{"id":1467,"date":"2013-06-17T14:22:00","date_gmt":"2013-06-17T14:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitaldots.info\/?p=1467"},"modified":"2024-01-25T14:23:04","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T14:23:04","slug":"the-economics-of-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitaldots.info\/?p=1467","title":{"rendered":"The Economics of Green"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"\" The weekly Verdigris blog by Laurel Brunner<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ideals are all well and good but at the end of the day businesses exist to make the money that keeps economies afloat. Carbon calculating and offsetting exist in order to enhance the business. As someone at Mondi\u2019s Green Event said earlier this spring, \u201cgreen is about being better\u201d and that extends to all interpretations about what better means, including more profitable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It makes sense. Businesses can only do well if the organisation is run efficiently. For huge companies such as Mondi this means reaching out to all areas of the business to make sure that things are working as they should. This is the underlying thinking in the concept of Natural Capital that was also discussed at the Mondi meeting. Natural Capital is a concept dreamt up by a group of bankers who wanted to \u201cembed specific aspects of environmental, social, and governance factors in their risk management, due diligence, loans, investments, and insurance activities\u201d. A bit of a gobful but basically the Natural Capital Declaration (NCD) is about recognising all aspects of a business, and somehow assigning a numeric value to what might otherwise be considered intangible assets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The NCD is managed by the United Nations so this is not mere marketing bark. For the graphic arts industry and probably most other sectors it seems miles away from the realities of daily life and business. But for companies such as Mondi, which has huge amounts of capital tied up in trees Natural Capital is a valuable asset descriptor. More importantly Natural Capital assets can generate other assets that might fall within the purview of the NCD. For instance, Mondi\u2019s efforts in South Africa to apply \u201clandscape level thinking\u201d to local ecosystems. The result is massive improvement to wetlands that has also helped improve the quality of harvested forests through holistic landscape management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mondi has set aside 25% of its Russian and South African forests and is looking at other ways to use its Natural Capital to enhance its business. This is of course about money, because without money a business is little more than a house of cards. But the alignment of commercial interests to social and environmental interests is what business is increasingly about. For a handful of companies in the graphic arts industry this is the reality. They are paving the way for new approaches to business and for new ways of thinking about environmental impact improvements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Laurel Brunner<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This blog is yours to use if you want, as long as you fully credit the Verdigris supporters who make it possible: Agfa Graphics (www.agfa.com<\/a>), Digital Dots (www.digitaldots.org<\/a>), drupa (www.drupa.com<\/a>), EFI (www.efi.com<\/a>), Fespa (www.fespa.com<\/a>), Heidelberg (www.uk.heidelberg.com<\/a>), HP (www.hp.com<\/a>), Kodak (www.kodak.com\/go\/sustainability<\/a>), Mondi (www.mondigroup.com\/products<\/a>), Pragati Offset (www.pragati.com<\/a>), Ricoh (www.ricoh.com<\/a>), Splash PR (www.splashpr.co.uk<\/a>), Unity Publishing (http:\/\/unity-publishing.co.uk<\/a>) and Xeikon (www.xeikon.com<\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The weekly Verdigris blog by Laurel Brunner Ideals are all well and good but at the end of the day businesses exist to make the money that keeps economies afloat. Carbon calculating and offsetting exist in order to enhance the business. As someone at Mondi\u2019s Green Event said earlier this spring, \u201cgreen is about being … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaldots.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaldots.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaldots.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaldots.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaldots.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/digitaldots.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1468,"href":"https:\/\/digitaldots.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions\/1468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaldots.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaldots.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaldots.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}