big businesses have sustainability professionals like myself, but small businesses do not — and Canada is a land of small and medium businesses. So what can we do to help them?” explains Frances.
Enter the University of Waterloo, and fourth year students like Danielle Ruggles who are part of a group called ecoEngage, using the skills from the Environment and Business program to provide knowledge and time to companies who want to create a sustainability report for their business, but lack the time and expertise to do so.

Frances calls it a “a win-win-win.” Students like 22-year old Danielle have the opportunity to put their studies into action in the Canadian business world. Businesses are able to take that essential first step of determining their environmental impact so they can begin to make necessary changes. And of course, the environment is the real winner when those changes start to be made.
“It was really a great, positive experience,” says Danielle. “It gave me an opportunity to showcase everything I’ve learned in the past few years in my program.  It was almost a way to test myself.”
Dr. Goretty Dias is a professor in the Environment and Business program at the University of Waterloo. She supervised the ecoEngage students. “Small and medium-sized enterprises in Canada collectively have a very big impact, but very few resources,” she says. “To integrate business and the environment makes so much sense, and with this program we are taking the human resources right to the business, and showing how it makes sense financially, environmentally and socially.”
Students had to regularly think about the potential for “green-washing,” adds Danielle, or not making environmental steps forward seem even larger than they actually are, in order to enhance a company’s image. “It was about how to take this piece of information and say it in a way that is honest, and not presenting it in a way that is exaggerated, especially for the companies who will use these reports on their website. We learned that we can say things in a good way, but still show that we have plans for future improvement,” says Danielle.
Danielle was part of a group of four students working with three Canadian companies in the Change the Equation competition. Their work term lasted eight months.
For the businesses, it was actually a contest, with their sustainability report being judged by Professor Matten – the HP chair in Corporate Social Responsibility at the Schulich School of business at York University.

“The rules are on the Living Planet@ Work  website,” says Frances. “It’s pretty basic. The report needs to be a company’s first, and they can set goals as big or small as they like. We want them to put their first toe in the water. The whole idea of this program is to start the journey. You have to know where you are starting from to go anywhere.”
And it’s not a journey the companies — or their volunteer students — have to take alone. Danielle and her fellow students had WWF to count on as they worked through the process of creating the sustainability reports.
“It took the “scary” factor out for us and for the company,” says Danielle. “Having such a big name as WWF behind us and having them accessible for little questions and for reading over the report when we were done, was huge,” she says. “It’s great for us, and it was great for the companies we were helping.”
How does your company collaborate with organizations on sustainability? We’d love to hear more. Sign up to Living Planet @ Work and share your story with us!
If your company is located in southern Ontario and looking for student support to help you write your sustainability report, e-mail Adrienne Lo at [email protected].