By Alison Waske
July 1, 2010
Becoming a sustainable business or organization can be a resource intensive process, but one that legitimately can achieve worthwhile results for your budget, the environment, and your stakeholders. You likely will not realize significant gains if your attempt to become more sustainable merely encompasses adding a recycling bin and asking employees to shut off their lights at night. Don’t get me wrong, those actions are definitely great first steps, but they will not result in the types of savings, financially and environmentally, that your business has the opportunity to capture by developing and implementing a serious sustainability program.
The good news about sustainability programs is that they come in all different sizes and shapes and can be tailored specifically to your business. There is no one size fits all. In addition, you do not have to transform your operations completely to become more sustainable. But there are some identifiable tasks that should be completed for every organization working to incorporate sustainability into its business structure.
Management Buy-In and Structure
Senior level management buy-in is imperative. The initiative may originate at the grassroots, but without management buy-in, necessary resources will not be allocated to the initiative. And although many sustainability initiatives do not require large capital expenditures, they do require human capital. Therefore, the first task is to educate and obtain approval from your primary decision makers and then to identify and formalize goals and a plan of action.
At Warner Norcross & Judd LLP, our Sustainability Manager provided the firm’s Management Committee with information identifying clients as well as competitors who were prioritizing sustainability. Once our Management Committee agreed to pursue sustainability, we made it a part of our firm’s culture and structure. We adopted “Putting Sustainability into Practice” as a firm motto and incorporated goals and deadlines for accomplishing specific sustainability tasks within our firm’s business plan. Next we sought help from a client who is an icon of sustainable business, Cascade Engineering. Quest Sustainable Solutions, a division of Cascade, provided some initial training on the general concept and benefits of sustainability for our employees. In addition, Quest worked with us to develop our firm’s first Sustainability Policy.
Team Up
At Warner, we have three independent, yet complimentary, teams practicing sustainability. First, we created our Sustainable Business Practices working group, which is a voluntary group open to all employees interested in helping the firm become more sustainable. A variety of employees is crucial to ensure that all areas of your business are adequately assessed. Our 35 member team consists of attorneys, directors, paralegals, and staff from all departments, including representatives from each of our six offices.
Second, Warner attorneys practicing in the areas of environmental law, economic incentives, real estate law, litigation, and corporate law teamed up to form our new Corporate Sustainability and Climate legal practice group. This group is externally focused. In today’s climate, businesses are facing many new legal issues related to sustainability—from energy use to construction, from raw material purchasing to transportation, and from product design to marketing. In addition to our legal services, our third team offers sustainable business consulting to our clients. This team helps clients identify the financial case for incorporating sustainability, and then helps put a sustainability plan into place.
Oftentimes your clients may inspire or require you to embrace sustainability. This is another opportunity for teamwork and a great way to build connections with, and learn from, your clients.
Measure and Assess
What you do not measure, you cannot manage. It is essential that you begin tracking and measuring metrics important to your business, which may include electricity, natural gas, product procurement, water, and waste. Without identifying your baseline, you will not be able to evaluate the success or failure of your sustainability initiatives. Carbon footprint evaluation, baseline sustainability assessments, and energy audits are a few different sustainability tools available to assist in this process.
At Warner, we commissioned The CarbonNeutral Company to complete a greenhouse gas assessment (carbon footprint) for our entire firm. To further understand the source of our carbon emissions, we hired Choose Renewables, another division of Cascade Engineering, to complete an Energy Impact Analysis. For these reports, we measured electricity, waste, employee commuting, business travel, third party deliverables, paper purchasing, and energy consumption by office electronics. As a result of these assessments, we identified key metrics that we continue to document and measure to ensure that our sustainability initiatives are working and are financially sound.
Start Easy
Most businesses will have one or two areas that are obvious starting points for improvement. The legal profession is very paper intensive, and so, our first intentional step into sustainability was implementing an extensive paper reduction and recycling program. For many businesses, this may be one of the easiest, cheapest, and most well understood initiatives and therefore a great first step. At Warner, we purchased and placed small recycling bins next to all printers and copiers and created a weekly recycling collection system for all employees. As a result, we’re recycling more than 25,000 gallons of office paper waste annually.
Next, we switched from zero-percent recycled content paper to FSC and Green Seal Certified 30 percent post-consumer recycled content copier and printer paper. Although the recycled paper costs about 20 cents more per ream, our conversion to several paperless practices offset the additional cost.
Finally, this year the firm is implementing an electronic filing system and transitioning to duplex printing to significantly reduce the amount of paper that is printed and used in the first place. In the future, we intend to take a close look at our document retention program, which should lessen the amount of paper that we store and the energy and cost associated with that storage.
Warner Norcross & Judd LLP is a full service law firm with offices in Grand Rapids, Holland, Lansing, Muskegon, Sterling Heights, and Southfield. For more information on Warner’s sustainability initiatives or business consulting, please contact our Sustainability Manager, Alison Waske, at 616.752.2462 or awaske@wnj.com.