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🎣 The Catch Up

Hi there,

A bit late this week but here we go!

2 things this week:

1. Invites will go out for the first Pure Procurement Fireside Chat tomorrow. Throw your name in the ring by answering the survey below if you’d like to attend. It will be Friday, 10 am Eastern Time for 60-90 mins and is absolutely free. There are only 20 spots.

   Erin and I did a little Dry Run and I am EXCITED. We will be nerding out very deeply on Autonomous Sourcing. This isn’t an intro webinar… You’ve been warned!

2. I just finished my favorite book of the last decade. No joke. Tonight’s note is all about my key takeaways from Hannah Ritchie’s latest book: Not the End of the World. If you’re a procurement professional that has any interest whatsoever in sustainable procurement, you need to read/listen to this book.

   It gave me the clarity I’ve been looking for around sustainability.

That being said, enjoy this week’s note and have a great week.

Best,

Joël

🌙 Sunday Night Note

Sustainable development is exciting these days.

In 1987, the United Nations defined sustainable development as:

I like this definition for 2 reasons:

1) It acknowledges that it is unrealistic to believe that humans, at scale, will compromise their current livelihood for a better, blurry future.

2) By this definition, we’ve never been a sustainable species. We can’t “go back” to sustainability…

Once we get those two things out of the way, we can start having some productive conversations about sustainability: Nobody is going back to the stone age and besides, stone age practices are terribly wasteful.

If we are to be a sustainable species, we need to bring everyone into “the future”, and quickly.

So why do I say sustainable development is exciting these days?

Well, for the first time in human civilization, there is clear a path forward for us to become the first truly sustainable human generation.

And, as Procurement professionals, we are key actors in this process as the stewards of our organizations’ purses. We can have a definitive impact on reaching this objective by ‘voting with our wallets’. But to get there, we need to understand and act on the following 3 key points:

1/ “Common Knowledge” on Sustainability is Often Wrong

There’s so much pseudoscience and news headlines out there not based in data… As a consequence, our sustainability reflexes are terribly dull…

For example, most people believe recycling is the most impactful sustainable behavior they can adopt… In reality, it barely moves the needle on important indicators…

Here are a few other facts I was surprised to learn recently:

• While global green house gas emissions are still growing year-over-year (and need to be dealt with), we’ve past ‘peak’ emissions per person. While the global population is still growing, each new human produces marginally less GHG than the previous one. This means we will soon hit ‘peak’ GHG globally.

• While there are countries out there with growing deforestation rates (and this needs to be resolved), we passed ‘peak’ deforestation as a species decades ago. We currently have more ‘net forests’ globally year-over-year, every year.

• Eating local and/or organic food is much less important than what you eat as it relates to sustainability.

  • Transportation represents about 4% of the total GHG associated to the production and distribution of food.

  • Growing crops or livestock in places where it is inefficient to do (e.g. energy required), produces much more GHG than growing it where it is efficient to do so.

  • Generally speaking, the bigger an animal, the more unsustainable it is to farm for food.

• Oil palms (used to produce palm oil) are one of the most productive and efficient plants for producing vegetable oils (when compared to others).

If our organizations are setting sustainability objectives and taking decisions based on bad data, then we’re all missing tremendous opportunities to make an impact.

Take away: Act on good sustainability data!

2/ Sustainability is Lopsided

When you start looking at the data, you realize that for most environmental issues, a few culprits are responsible for large chunks of each problem and that most problems are related. Pareto definitely applies. This is incredibly encouraging because it means that with a few targeted actions, our organizations can have massive positive impacts on sustainability.

The other piece is that the biggest sustainability impacts you can make as an organization may have nothing to do with your main business model.

For example, one of the leading causes of deforestation is farming (3/4) when creating pastures to raise livestock and create crop farms. Energy (wood) is another big part. Therefore, the most impactful things we can do to tackle the deforestation issue are:

• Getting leading farming practices into the hands of inefficient farming nations (less land needed for the same amount of food).

• Moving away from big animals as our protein sources (they take up the most room but provide the lowest ‘nutritional return on investment.‘)

• Adopting high yield oil crops for our ‘go to’ oils (less land needed for the same amount of oil)

• Getting clean energy into the hands of wood burning nations (its more efficient in every way).

These 4 things can make deforestation a thing of the distant past and fairly quickly… We already have the solutions. It’s a deployment problem.

The same dynamic presents itself when looking at air pollution, climate change (temperature), biodiversity, ocean plastics, overfishing, etc.

Take away: It’s possible to identify just a few things you can do that will actually move the needle on the sustainability problems you care about, regardless of your business model.

3/ Many of Your Current Sustainability Efforts May Be for Nothing

With the 1000+ sustainability and ESG frameworks out there right now, it’s easy to drown in information, spread yourself too thin, or worse, focus all your efforts on something that will barely make a dent in environmental issues (e.g. replacing plastic straws with cardboard straws in your cafeteria…).

If you are haphazardly feeling your way around in the dark as it relates to corporate sustainability objectives, you need to know the problems aren’t as hopeless or complex as they seem. It’s possible to gain clarity quite quickly.

The best thing to do with your sustainability objectives might simply be to donate to the correct, impactful causes/organizations instead of trying to make your own supply chains more sustainable (e.g. a pure professional services firm).

In short, if your business model is not tied to any big environmental problem, don’t spend lots of resources on problems that are yours but aren’t the biggest problems… Funnel resources into solutions to known big problems.

In my Diamond in the Rough section this week, you’ll find my favorite book on Sustainability. It’s been one of the most influential reads of the last decade for me. I hope it proves useful to you as well.

💭 Quote of the Week

💎 Diamond in the Rough

Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World may just be the most influential book I’ve read this decade… Ritchie lays out the sustainability problem (and it’s solutions) so clearly…

It’s a dream for ‘A-Type personalities’ who were aching to run with the ball and just needed a direction.

To hell with Eco-anxiety. We got this.

📊 How Did I Do This Week?

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