Our com­mon future — Islet suis­tain­able development

First Steps towards a Sus­tain­able Future

Wel­come to the first post in our sus­tain­abil­i­ty blog series where we describe our road towards sus­tain­abil­i­ty. This blog series is to show­case how we inte­grate dif­fer­ent cor­po­rate respon­si­bil­i­ty and sus­tain­abil­i­ty themes into our busi­ness: both on the com­pa­ny lev­el but also with our part­ners and clients.

Let’s begin with a small intro­duc­tion into the world of sus­tain­abil­i­ty. The inspi­ra­tion for the title of this blog series is the report “Our Com­mon Future” (1987) by Gro Harlem Brundt­land, the for­mer Prime Min­is­ter of Nor­way. Her report defined the pur­pose for sus­tain­able devel­op­ment. Accord­ing to the def­i­n­i­tion, sus­tain­abil­i­ty is the abil­i­ty to meet the needs of cur­rent gen­er­a­tions with­out sac­ri­fic­ing the poten­tial for future gen­er­a­tions to meet their own needs. In oth­er words, we should live so that we don’t leave our plan­et in worse shape than we found it in.

Many may have the per­cep­tion that sus­tain­abil­i­ty is all about envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion and con­ser­va­tion. Sure, these aspects are impor­tant, but sus­tain­abil­i­ty is so much more. Sus­tain­abil­i­ty can be com­pared to a three-legged stool. One of the legs is our econ­o­my includ­ing, for instance, jobs and assets. The sec­ond leg is about social aspects in the world such as human rights and gen­er­al well being of cit­i­zens. Final­ly, we have the third leg, the envi­ron­ment. This leg con­sists of themes such as envi­ron­men­tal health and the abil­i­ty to sus­tain decent liv­ing con­di­tions. If any of these legs were to break, the stool becomes unsta­ble and will fall. The same metaphor applies to our soci­ety. So, we are talk­ing about impor­tant things.

Why do we at Islet empha­size sus­tain­abil­i­ty in our oper­a­tions and how can we con­tribute to this wor­thy cause?

Let’s first answer the ques­tion why. The sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty has near­ly unan­i­mous­ly claimed that cli­mate change will be one the largest safe­ty and secu­ri­ty threats for the world in the next decades to come. Humankind’s indus­tri­al activ­i­ty and con­sump­tion pat­terns only accel­er­ate the phe­nom­e­non. More­over, chang­ing demo­graph­ics, glob­al­iza­tion and urban­iza­tion will change our social struc­tures. In this chang­ing social land­scape, it is impor­tant to make sure that every­one has the chance to be edu­cat­ed and real­ize their poten­tial. We see that it is impor­tant to use our exper­tise to reach sus­tain­able out­comes together.

The pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned chal­lenges also mean that every orga­ni­za­tion must take sus­tain­abil­i­ty into account in all of their oper­a­tions. The man­age­ment of brand image and stake­hold­ers might pre­vi­ous­ly have been the main rea­son for inte­grat­ing sus­tain­abil­i­ty into busi­ness. Nev­er­the­less, I state that the busi­ness gains of adding sus­tain­abil­i­ty into busi­ness oper­a­tions are remark­able: sus­tain­able atti­tude and actions will be reflect­ed as a bet­ter result in your bot­tom line. The use of new tech­nolo­gies, such as Best Avail­able Tech­nolo­gies, will decrease com­pa­nies’ envi­ron­men­tal impacts and enhance social sur­round­ings at work­place. Decreas­ing envi­ron­men­tal impacts will help com­pa­nies to opti­mize the usage of side prod­ucts of their pro­duc­tion and to min­i­mize the waste. Bet­ter recy­cling, sort­ing and re-pro­cess­ing of mate­ri­als enable sourc­ing from mate­ri­als once already used, so the acquir­ing costs may decrease sig­nif­i­cant­ly. The social inclu­sion at work­place improves employ­ee well­be­ing and great­ly affects the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of the whole organization.

Now, I can tell you how we will make our way towards more sus­tain­able avenues

Because sus­tain­abil­i­ty is so mul­ti­fac­eted, we can­not say that we have already mapped all the mile­stones. There­fore, we will rec­og­nize the themes where we can con­tribute the most. This is called materiality.

Rec­og­niz­ing mate­ri­al­i­ty is impor­tant because it will enable us to pri­or­i­tize the areas that are most impor­tant to our stake­hold­ers. Dis­cov­er­ing mate­ri­al­i­ty is an under­tak­ing that involves com­pa­ny exec­u­tives, employ­ees, clients and oth­er stake­hold­er groups. There­fore, we will ask our stake­hold­ers for their inputs on how we can devel­op our and our clients’ sus­tain­abil­i­ty aspects.

I can­not ignore tech­nol­o­gy as a dri­ver for sus­tain­abil­i­ty. New tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions will rev­o­lu­tion­ize the ways we con­sume and com­mute dai­ly in near future. We feel that with our exper­tise we can sup­port our cus­tomers in this change and accom­plish solu­tions for future tech­nolo­gies together.

In a few years, alter­na­tive renew­able sources of ener­gy and bio-based solu­tions will become piv­otal to sus­tain­ably, enabling us to have the com­modi­ties that we so need, for exam­ple elec­tric­i­ty and plas­tic. The devel­op­ment of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence makes it pos­si­ble to cre­ate a new ser­vice econ­o­my. Autonomous cars work as an impres­sive exam­ple of this, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to use them only when need­ed and replace many of our inef­fi­cient pri­vate vehicles.

Even though many of these exam­ples often heard sound futur­is­tic, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence can ben­e­fit us in more sim­pler sit­u­a­tions. Our sev­er­al dai­ly process­es and ser­vices will be trans­formed with the use of AI. The only ques­tion now is how rapid­ly we will take the first steps to uti­lize arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and start trans­form­ing our process­es to become more sustainable.

We have invest­ed heav­i­ly in these new tech­nolo­gies and we are not afraid to grasp all new oppor­tu­ni­ties to help our cus­tomers with our new gen­er­a­tion expertise.

In our next sus­tain­abil­i­ty blog post, we will go through mate­ri­al­i­ty in greater detail and describe how it will be shown in our oper­a­tions. We will also dive deep­er into the tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions and explore how we can pro­vide sus­tain­abil­i­ty val­ue to our clients.

Con­tact Information:
Piia Hoff­sten
Chief Oper­at­ing Officer
piia.hoffsten (a) islet​group​.fi
+358 40 5877 303

Buzz­words: #sus­tain­ablede­vel­op­ment #sus­tain­abil­i­ty #cor­po­ratere­spon­si­bil­i­ty #mate­ri­al­i­ty #AI