 Hi everybody, I'm Yossi Sheffi talking to you from MIT and I'm gonna talk now for the next few minutes about my new book Balancing Grand Balancing Green went to embrace sustainability in business and when not to So the main point of the presentation are the following first of all That sustainability it's all about the supply chain. It's not about what a company is doing. It's about its entire supply chain My second point is why should the executive even if they don't believe that this is the challenge of our time Should think about sustainability and do something about it Talk just mentioned some of the relevant dimensions of sustainability talk about customers willingness to pay for sustainability and What are the main? Points that have to be accounted for when you talk about sustainability So first of all, let's talk about the supply chain First of all two third of the carbon emission of most company is in their upstream supply chain For some product most of the mission are in the use phase the downstream supply chain For example automobile emit a lot of carbon dioxide during the use phase So the idea that looking at the company Environmental impact just between the four world the company itself. It's actually misleading and some example is One example for example is Coca-Cola Coca-Cola is mostly concerned rightfully so about the use of water and they through a lot of effort were able to reduce the Number of liter of water used to make one liter of coke from about six liter of water per Coke to three liter of water per coke At the same time there are over 200 liters of water used to grow the sugar canes or used for the sugar in the In the Coca-Cola beverage. So unless you include the entire supply chain You really miss the point Another set of example is all the high-tech company Microsoft Cisco Apple who actually don't make anything They just design they market So they look very good on sustainability metrics But unless you include order supply or actually make the parts you're not getting the true picture as an example The center several years ago Look at the life cycle assessment of a banana the entire supply chain of a banana from the time it grows until the time It's a it's consumed and we chose banana because we thought it's kind of a simple product It has only one part and it comes with its own packaging. So it's kind of easy to think about it The study look at all the steps from the farms in Latin America through the warehouses through the shipping From from Latin America to the US to various parts of the US and this gives you an idea of How many kilogram of CO2 per box of banana are in each stage of the supply chain? Turns out it's it's not enough to talk about the United States It's also important where it is coming to because if the bananas are being consumed around the port of New Orleans, it's only 14 15 kilogram of CO2 per box of banana If on the other hand if it's the Northwest United States when there's a lot of transportation Then it's more than 20 CO2 Equivalence per box of of banana. And if you want to see the the main hotspot, you see transportation is a big deal In in growing the banana and the disposal after it leaves the Supermarket all the packaging everything that goes with it the pills all taken into account It's also a large part of the Of the carbon footprint now I started working on this book because there are many parts of the world when Especially in the developed developed world when many Companies will Will put up a lot of glossy brochures But executives don't really believe that they make sense to do anything And my point is that they may be right and we'll come back to this point They may be right that they shouldn't be overdoing sustainability But at the same time they should do some things for three basic reasons even if they're skeptics about Climate change about possible impact of their their initiative on the On the climate of the earth the first is eco efficiency many sustainability action actually reduce cost So there's no reason not to do it. The basic one is reduction in energy use Example the staple put the regulator on the engine of the truck to Regulate the speed and cut energy consumption Significantly also cut cost significantly. So there's no reason not to do it. The second reason is risk mitigation It doesn't matter if executive believe in climate change or not as long as the customer NGOs the media believe in it if They do something bad They may be attacked which leads to reduced sales and stock prices So companies should make sure that they do some minimums just not to be attacked by NGOs and the media for example famous examples Nike was boycotted several years ago Because there was a picture on the on the cover of Time magazine of a boy showing some soccer ball for 9 cents an hour or 12 cents an hour it enraged consumer in the In Europe and the United States there was a boycott it got the It reduces Nike sales since then Nike became a paragon of sustainability invested a lot in it The last reason to do it is hedging The world may change So some companies may want to get to know to understand the demand pattern Understand the technology know the supply just in case the market changes for example, Clorox is 8 billion dollar company Started the greenworks, which is a 40 million dollar business in Sustainable products as an experiment to understand the chemistry to understand the supplier to understand the market and so forth Now the question is as I said Companies should worry about being attacked and the question is who is at risk? So by and large consumer facing company are most at risk particularly those who deal with children The companies are Disney Mattel The brand is very important and they they are very vulnerable to attacks by NGO and Consumer group Warren Buffett says take 20 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to destroy Then there are companies that have no halo effect actually Amazon and Apple are not very sustainable But we love them. We love Amazon. We love it, but even though Amazon is one of the least sustainable companies out there the working working condition the warehouses are far from Ideal the packaging that they send with them with the product create a lot of Fresh basically, but we love Amazon. So Amazon has never been attacked similarly Apple Even though it doesn't make anything if you take into account all the Chinese suppliers who make iPhones and iPads and Computers and everything else if you take all this into account every is not a very sustainable company, but Apple is a company that people love. So it's not being attacked too badly and Then a company with deep tier supply chain simply they cannot get they cannot even know who is the tier 3 tier 4 tier 5 supplier So they don't know what is happening deep in the supply chain and they can be hurt because of this somebody Deep in the supply chain does something and the company will be attacked They also have no commercial relationship with the deep tier supplier their small volume with them and They cannot identify because the in many cases these are commodities who are being sold on world market by Brokers as an example if you remember the horse meat scandal in Europe when companies found out that they are selling actually Horse meat when when consumer thought they are buying beef and it was because there were seven tiers in the supply chain starting in Romania or eating Horse meat is perfectly fine, but somewhere between the between Romania and the stores over northern Europe somebody changed the label and We got to the scandal of So the so-called horse meat scandal Now just in terms of what is relevant for sustainability. It's not only carbon footprint It's all kind of other emission. It's waste. It's water use the use of dangerous material It's depletion of resources and of course there are social concerns I don't talk so much about social concerns in my book, but as a background they are there and it's in the supply chain in Every part of the supply chain. It's in the suppliers. It's in the use phase and the company's operation the suppliers in the use phase and Companies only decide what to focus on they do what's called material materiality assessments. This is an example of BSF in the German Chemical giant and You see on the two axis rating by BSF and rating by external stakeholder What is important and it's our company try to decide what to focus on Now the main issue That makes that gives company trouble is that many consumers say they're gonna pay for more sustainable product But in reality when they get to the supermarket shell, they don't pay more Give you an example of the story of Ford in 2014 2014 Ford by By a survey of global brand was the number one green brand in the world the most sustainable brand in the world They were making in investments of billions of dollars in developing Sustainable product developing green cars developing high-briefs developing electric cars and Let's look at Ford in 2018 in in 2018 Ford lobbyists to relax the mileage standards and in April 25 That's less than a month ago Ford made an announcement that it is eliminating most cars and focus only on SUVs and trucks now the only cars that is kept in its table are the Mustang which is certainly not the Low mileage car and the Ford focus Now SUV the problem with SUV is that the ride high and more wind resistance. They weigh more than sedans. So they eat up more gas than Use more energy than the sedan. What change? Why did Ford in four years move from being a Champion of green Somebody went completely the other way and focus on SUVs and trucks. Well, partly is cheap fuel partly because the customers clearly prefer SUVs and trucks So Ford cannot do cannot build Product that the customers will not buy so it all begin and ends with a consumer where they're what the consumer is willing to pay for By the way GM Fiat Chrysler are also changing their their product. They also announced that they are moving away from cars towards Trucks and SUVs Why consumer don't are not willing to pay some of them don't care and We talk about level of concern, you know people care most about What's called in me on me and around me? so they care more about stuff that they eat and you see all the movement to organic food and clean Clean consumption of food on me. There's some movement towards Towards having clean detergents and other Cosmetics and other stuff that people put on themselves in the careless What what what we call is around me about what what happens to the planet as an example? There's a Nordic eco label, it's one of the few labels that actually work All along the Nordic country in Northern Europe people actually believe in this label that is very very rigorous and rates product and gives them the Eco label if they meet a stringent set of requirement turns around for toilet paper Green Nordic label turning toilet paper can get 10 to 17 percent premium Paper towel can get no premium at all because people care less about it Some people think that green products are not comparable because they have to go to certain There's a certain constraint of them. They're just not as good and Some people think that other features cost convenience are more important and there's always risk of Switching people don't want to switch from one one product to another And then there's a question. How do people know that products are really green? Well, let's think about all of product attributes when you go and buy a product what it is that you look at So there's some Attributes that what we call search attributes. They're obvious tangible properties the color of the car. You see it before you buy There are some that we call experience attributes They can be verified but only after the purchase. So you look at the yogurt and you think it tastes good But it's actually you can verify it only when you bought it and tasted it There are some in what we call intrinsic credence attributes They can be verified after the purchase but only very specialized expertise very specialized equipment So for example, you can verify the emission of an automobile after you bought it but you have to take it to some specialized lab and There are things that we call hidden credence hidden credence attributes that cannot be verified by the consumer at all Because they're not in the product where there's some supply use child labor or polluted local rivers You'll never know This is a version of what's called the Akerlof effect Akerlof George Akerlof was a An economist who actually won the Nobel Prize for this for a version of this work Tried to look at markets and he looked at the market of what's called lemon cars So what happened when consumer for use cars cannot distinguish between good cars and bed cars Then cars are called lemon cars What happened when consumer cannot tell the difference? So if they cannot tell the difference, they're not gonna pay extra for good cars Even if the seller will argue that the car is good because every seller will argue that the cars that his card It is saying is good or her card that she's saying is good So they will only pay in the long term for the average quality They're never gonna pay more for something that the seller argue is a is a very good car The result of this that sellers of high quality cars will leave the market And the average quality over time will go down and the market is damaged There is how this is exactly what happened with corporate social responsibility if consumers cannot judge and Buy-in-large consumer cannot judge The product if the product is really sustainable if the process of making the product is really sustainable They will not pay more for responsible product or green product. It only makes sense So what companies try to do they put all kind of labels on the product and that as many labels as one can imagine Last count there were close to 500 labels. Some of them are very In the hard to get and some of them are almost sent us $15 and we'll send you a label So even with labor, it's very hard to determine What makes sense and what doesn't make sense? There are some labels that work basically labels that work are they binary and done by By some trusted third party like the energy stars done by the government I mentioned before the Nordic eco label the rainforest alarms These are just they put on the product to say the plug is good or not good And usually they scan and product that are in the top third of their of the rating are getting the label on the top half are getting the label There are some numeric products that are that also work They're almost always by government and they never talk in terms of kilogram or CO2. They talk in terms of money spent so they talk in the Relate the information in terms that are directly Applicable to the consumer. So on the automobile Label you see that you can save $1850 over five years compared to average new vehicles Of that type. So by and large what do companies do in general? companies do not Go overboard For example Walmart and most other companies a Sustainable product must pass the standard hurdle rate, which means it has to be economical. Then the company will do it a Few companies use lower hurdle rate for sustainability products So if they need 10% rate of return for for a product to go forward, they may be used 8% for a product That's also green Very few companies Will do it regardless of cost companies like Patagonia save the generation Dr. Bronner Those are companies that committed to sustainability by and large. They are small and privately owned Sevens generation was just born by Unilever, but Patagonia is privately on Dr. Bronner is privately on they sell to the Patagonia products are more expensive They are always green and they sell to people who care for it and are willing to pay for it but these are very relatively to the size of the market Tiny companies who sell to tiny sliver of the consumer Finally, let me give you an example of the main problem with Green with companies going going green Let's look at Alberta, Canada. They are one of the western provinces of Canada. This is what Alberta Wants you to see in their tourism brochure. It's actually a beautiful place some of it however look like this they look this is a surface mine of so-called oil sense it's a Bed process it burns huge quality of gas to generate steam the steam is injected in the ground to mobilize The bitumen deposits that come out from which you can make oil It's 10 to 30 percent higher carbon footprint and other energy sources. It use a lot of water per barrel of oil Environmental Defense Canada calling the most destructive project on earth well in 2010 forest ethic, which is an NGO non-governmental organization Committed to just an ability as the name suggests force ethic Publish a list of companies using companies that use trucking companies That they decide use Alberta oil companies gap and Levi's and FedEx and Timberland The Alberta government was not in use and they made a point to To tell the market that the industry provide 30% of the province GDP and then the number one employer Of indigenous people in addition it has huge revenue that the Alberta government depends on and the industry is not as dirty It's only a little over 1% of the forest over of our beta. That's actually Be mined most of the water is recycled and Permissions are down and they also plant a lot of cities but the the Canadian people were a little less measured in the response and A reader on one of the papers said we invite leave us trash the gap and they affiliates As well as any other American company currently marketing the product in Canada That does not want to accept our dirty money to no longer do business of Canadian oil Don't let the door hit you behind on the way out They started actually a counter boycott of the company that the NGO was Trying to boycott the company actually acquiesced immediately For example leave a straw spoke when say we do not take position opposing or supporting any fuel or energy source from any country or geography The point is the following a lot of people use slogans slogans like the issue is a planet versus profit or People versus planet or people versus profit None of this makes sense the problem with going green is that it's really People versus people It's people who want a clean environment and they're right and People who want jobs and affordable stuff and they're also right and Until this group of people will stop vilifying each other and start talking to each other It's hard to imagine that there'll be a Solution because we need the people who talking about the job and affordable stuff to be willing to pay more For clean environment and for people who argue for clean environment to understand that we need to to secure jobs and affordable stuff Anyway, let me stop here You can read a lot more about it in my new book balancing green went to embrace sustainability in business And we're not to it has hundreds of examples from companies what they're doing what they're not doing and all dozen and dozen of case studies and I hope you'll enjoy reading it. So with this, let me turn to Chris. Yes, take your questions All right, so everyone we are using Slido and The password is green. So it's hashtag g r e n and he needs that to respond to polls So we'll have out but the main thing we want you to use it for is to ask questions Because I know everyone you probably have a lot of questions and everyone doesn't agree with everything that you see says So now's your chance to interact and we'll answer as many of these as we can So again, go to Slido comm and then it's greens hashtag g r e n There's a poll up there But you can always switch over to ask a question and I'll start by asking some that have come in and then I wanted to ask so you didn't Millennials are different and so a lot of millennials now There's a lot of talk that people are in their 20s early 20s are much more a green Conscious and that they will change things and they will change the buying patterns here. What do you think about that? yes, this is one of the questions that I get every time I Give the presentation and if you recall the third reasons for companies to do something is hedging It's the idea that the market will change and they're looking exactly at this phenomenon that Millennials or young people are more attuned to sustainable concern than older people. I take it with a grain of salt to to use a well-known American saying is that the Young people are always more Democrat older people are more Republican as people grow and get more More income they tend to change their preference. It may or may not happen I don't know if it will happen But there's a chance it will happen and that's why companies should hedge and should try on the margin to make sure that if the market Changes they are ready to do it and it's one of the things I argue in my In my book for I don't know if it will happen. Some argue it will some argue it won't but why not get ready Okay, another question is you mentioned Patagonia and they're able to do it. So why can other companies follow what they've done? Why isn't that a blueprint or a green print for what other companies can do because Patagonia has a group of customers who are willing to pay more and As it turns out while In many cases people are saying they are willing to pay more when they come to the supermarket shelf or to the E-commerce site. They are not willing to pay more. They're actually shopping for the lowest cost item lowest price item. So Since some some companies can do it As I said the main reason that Patagonia a few other companies are doing it is because they have a group of customers who are willing to pay more for that But this is Patagonia is a six seven hundred million dollar a year company you know Proction Gamble is what 50 billion dollar company. It's a Or or unilever or lots of Nike These are mammoth companies who are selling to the masses and the masses Let me add to this one more thing When I said the masses are not willing to pay This is in the developed world in Europe in the United States the side effect that I always have in my talks Some somebody with European exit doesn't agree with me, but it's a in all my in all my talk I made the point. It's not only in Europe and the United States. There's a difference between say and pay Two-thirds of the world are really in the developing world and they simply can't afford it for them It's a luxury good because if it raises the cost it's less affordable and people live on two three four five dollars a day Just cannot afford it. So Let's take it with a grain of salt how much companies can do Okay, so you you're making the point that it isn't just the companies It isn't their responsibility to save the world or everything So are you arguing that it's the governments and are you arguing for more government action when it comes to this? Whether it's regulation or markets or whatever No Not surprisingly, I'm not argue for some Some but very limited. Why do I say limited? Because government cannot go too far ahead of what people think make make sense We always live in a regulated world. We you know, we pay taxes. We don't like to pay taxes We don't have to pay taxes so and people understand that in order to fund what the government is doing you have to pay taxes It's not clear that people agree with all the regulation of The deal with sustainability some do especially regulation that have to do with quality of food a Regulation that have to do with the outlawing a hazardous chemical because this goes to in me This goes to health. So people are Okay with it and even supported it when we start talking about regulation that impact that raise the cost in order for the planet not to be Hotter 50 years from now a hundred years from now It's not clear that the majority of people in fact it is clear From experiment the majority of people are not willing to pay for it I'm not willing to be regulated for it when government goes too far on regulation We get the we get a blowback. We get people who come to power who are populist coming from the other side of the Of the political spectrum. So of course some government can do it Government in China the government in Turkey can do it if they want autocratic governments can do it but that's a huge cost to pay in the loss of democracy for being able to do some Sustainability initiative. So what I'm trying to say the old thing is very very nuanced even cases like wouldn't Even cases like when companies try to take harsh actions. So for example after the After the building a The factory came down in Bangladesh and a thousand people were more than a thousand people got killed Some companies said, well, we're gonna leave Bangladesh. Well, first of all such harsh action I have to think about the consequences because you are leave Bangladesh your press release will look better We are not doing anything with Bangladesh But those women who work in the factory Bangladesh have no other job So you just throw them to the street basically So I was to think about all all of these green activities and sustainability in a very nuanced fashion All right So I want to remind everyone to go to slide out to entering questions If you want your question answered do it now don't wait for the last three minutes Which you guys typically do try to get them in now and I'll be able to answer them And so one more question for me and then we have some coming in from the audience first Who do you think's more sustainable Amazon or Walmart? I Think Walmart is more sustainable. I think Walmart is significantly more sustainable in fact first of all I don't think Amazon is sustainable because it's a Most of it first and foremost because of the packaging you get all the huge packaging at home small small part come in big packages with all the Nylons and all the other stuff around it. What do you do with all of this? You just throw it away. It just goes Goes to landfill One can argue whether the transportation Which is which in most cases people go to Walmart go to the store. It's not a special or mini case It's not a special trip. It's part of trip Back from work. They stop in the store. So it doesn't add too much to the transparent but even if the transportation is a wash the main thing is the Packaging that's not very extremely not sustainable with with e-commerce in general now I don't to talk about Amazon in particular in addition to this by the way Walmart had led many many sustainability initiative because of its scale. It was able to change the market one quick example a Concentrated the detergent was invented in Japan by the Keo corporation about 40 years ago Procter and Gamble Unilever many companies try several time to introduce it in Europe in the United States It was very hard because the package was small and competed with big packages They had the same cleaning power, but people bought the big package. It cost the same. So Consumer always bought the big thing. It also looks better on the on the shelf at one point. So Unilever tried to do it then Procter and Gamble tried to do it other companies wanted at one point Walmart said we're buying only Concentrated detergent and the entire market fleet and because of their size all the other retailer had to do it as well And there are many many examples like this when Walmart because of its size Change the market change the market in in a sustainable direction. Of course one should not Lose the fact that at the same time it reduces Walmart cost because you can get more packages on a truck You can get more packages on a shelf. So for Walmart whose Motor is everyday low price It was the perfect solution because it was a green solution that also reduces cost and they had many many such examples Yeah, so for the concentrated laundry, it wasn't that it was The product itself reduced the amount of water in it. So they weren't shipping as much as they use less space for packaging So save fuel and things like that. It just reduces the amount the amount of water in the package What about the next step for detergent cold water? And so changing most people wash their clothes in hot water But there are formulations where you can sell using this clothes water because I think the life cycle of detergent That's the big energy use. It's not a production distribution. It's the life So use of the life cycle the face It's one of the classic example with the use phase has the highest carbon footprint and companies are pushing many many companies are most companies who sell of cell detergent sell cold water detergent and They're called water tide and cold water every one of these over the detergent as a cold water version It does not get a large part of the market. It gets two three five percent of the market at most So that's another example. As I said before people are not willing to pay more for a Green product. They are also not willing to have less convenience or they feel or less quality and people feel it's less quality You don't get as clean detergent when it's right or wrong. I'm not even arguing the point but that that is the perception of of the market so the market is not willing to To sacrifice performance the market is not willing to sacrifice convenience So people still buy e-commerce a lot and the market is not willing to pay more by and large for Green product as long as these things don't change NGOs media in investor cannot accept companies to make substantial initiatives substantial investments in Green initiative they can do it on the margin of course, but not substantial initiative not substantial investments All right, so a question from Ignatio How can a company encourage their suppliers to go green and how can this be monitored effectively considering the multiple layers of supply chains? Yeah This is a good question and the answer is with difficulty. How can a company do it with difficulty? It's not easy to do it is easier to do for the first year companies are buying from from suppliers and they have in some sense It's easy you you you are buying from someone you can press the supplier Especially if it's a market that has many suppliers Yeah, you have a lot less leverage if there's only one or two good suppliers in the market but if in market when there are many suppliers you can press them and Get them to To institute Sustainable sustainability initiative the problem is when you start getting to Deep tier supplier deeper to your suppliers. First of all in many cases. You don't know who they are until something happens and Even if you know who they are you come to a company at the tier four in the supply chain They don't have any relationship with you and you say I want you to start Paying more per hours and stop using Overtime and stop polluting the local river. Let's say who are you to tell me this? I'm not selling you anything. I don't care what you tell me. So you have no leverage with them So even if you know who they are How can you so the answer is you cannot? Companies try to do it by pressing on the tier one to press on the tier two Hopefully to press on tier two to press on tier three But it's with very limited success. There are some schemes with a Of paying actually deep tier supplier to become to become more sustainable having industry consortia that pay deep tier supplier to become more sustainable give all kind of Elements that you you you buy these things you buy Like credit points from a supplier because they are most sustainable they get some more credit point that they can sell you some schemes like this have been developed in the develop in the palm oil supply chain they develop in the conflict minerals Area with Somewhat success not very far from a hundred percent success because it's fundamentally hard to do And so it's not just one thing is going to your deep tier suppliers for like their product quality because there was the baby milk Crisis and then some of the dog food mel known and down in China But you talked about credence attributes. Yeah, they're even harder because you cannot measure so you have to almost have something to So certified so you have so what do you have? the most successful scheme and our industry wide scheme rather than company right the industry bends together like the Electronic industry association and several others who are together develop guidelines or codes of conducts for For suppliers to use and then they pay for auditing the supplier to do something there are even problems with this because when you get the NGOs are always Against this big industry association because you go to the lowest common denominator when when you have industry so the The code of conduct is not that the demanding right and because it's it's the lowest common Lowest common denominator, but that's these are the things that kind of work And they can also have some of those unintended consequences like for the conflict minerals where we'll drive Valid companies from even looking at that area. They'll go totally to a different area It's exactly what exactly what I thought before about Bangladesh right that you have to look at this You have to look even in the Democratic Republic of Congo They are minds that are the deuce artists that are really good and hard-working and you don't want to drive them out of business So that's that's the difficulty So the question will will blockchain solve all this because blockchain is the technology distributed ledger That is immutable and it's being discussed for use in provenance or actually smart contracts things like this What do you think will this help solve the problem will this solve everything? the proponent of Blockchain of course say it will solve everything. I'm still waiting to see how you tie the physical product to the Information system because what is clear is that the information cannot change the information is immutable the informations flow flows through but By the at the same time when the information flows through sometimes can change the physical products Sometimes somebody can put the wrong label on it. Somebody can exchange it for something for something else So it still has to be monitored if it still has to be if the physical product has to be monitored Then I'm not sure that I see how it works the reason that it works with money because it's all digital So it works with digital product. I can see how it will work for Microsoft. So it will be harder to To fake window 10 it will be harder to but I don't see how to local physical product when the information in the product I'm not one of the same and they always have to be tied to each other. So you have to have something that will tag the The physical product in a way that cannot change and completely tied to the information Yeah, we're there's actually talk about using blockchain for the micro masters credentials because that's a perfect example Or you want to if you earn it you want to have people see it you can distribute to anyone and it's totally verifiable But the challenge is getting the data there The blockchain seems to assume that it's perfect once it enters and it never is it never is That's the issue. So yes, we can do it for because the the micro master transcript is basically an information product So Can be done for that. So we have a question from Giovanni and I'll read that in a second We also have a poll going where I'm asking you to say what do you think is the most sustainable company that you know of? Just to see what's out there will build a word cloud out of that, but Giovanni is wants to know He he's asking if he we can share a suggestion how to be more sustainable in everyday life Okay, this is a religious question. This is a religious question a Lot of people the the the slogan basically is think globally act locally. So if you are Buying green product if you are separating your trash if you are Not using e-commerce to buy All of these things are if you are Recycling your trash if you are minimizing the use of water use shower and not bath and all of these things are on the margin Helping you as a person Mostly honestly they help you feel good in terms of the impact on the On the climate unless you get you and your seven billion or eight billion friends to do the same It's very hard to imagine how you do it, but At the end of the day That's that's a start if most people will start acting more Sustainably then companies will have to respond But until the majority of people it's not even the majority the large number of people even 30 40 percent of Customers would be willing to pay more would be peeling not to do e-commerce would be willing to You know circulate the The trash then it will be a large impact when very far from there as of now So if I order Patagonia products from Amazon does that make me sustainable? That makes you that makes you average Seeing asked a question, what are the best measures or rankings of sustainability that consumers can depend upon ah A very good question And as I said before there are some government measures if you have if you buy I I don't know where where you live in the world in the United States when you buy any refrigerator or any any appliance there's a government rating of this appliance and you get certain star type of Designation if you are the top half of this Let's say washing machines in terms of energy consumption so You can rely on government labels usually you can rely there are some Third parties I gave example before of the Nordics one the but there's something the several NGOs that give labels based on very rigorous questionnaires and an audit But we've been many cases in the United States at least the companies were sued companies We were putting a green label on their product and being sued and had to pay millions of dollars because they were misleading consumers So companies have to be to be careful in terms of putting putting misleading product, but they still do So buyer beware the only thing they can say So when I lived in a town that I won't name We had the recycling green thing buckets you put stuff out for and then the garbage and it was a big scandal Because they found that the same trucks were collecting them and they were just putting them in the same thing and taking them to the dump Even though they were charging the city more for doing that So it's tricky to know. It's actually really happening, but I did feel good Maybe feel good though So Lucy asks as a millennial with a tight budget, how can I be sustainable if I cannot afford to buy these special products? Not easy being a millennial millennial It's not easy being a it's not easy to have your ideals and your budget. Not it's not in sync and I understand understand the question, but You can do the things that are not Very costly. So even if the product that you buy are not very Green product you the way you deal with a trash the way you use water Can be more sustainable on the margin But in order to move the market we need companies to make products to start making all the product in more sustainable fashion and for this You have to enlist, you know several billion friends to To agree to this and by the way I should say most likely It's not for the long term because once large companies will start Developing more sustainable product It is likely that the cost will go down Because there will be a learning care as with every new product will have to go over the hump over the first five Ten years that the companies are moving from less sustainable to more sustainable Product and then as most items are made in more sustainable ways There'll be a lot of learnings and the cost is likely to go to come down But we have to get over the hump, but to be fair if you go back 40 years I would say companies probably use less resources To produce things now than they did then whether it's economics driven or anything else Do you do you disagree with that? Do you think companies just naturally? I mean, there's less pollution There's less things things generally improve Over the last 20 30 years generally improve because of the following they improve in certain areas that have to do with health So things like the clean water clean air bill were very successful bills Because at the end of the day it was not about how things are being made It's about the impact on me as an individual. So there's a lot of support for this There's one example the Montreal The Montreal agreement that they dealt with the hole in the in the ozone layer the hole in the ozone layer It's a chlorophyll. Yes, but it was very easy to relatively easy to deal with because they were ready ready a Replacement products they were in the market was edited relatively easy to do there was a lot of movement to doing And George Schultz was heading the the secretary of state then of the United States was was heading it Decarbonizing the entire market is a much more complicated issue and much costlier issue So it's not happening at the same rate Suzanne has a question. Do you see any sectors taking on sustainability these days that have avoided it in the past? Any industry sectors or companies or it's not clear. I tell you why it's not clear because there are Everybody in every sector every industry every company is claiming to be sustainable is claiming to invest in sustainability it is very hard to Separate the talk from the walk so to say it's very hard for an MIT professor to come to a company and say You say that you reduce water consumption by 10% now over beer really tell me the truth Is this really happening or not? It's not clear that the you could get a straight answer on this especially once the company advertised that they're doing certain things so It's I it's very hard for me to To have data to answer. It's a good question, but it's very hard for me to answer Okay, I think this might be the last question from Dave see sustainability is subjective How can companies joined by a common supply chains harmonize their priorities of many issues that make up the word sustainability? One of you mainly focused on environmental. Yes sustainability. Yes environmental sustainability even environmental sustainability talk about the Carbon dioxide you talk about no exit talk about the water. You talk about the Pollution you talk about the you know air pollution talk about harmful chemicals You talk about a lot of things even within environmental sustainability and then of course there's the social side Which I mentioned in the book, but I don't I don't emphasize one of the main problems With sustainability is there is no clear metric which you put you put your finger on it Unlike sometimes companies publish at the same time both their financial Result for the quarter or for the year and their sustainability Report sometimes even in the same report the problem is that for money There's a very clear metric It's the dollar sign or the euro sign or the one sign. It's money For sustainability, there are so many dimensions and so many metric that we have not been able yet to develop One index I'll say this company is better than others People have tried there's a you know the industrial John industrial Jones Sustainability index and there's several other sustainability indices They try to put this together When you look into what they put into the into the index you'll get You'll be dispelled because it's not It's not comparable. It's really hard Hard to compare. How do you compare a company like I know that the BSA for companies heavy manufacturer was always complaining about the fact that they are that the result are compared to Apple or to Microsoft that doesn't manufacture anything relies only on on suppliers So it's it's very hard to compare across company. It's ongoing work and we all hope Together there are various metrics that are being developed, but We're very far from develop The number that we said this company is 75 and this company is 69 Well, we're very far from there yet All right, so I think that's gonna conclude our session any last words You want to say just yes the book is available on Amazon and available also in You know in version so hey if you want to argue with me and I answer email of people who read the book If you read the book and you have an argument, I will answer it All right So thank you very much and in the meanwhile if you want to be green then cheer on the Celtics as they as they're winning the NBA Championship hopefully. All right. Thanks guys. Take care