Image courtesy of Green Story.
Recently, we spoke with Akhil Sivanandan, the co-founder of Green Story. Green Story is an environmental organization dedicated to helping consumers choose the more sustainable and ethical option. They do this be applying industry standard practices of determining a products environmental footprint, and making that information available to the consumer at the point of purchase.
This kind of information has enormous potential to sway a consumer’s purchasing habits if they are environmentally conscious and it also makes the supplier more accountable for their emissions. Please enjoy the conversation below that we had with Akhil to learn more about this amazing organization and where they are taking Green Story next.
Water Docs - Tell me a bit about yourself and the journey that led you to establishing Green Story.
Akhil - Ever since I was young, I've been very interested in sustainability in some form or another. After I graduated, I was lucky enough to be entered into a firm which was looking for people in the sustainability space to work on market research and consulting activities. So, I started working on renewable energy, consumer sustainability and eco-labelling for various companies and governments around the world. I mainly worked in India and the UK, the US and the Netherlands. After a few years there, I got to understand a little bit more about the world of sustainability and what is going on. But also there was this seed of an idea in my mind: couldn't things be done faster? I started looking at it from a consumer lens point-of-view because definitely the world has been engineered in a way so that we are all kind of hyper-consumers. I think we do have some control over our habits and that we can enable change by pushing for more sustainable behaviours.
Water Docs - Where did the seed go from there?
Akhil - At the time, the idea for Green Story really started to develop, because one thing I noticed was that all my friends and a lot of people that I knew, really wanted to lead sustainable lives but they had never fully taken that step. I started digging into why and at around the same time, I met my co-founder (Navodit Babel) during my MBA year. We both had the same vision and we started digging more deeply into this issue. We came up with three key levers.
One was definitely cost. A lot of sustainable materials, sustainable products seem to be more expensive, for various reasons.
The second was just in terms of the education and understanding of what makes something sustainable. How do you kind of know that it’s sustainable? How can you verify that?
The third was the connection (or lack thereof) to the impact that you're making on the world by choosing to be greener.
We started figuring out, okay, how can we enable companies to show credible sustainability information to the consumers? How can we make it so that consumers can see this information and make better sustainable choices? That's how Green Story came about.
We started the company in 2015. It was basically a large Excel file with lots of nice imagery, which used to spit out the environmental footprint of an item or a facility. People really liked the visualization on how we did it. We gradually built that platform into a system where a company can understand the performance of the sustainable product, compare that against a conventional item, and see for example, how much water, energy, emissions, they're generating or saving and can show the consumer that information at the point of sale.
Image courtesy of Green Story.
Water Docs - I’d love to dive into the process a bit more. How were you able to figure out and determine a specific product's impact? It's almost like an equation you've figured out that you can apply to different products, no matter the company, no matter the product. It’s really very impressive.
Akhil - It's basically a global standard that's out there. And what we use is something called a Lifecycle Assessment Methodology (LCA), which in very simple terms is analyzing the flow of materials. So, for example, if you're making a cotton shirt, you have to grow the cotton from seeds and the seeds have to come from somewhere, there might be pesticides, a lot of water usage, some energy usage in the farming machinery, etc. Then that cotton's taken up and processed into fibre and yarn. In each of these steps, energy goes in and some kind of output is produced, what we'd call waste output.
All of these things are taken into account and you use this to figure out the lifecycle impact of a product. It uses a mixture of primary data, which is direct information from suppliers, and secondary data, which is research information. LCA, however, is a statistical science. When you look at information that's out there in the world, saying that, you know, “a pair of jeans takes 7200 litres of water to make”. That's not to say that a single pair of jeans takes that much, that's like the average pair of jeans, you understand? So at any one point, the water usage could be 600 litres, because it's all rain fed, or if there was a drought and the yield was worse or better, or they use a different process altogether. We are trying to be as precise as possible, while using statistical data and taking into account those kinds of variances.
Water Docs - Then you were able to take this process one step further and start this new initiative called SimpliZero. Tell me about how that kind of evolved from what Green Story’s mandate is and how it kind of builds on that work, but for an individual’s environmental footprint?
Akhil - The entire idea behind Green Story was to enable people to make greener choices and by extension, lead greener lives. We have very good relationships with our customers. They were reaching out to us saying, “Hey, we know we generate emissions in our day-to-day lives, how do we offset that impact? How do I make sure that my carbon footprint is zero?” And so we looked into carbon offsetting. Carbon offsetting is simply about finding projects where somebody is planting a tree or somebody is creating solar cookstoves or other such projects where you’re absorbing, displacing or otherwise offsetting carbon. You can fund these 3rd party verified projects, and therefore balance out your carbon footprint. So we started getting these kinds of projects for our clients, for their customers and for their employees. And then we thought why not make this into an open business where anybody can subscribe to support these projects, therefore offsetting their carbon footprint. That's how SimpliZero came about.
Image courtesy of Green Story.
Water Docs - I understand that with SimpliZero subscriptions you can choose to contribute to different projects to offset your footprint. What kinds of projects do you offer right now?
Akhil - There wasn't transparency on a lot of the projects out there. So on SimpliZero there's a transparency section where you can actually see all the different projects that are out there. This was important for us. This enables any user, any company, to have the ability to see what types of projects they're supporting, but also as a point of “credible-credibility”. At the end of the day, we want to ensure that all the projects that are being funded can be tracked and you can see where this money is going.
We're trying to find projects where there's a high degree of credibility and people can kind of really look into ensuring that if you invest in this project, this project will stay on for the next 20 to 30 years. And some of the projects that I personally love are the ones which have a strong community impact. There is a particular project in Cambodia which provides clean drinking water to communities through purification systems. I love those community oriented projects and there are even some quirky ones. We have this project in South India where they are basically generating electricity through the decomposition of poultry litter.
It's not just about funding your carbon footprint or providing somebody somewhere money to develop something, this is also about supporting communities. All the projects that we work with have some alignment in some way with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This ensures that the projects you're supporting are also a part of this global movement, towards getting us to net-zero and to a more equitable society.
Water Docs - I know that Green Story is intending on building some kind of blue carbon solutions as a way to offset. Tell me about that idea and then where it is now.
Akhil - We are actually already working on blue carbon! Blue carbon is simply projects which also have a carbon footprint reduction but are linked to the oceans. SeaTrees is one of them. There are also a few other companies we are working with but the idea is to set up carbon reduction processes which are connected to the oceans. We also want to look at water reduction and water offsetting projects, however we're still searching because we want to ensure that any company we work with has the right amount of certifications and oversight before we start working with them.
Water Docs - That’s amazing. Just to wrap up on a more personal note here, what does sustainability mean to you? Whether as an individual or as a consumer, however you want to take this question.
Akhil - I think for me, sustainability is maintaining a balanced way of life, and ensuring that you and the people you care about can still continue to live and thrive and do well in life. It's a simple and broad definition, but that basically means you have to take care of your surroundings and the earth.
Water Docs - Thank you for your time Akhil.