The Green Journey

Last week, Khazanah had invited a number of local GLC’s to their workshop on “Corporate Sustainability: Moving towards low carbon growth”. This is a Silverbook workshop by them; the 6th one already in fact.

A quick background into what the Silverbook is; I am sure you can recognise what some of these are on:

Click for bigger picture

Two of the principles from the Silverbook states:

GLCs should proactively contribute to society in ways that create
value for their shareholders and other key stakeholders

GLCs should actively manage their contributions to society in the
most efficient and effective manner in line with industry norms
and best practices as well as the relevant regulatory framework

Broken down, and also coupled with our Prime Minister’s pledge to reduce our carbon emission intensity by 40%, this translates to the core area of environmental protection and policies. Therefore the topic of sustainability comes under this.

So what is sustainability?

Whilst the topic of sustainability is both wide and also evolving, I would like to attempt to define it for our use.

Definitions of sustainability often refer to the three pillars

Source, and more elaborative explanations, at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability

“Sustainability is the capacity to endure”

In our context, it means that given our lifestyle of:

• consumption (of food, fuel, manufacturing);
• waste (trash, inefficiencies/leakages);
• development (deforestation, mining (BP?), more cars on the roads);

we will eventually BOTH continue to harm the environment as well as deplete our limited resources.

An interesting note is that there is existing data indicating that Malaysia is already quickly becoming one of the bigger polluters per capita in the world. But what is more interesting is that, whilst China is also one of the highest polluters per capita, they have more programs and projects to mitigate these negative impacts than we do.

Sustainability advocates:

• smarter use of existing resources;
• improve upon efficient use of them;
• find alternative means (new technology, biofuels, low emission, alternative sources of energy, alternative means of transport, etc);
• limit the damage to these sources (toxins in natural water, poisons in soil, logging of our “lungs”, increasing amount of trash/landfill).

Already there are financial institutions that are looking into responsible investments into projects/schemes that go toward this philosophy.

At the government level, the Ministry for Energy, Green Technology and Water has already started looking into public policies that bring about environment-friendly initiatives; with the launch of Greentech : 1 Identity and the resulting working committees and task forces.

As an airline, with fuel being the biggest cost component (and thus all efforts have been invested in bringing this cost component as low as possible) the other areas we can focus efforts on are our utility use (water and electricity), to a large extent the non-airplane assets (ground vehicles), procedures (flight management, turn-around times, taxiing).

On a personal level, and either toward the (or any) company or toward our environment, we can also practise these similar philosophies. As you know, already there are supermarkets with their No Plastic Saturdays, some who charge for the use of plastic bags, shopping centres that have recycling bins to segregate waste. Not only will reducing waste and being efficient save you money, your children will see this as the normal learned lifestyle that will only become their natural habit as adults later on in life.

Even if you don’t subscribe to climate change or sustainability, you have to agree with what you have read about limited resources- even in our own backyard: That even for Malaysia, we will become a net oil importer in the not too distant future.