NZ businesses encouraged to join transformational sustainability program

New Zealand’s Sustainable Practice 360 program helps organisations make the transition to greener operations and has a new intake of businesses planned for October this year. The new cluster will include businesses from the Lakes District and Central Otago regions and the program will be delivered through Otago Polytechnic’s Centre for Sustainable Practice.

Developed by Dr Barry Law and Chris Pickrill of The Sustainability Company, the program provides a set of connected and customised tools that allow businesses to collect data, identify issues and find the best ways of doing things - with transformational results.

“The measure to manage approach allows people to assess exactly what they’re working with in their business, what they can change, how they can change it and where they can influence others to make changes,” said Dr Law. “The current global agenda is to establish better ways of conducting business through green growth thinking, leadership, sustainable practice and market opportunities. In this context we show business how to change their behaviour willingly and for good. We encourage businesses to take our survey at www.thesustainabilitycompany.co.nz to see just how they’re doing in this space - it’s quite revealing.”

Throughout the 12-month program of education and implementation, businesses learn to reduce their environmental footprint, establish higher levels of social responsibility and achieve greater economic efficiency.

Fluid Visual Communications Director Tim Buckley, whose marketing, communications and design business is part of the original Sustainability 360 cluster, says the program has “changed our business”.

“It’s enabled us to align what we stand for with how we work and who we deal with. By understanding and working through this process, we’ve grown and improved our business. It’s deeply affected what we do and how we do it. Networks have opened up for us, we have driven better relationships right through our supply and delivery chain and, as a result, we are now more efficient and more capable than before,” he said.

The first workshop of the Sustainable Practice 360 program is to take place in Queenstown on 19 October. It costs $4000 plus GST or $2000 plus GST with a subsidy from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise for qualifying businesses.

The program includes workshop participation for up to two staff members, up to five hours of one-on-one consultancy and a full set of customised tools for implementation.

Interested organisations are encouraged to take the free survey to see how their workplace shapes up.