Courtesy : gggi.org
Green entrepreneur
What is Green Entrepreneurship?
A business is the activity of buying and and to make a profit (i.e., having an income or
revenue that is greater than costs). All businesses must be financially viable. Without this basic pre-condition
they cannot sustain themselves, pay their staff, and continue to produce products or offer services to the
market.
Some businesses ONLY care about this. Or they may only care about their staff’s well-being or their
environmental impact where it affects their production, reputation, and sales, and therefore, their profits.
So where does sustainability fit in?
Sustainable development (and sustainable business development) has been defined in many ways. A frequently
quoted definition is: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs.”6 In the past, development of businesses, and the economic growth
they drive, have generally been unsustainable from an environmental perspective.
Fossil fuels, including oil, diesel, kerosene, and natural gas, which the current economic system depends on,
are finite. Burning them for energy damages the environment and contributes to climate change. Extractive
industries, such as logging and mining, remove resources
in minutes that took hundreds of millions of years to
form. Almost everything we buy is packaged in plastics
that do not decompose, but will stay in landfills, or worse,
in oceans, long after the person who used them is gone.
Businesses must be part of the solution to these
problems.
A sustainable business strives to balance the economic
(financial), social (people), and environmental
(biodiversity, ecosystems) benefits of the business as
part of its core business objective. For a business to be
sustainable, it must not exploit resources or people to
improve profit margins.
A sustainable business knows that if it depletes the
resources that it is using faster than they can be
generated, it cannot go on indefinitely. Similarly, viewing
itself as part of the broader community, it ensures that its
staff are paid fairly and have a good quality of life.
The three pillars of sustainability7
http://www.un-documents.net/our-common-future.pdf.
7 Graphics by Margaret Seruvatu, GGGI.
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What is a green business?
There is no single definition of a green business, but generally, it’s a business whose core business model
addresses an environmental or social issue – this is, it improves energy or resource efficiency, reduces
greenhouse gas emissions, decreases waste or pollution, protects or restores ecosystems, promotes local
culture, or supports communities.
A green business will typically do any or all of the following:
• Incorporate principles of sustainability into its business decisions and actively monitor them.
• Pay staff a fair wage for the work they do and ensure that they are able to maintain a good work-life
balance.
• Distribute benefits equitably across the value chain.
• Maximise the social benefits of the business (e.g., by employing marginalised groups). Some businesses
set up foundations to assist with this – but a sustainable business doesn’t confine its social activities
just to charitable donations – it looks for every opportunity to increase the social benefits of the
business in its day-to-day operations.
• Supply environmentally-friendly and/or local products and services that replace demand for non-green
or imported products and services.
• Help its community become more sustainable (e.g., by reducing energy use or water use, or reducing
waste or pollution).
• Make efforts to reduce resource use (energy, water, materials), and replenish, enhance, or substitute an
environmental resource that is used by the business (e.g., replanting trees, enhancing soil fertility, using
renewable energy).
• Make an enduring commitment to environmental principles in its business operations. These will often
be detailed in a publicly available and regularly updated Sustainability or Environmental Policy.
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Green Banana Paper in the Federated States of Micronesia makes vegan wallets and other
products from banana plants that are the waste products of the banana harvest. They also
address social sustainability by ensuring liveable wages and safe, comfortable conditions for
their staff.8
What is a social enterprise?
A social enterprise exists to generate revenue (and sometimes profits) to sustain socially-beneficial activities. A
social enterprise can be for profit or non-profit. At its core is a purpose to improve lives and/or the environment.
It has determined that it can best do that by creating a stream of revenue from producing and selling products
or services to sustain its activities and programmes.
The difference between a social enterprise and a green business largely stems from the motivations behind
their existence rather than what they do.
As a hypothetical example, two businesses that produce construction material from crushing recycled glass
have been established with different motivations. Business A has seen the amount of glass going to the
landfill and decides to explore ways to address this issue. They have looked at various uses for recycled glass
– repurposing the glass into other products such as vases, lights, and jewellery, and crushing it for use as an
aggregate in the construction sector. Weighing these different options, Business A decides that crushing glass
for construction is the best business solution to this waste management issue.
Alternatively, Business B developed because the founders wanted to find employment for young unemployed
8 Green Banana Paper, https://greenbananapaper.com/.
8 | GUIDE TO GREEN ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN KIRIBATI
labourers in their neighbourhood, and developing a glass crushing business is a viable option.
These motivational differences mean that the two businesses may make very different strategic decisions. For
instance, if the demand for construction material changes so that crushing glass for construction products is
no longer viable, Business A may consider repurposing recycled glass into other products, but Business B may
decide to stop recycling and crushing glass, and look for other options to employ labourers. In this example,
Business A is mainly a green business, while Business B is a social enterprise.
Kiribati Organic Producers making organic products
EXAMPLE: The Kiribati Organic Producers (KOP)9 is a social enterprise selling organic
coconut products. Formed in 2012, KOP helps families in the Outer Islands earn money
for school fees and other needs through the sales of niche products such as virgin coconut
oil, coconut sap sugar, and coconut syrup. KOP also provides training, quality control, and
marketing in Tarawa.
Standards and certification programmes
Many certification programmes exist to help companies distinguish themselves as green and/or sustainable
(see Box 1). However, the costs involved with certification can prevent smaller sustainable businesses from
becoming accredited. The Pacific Organic Standard is addressing this by developing a standard, accredited
by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, that can be used as part of Participatory
Guarantee Schemes in which members of a group assess each other’s compliance with the standard. If you are
considering getting certified, it is important to look at which certifications are most well-known by your target
customers when choosing which one to apply for.
