Apparently George W. Bush stated that he is committed to fighting global warming, and to this end he has initially committed to sending 20,000 American troops to the sun.

Further, he has a plan to lower the earth’s temperature dramatically by switching from Fahrenheit to Celsius

And just the other day President Bush was heard to remark that global warming is happening much quicker than he thought, until his staff pulled him aside and told him it was spring.

You may be wondering why we chose to kick off this newsletter with a few jokes around climate change, which is actually quite a pressing and serious topic. Isn’t that just the way we human beings cope with a crisis? A few years ago, people’s perception of what a waste management company did was nothing more than a dustman running behind trucks.

Now, with increasing local and global focus on the environment, there is a much better understanding of what our business is all about.

Dare we say that those of us who work at EnviroServ, suddenly are in a sexy industry.

Increasingly, the environment is playing a key role in business today, along with other issues related to sustainability and stakeholder engagement.

In the book Beyond Reasonable Greed: Why a Sustainable Business is a Much Better Idea – a book our guest speaker, Clem Sunter, co-authored with Wayne Visser, the point is made that sustainability is not something over there …. It’s right here, right now. In fact, the new business landscape is sustainability and stakeholder engagement.

The authors cite the example of two Harvard professors, who compared the eleven-year records of large, established companies that gave stakeholders in the form of customers, employees and shareholders equal priorities with those companies that always put their shareholders first. It turned out that the more stakeholder-sensitive companies grew sales four times faster, created eight times as many jobs, improved the share price eightfold and experienced greater net income growth.

In other words, being sustainable is a sound business strategy – and reducing carbon footprint and mitigating climate change is at the heart of that strategy. It’s well-documented that current energy consumption is running up unsustainable ecological debts. Hurricane Katrina highlighted the urgency of the situation and was a potent reminder of our frailty in the face of climate change even in the world’s richest nation.

Climate recognises no borders. Beyond Reasonable Greed puts it very succinctly by pointing out that we live in a closed planetary system. Everything disperses, but nothing disappears. Apart from the sun’s energy, nothing comes in, nothing leaves.

In order to mitigate against climate change and establish a sustainable business model, we have to transform the way we produce and use energy. We have to place ecological imperatives at the heart of economics. And that is not as impossible as it might sound. As the latest UNDP Development Report points out, rising prosperity and climate security are not conflicting objectives.

EnviroServ’s Chloorkop Landfill Gas Recovery Project, among the first carbon credit projects to be signed in South Africa, is a case in point. Under the Kyoto Protocol, we are selling carbon credits or carbon emission reductions, as they’re sometimes called, equivalent to one million tons of extracted greenhouse gases over the next seven years through Japan Carbon Finance. The project will contribute to more sustainable landfill practices and reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the capture of methane gas currently emitted into the atmosphere. Initially, we were going to destroy the methane gas through flaring, but we have now identified a way to turn this gas into usable energy in the form of electricity.
It is innovative projects like this one that can help turn the tide of climate change and we need to turn the tide NOW. It is estimated that South Africa ranks 13th on the list of the world’s largest carbon emitters. That gives us a particular responsibility as we stand at the crossroads of climate change. We can choose the high road of committed action and climate security or the low road of inaction and climatic chaos.

EnviroServ Waste Management will take the worry out of waste management. We will assess your various waste streams, classify them according to the appropriate legislation for safe handling, transportation and disposal, explore alternatives to landfill, investigate options to beneficiate your waste, recycle, re-use and ultimately reduce the time, effort and money you spend on waste management.

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