Month: December 2021

How To Make Sustainable Practices Profitable

Written By: Benjamin Laker
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For decades, the idea that sustainable business practices could lead to profitability has been dismissed. However, with increased pressure from stakeholders and government legislation in recent years, companies are compelled to find ways to reduce their environmental impact while maintaining economic competitiveness. Right now, sustainability is quite rightly top of the agenda, amid the backdrop of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly referred to as COP26.

Most people don’t realize that waste is a resource with an economic value and recycling can be a profitable practice say experts.

The environmental impact of organizations and the states they reside in are scrutinized more strongly than ever, ensuring customers and employees do not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs and consequently design a world without waste. At present, nearly 65% of greenhouse gas emissions arise just from handling materials’ production, transportation, and disposal. But a circular economy may significantly reduce 90% of the emissions, thus departing from a linear economy to one that builds circularity into products from the outset is paramount. 

ReCyrcle specializes in this area. Designed to support a waste-free world aligned with the “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity” from the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the innovative tech startup offers a revolutionary recycling system that follows a circular economy approach. “We want to prevent and reduce the waste accumulation of recyclable materials in landfills and change society’s mindset towards waste,” Samreen Nurullah, cofounder and director, told me.

ReCyrcle offers a revolutionary recycling system that follows a circular economy approach

She continued, “collection of the materials directly from the consumers through our app allows us to track the entire process and ensure that these materials do not leak into the environment.” Nurullah’s business partner, Sharaf Rahman, added, “We recycle materials and process them into a usable and manufacturable form reducing the demand and need for virgin materials being extracted from the Earth’s crust.” In doing so, the organization is attempting to digitize the reverse supply chain of waste to make the process more efficient, transparent, and accountable.

ReCyrcle makes a critical assertion – they don’t believe that poor recycling rate isn’t a habit problem but is instead a perception problem. “Most people don’t realize that waste is a resource with an economic value and recycling can be a profitable practice,” observes Rahman. “Our app encourages people to recycle by offering rewards and incentives for recycling in the form of digital tokens.”

The mobile app shows the journey of a plastic bottle and post-consumer packaging waste from the point of collection to being processed into new products so a user can track their recycling habits and buy products made from their recycled packaging waste. This could well be a watershed moment for the future of corporate sustainability, particularly because within countries such as the UK, where the government has delayed plans to implement the Deposit Return Scheme for recycling until late 2024. “We understand the climate emergency and have come up with our private digital deposit return scheme, which can be claimed through our app,” concludes Rahman.

ReCyrcle reprocesses 3D printer waste into recycled filaments to be reused in 3D printing again

Companies like to bucket. Purpose belongs to corporate social responsibility, while the customer belongs to the brand. But here’s the problem with those buckets, concludes Nurullah. Your customers are whole people seeking mission and brand engagement. They expect you to deliver what matters most to them. “Embrace your customer’s mindset, the holistic understanding of their heads and hearts, to deliver on brand and purpose,” recommends Nurullah. Because as companies embrace stakeholder capitalism, they risk subjecting themselves to what besets the nonprofit sector—the tendency to think every stakeholder is a customer, which confuses their strategic aim. Therefore, understanding if your organization is substantially differentiated or even relevant is mission-critical – and the key to entrepreneurial performance, which in the case of ReCyrcle, is impressive. 

That’s not to say they haven’t had help along the way, of course. For example, Rahman explained at length the impact of support that Brunel University’s Bridging the Gap program has had on the organization. “They’ve aided us throughout our journey, and we have recently started collecting 3D printing waste from their design facilities as the curbside municipal recycling programs do not recycle 3D printing waste,” he said. ReCyrcle reprocesses this waste into recycled filaments to be reused in 3D printing again.

This is a key component when thinking about starting a business, says Dr. Marrisa Joseph, Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Henley Business School. Startups and increasingly established companies have moved away from thinking about what product or service I could offer. Instead, thinking has evolved to what I could create that my potential customer would want, or even better, what they need and how it will impact the planet.

The triple bottom line concept- people, planet, profit- has become an increasingly sought-after value proposition as businesses thrive when they have a greater purpose. That unique nexus is the source of differentiation and the cornerstone of your differentiation strategy. Embracing it requires that you appreciate them as whole people. What matters the most to your customer is what matters the most to you too. Watch out for the zone of indifference, and don’t build your strategy around it.

Every company has attributes and features near and dear to its hearts. Perhaps it’s the origin story, the internal rally cry, or their hometown. Be forewarned. You cannot compete on differentiation by claiming unimportant attributes to your customer. Your customer’s tell-tale shrug is the evidence that what you hold dear can’t deliver a differentiated advantage. And with the case of ReCyrcle, they certainly have it.

Why scaling investment is crucial for sustainable development

Written By: Ahmet Burak Dağlıoğlu
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Mobilizing financial resources will play an important role in reaching the sustainable development goals.



  • Global organizations are cooperating on scaling investment to help achieve sustainability goals.
  • Investment promotion needs to change to target sustainable investments, particularly to help reach climate goals.
  • Turkey is implementing this approach by making the SDGs central to its foreign direct investment strategy.

Climate change has been on the international agenda for a long time, but recent developments have upped the urgency of taking immediate action for both humanitarian and developmental reasons. World leaders gathered in Glasgow to discuss climate change at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26, following the G20 summit in Rome in late October, which also prioritized sustainability.

Keeping climate change at bay through mitigation and adaptation is imperative to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were set by the United Nations in 2015 and made social, economic and environmental sustainability central to economic development.

Achieving the SDGs will, in turn, require an integrated approach and close cooperation among all stakeholders. Mobilizing financial resources will play an especially important role in reaching the SDGs and addressing the adverse effects of climate change. In this regard, foreign direct investment (FDI) has been a significant source of external finance for many countries, especially developing economies, to help achieve sustainable economic development.

Commitment to SDGs can mobilize foreign direct investment

Today, all economies vie for greater FDI inflows as it not only brings capital but also generates employment, transfers technology, and helps move up the value chain. Moreover, FDI can be instrumental in a country’s economic transformation towards a greener economy, as multinational corporations (MNCs) have both the financial wherewithal and technical capacity to help transform local operations to greener global best practices. MNCs have been increasingly incorporating environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles into their investment strategies, not only to achieve ESG investor score targets but also to save costs and mitigate risks, helping achieve both more sustainable and more profitable operations.

The international community is putting more efforts into scaling such investments through establishing effective mechanisms to support cooperation on investment issues, such as the planned World Investment for Development Alliance, which can facilitate collaboration on public-private projects to scale sustainable investment. One important dimension of such scaling is for countries to create a favorable environment to attract “Green FDI” in order to help achieve environmental and climate goals.

Through smart and targeted policies, sustainable investment can make significant contributions to a country’s economic development, including Green FDI to help reduce carbon emissions.—Ahmet Burak Dağlıoğlu

Unless host countries are attractive enough for such investments, MNCs will hesitate to invest there, especially in a time when attracting FDI is becoming increasingly difficult due to unexpected challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, policy uncertainty from increasing protectionism, economic shocks, and geopolitical risks. Moreover, the growing inclusion of sustainability clauses into new generation trade and investment agreements by major trading blocs will also affect MNCs’ location choices. Therefore, in order to make the best use of FDI in the aftermath of the pandemic, investment agencies should recalibrate their strategies and position themselves as promoters and facilitators of sustainable investment.

Through smart and targeted policies, sustainable investment can make significant contributions to a country’s economic development, including Green FDI to help reduce carbon emissions. Incorporating the SDGs into a country’s FDI attraction strategy can thus bring benefits across society. Therefore, FDI practitioners and policymakers should develop novel strategies that are more inclusive and SDG-oriented.

How Turkey is contributing to sustainable investments

Cognizant of that we, as the Investment Office of Turkey, have recently revised our FDI strategy and made SDGs one of the main pillars of our investment promotion and attraction policies. We have also incorporated “impact investments” into Turkey’s national development agenda. Through an extensive engagement with national and international stakeholders, “impact investments” have become a priority for private and public sectors in Turkey.

Together with the United Nations Development Program(UNDP), we co-published a series of reports on The Impact Investing Ecosystem in Turkey and SDG Investor Map Turkey, providing a guide for the private sector to perform diligence and make impactful business decisions. After these successful initiatives, Turkey’s Impact Investing Advisory Board was established to mobilize government agencies and private sector stakeholders to develop a state-of-the-art regulatory framework. Establishing such a national impact management framework will standardize the measurement and control across all sectors, which will incentivize impact investing and boost the performance of impact investors.

Success is contingent on going beyond defining certain metrics and standards or appeasing shareholders. Implementation, monitoring, and assessments are essential to creating real impact through sustainable investments. Therefore, national and international efforts to establish strong mechanisms for implementing impact investments and attracting Green FDI must be backed up through collaboration and partnership at every level.

International organizations, such as The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), UNDP, and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Economic Forum have been playing an important role in creating effective platforms for cooperation. National institutions should continue to engage with these organizations in order to adapt their local investment ecosystems to the changing international investment trends, practices, and opportunities. We are all facing global challenges that require global solutions, and cooperation is a sine qua non requirement to find sustainable solutions for the problems that are threating humanity.