Sustainability in business ??

Today, I listened to the lecture from our guess speaker, Michel L. Belland. It was very inspiring. First I have to say that before I came to the class, I’ve never had any thought about green, environmental protection or even sustainability in the business context. I thought that those tree hugging issues are very far from myself. However, this class completely change my perspective on these issues.

He talked and gave us a lot of explicit examples that I’ve never thought about. For example the way to imitate the structure of the nature creation can help designers to design something that is more sustain and create a huge profit back to the company. Or the way that nature works in non-linear fashion, it always work in cycle so as your business process that they should be created around the concept of circle or spiral. All of the samples are intriguing, if I haven’t heard these kinds of story from other places, I would not believe that these are true and practical.

In class, it also spark my creativity on producing new products. Since, my family business is in the textile industry. We are yarn manufacturer. The concept of entropy pattern and recycling material can be adapt with our new product in my different ways. Here are my ideas.

- Yarns that have controlled colors. Normally for the dyed yarn, customers always want to have a very steady or even fix colors. So any variation in color is considered a defect. If we can create a dyed yarn that have controlled variation in colors and we use natural dying stuff, we can sell it to more environmental concern customers. Or we can even create a pattern on the fabric using the variation in yarn’s color. This will create some effect similar to entropy design that Michel talked about.

- What can we do with used yarn or fabrics. Can we correct them and reproduce it back in to yarn? These questions may not be answered here but I think that it can lead to some research that my company needs to pay attention on it.

- Returning sample from customer is also a good idea because in my business, we need to send tons of catalogues to our customers. They are on the largest promotion cost for our company so if we can create some process that give opportunities for customers to send it back. This will help reduce a good chuck of cost.

These ideas are great but only problem that conjure up in my head is how to convince all the people in the company, especially upper management level to understand the benefit and the real return from being sustainability and environmental friendly. This question was asked by one of our classmate but I didn’t satisfy with the answer. I think that top down management will pay a very important role in implementing this kind of idea into the company and also that company needs to be in a very stable situation enough to think about something else other than survival of the company and how make money. Especially when the world’s economic goes down like this, I hardly see how to implement or create awareness in the company about environmental issue.