Simon King is a partner at edenseven and an expert in sustainability, ESG and procurement having worked as a Global Chief Procurement Officer and Director of Sustainability for companies including Tata Group, Mitie, Dairy Crest and Coca-Cola.
In Simon’s new book, Sustainability – Profit, People and Planet, he challenges the idea that sustainability strategies come at a cost to revenue and growth. By making sustainability a central part of your strategy and mission, businesses can deliver for people, planet, and profit.
By sharing his knowledge and experiences, Simon hopes to inspire business leaders to take action and embrace sustainability as a path to both commercial success and positive global change.
We are approaching several major environmental tipping points that will lead to irreversible damage, according to scientific reports released in the run up to COP27.
At the conference, UN secretary general, António Guterres, did not hold back:
“We are in the fight of our lives and we are losing. Our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”
Fortunately, there is still time, and individuals and businesses can all do something. Simon King and the edenseven team are confident that UK businesses will play a huge role to deliver the legally binding target of net zero emissions by 2050.
Yet for a variety of reasons, there might be resistance in your organisation. Simon’s new book sets out to address these barriers, by explaining why sustainability is not an expensive obligation that restricts growth and revenue. When it is done the right way, using the right data, there are significant opportunities to reduce costs and increase revenue.
Simon starts his book with ‘Profit', debunking some of the myths around the costs of decarbonisation. He shows in simple examples, how green alternatives are often cheaper in both the short- and long-term. Sustainability can also be a major differentiator which in many cases leads to a higher price point for your products or services. He explains the competitive advantages that exist for companies that adopt sustainability at the highest levels—especially given the growing importance for public sector tenders and ESG investment.
In the following section, ‘People’, he makes the case that your sustainability credentials will have a significant effect on the talent you attract and your ability to retain staff. Furthermore, there are implications for client approval, investor buy-in, customer satisfaction and regulatory compliance.
In the final chapters on ‘Planet’, Simon zooms out to assess the ramifications for all of us, as individuals and businesses, if the worst environmental and societal effects of global warming come to pass. Effects on food production and biodiversity would have disastrous outcomes for our economies, so much so that ‘Profit’ might become irrelevant.
This important, timely and easy-to-understand book gives you the tools and arguments to fully endorse sustainability at board-level and at every level of your organisation.
In Simon’s broad experience across various procurement roles, he has held responsibility for complex areas of business including sustainability and fleet. As well as running functional transformation programmes, he has led on a wide range of sustainability issues such as transition to sustainable palm oil, re-engineering product packaging to use less materials, and energy efficiency programmes. In 2015, Simon joined Tata Global Beverages as Global Chief Procurement Officer, successfully implementing a greenfield global procurement function, including creating a Global Procurement Academy.
Moving to Mitie in 2018, he gained board approval for the repositioning of the UK and Ireland’s leading facilities management provider as an ESG and Sustainability leader to deliver across people, planet and profit. This included launching Plan Zero, a commitment to net zero by 2025 of which a 35% carbon reduction in the first two years was achieved. Plan Zero also encompassed decarbonisation services for clients with over 350,000 tonnes saved and significant growth in high-margin sustainability services revenue.
Alongside Plan Zero Simon launched a Social Value Framework and targets, significantly improved Mitie’s ESG rating with all major rating agencies and rolled out the largest pure electric vehicle fleet in the UK with over 2,500 EVs on the road. In 2022, Simon joined edenseven to pursue a variety of sustainability and data-driven initiatives with clients all over the world.
edenseven wants to play a part in helping businesses of all sizes prepare and plan their net zero pathway—using new technologies to embrace the many opportunities this future will create. We believe in that reality, for profit, people and planet, and we want to make it happen.
If you want to find out more about the optimal way to plan, track and measure your sustainability strategy, get in touch with the edenseven team. Our experts have the specialist skills and knowledge required to keep your plan on-track as well as helping embed sustainability into your strategic goals and growth.
Find out more about edenseven:
www.edenseven.co.uk
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