How to mainstream sustainability excellence

I was recently explaining the landscape of impact-based solutions to a friend. Given his reaction, I realized that it sounded like a blueprint for how our world could potentially improve one day, far from tangibly making a difference now.

For much of my career, I’ve been in a leadership position in the sustainability field, which perhaps makes me a bit biased toward the idea of a more sustainable economy and world. But my enthusiasm is not just simple optimism. My enthusiasm is embedded in the robust start-up innovation space, where companies across so many industries are working toward reducing fossil fuels, protecting biodiversity, increasing social justice, and creating viable solutions. 

So, stack the word sustainability with scalability and effectiveness, and you can’t help but see things in a brighter light. We can start positioning sustainability with topics and contexts that people already understand, meeting them where they are, and winning them over, which then gives us the space to really explain sustainability. Sustainability then moves from becoming sustainable value to simply value, which I believe is the concept of mainstreaming of sustainability excellence.

Let’s dive into a few examples of innovations that are paving the way to satisfy both sustainability and general value.

Seaweed can replace some single-use plastic items

Seaweed is far more sustainable than plastic, given its negative carbon footprint and that it’s biodegradable, compostable, and even edible. Additionally, the uprise in seaweed farming is supporting a number of fragile coastal communities with an emerging economy and jobs market. 

The seaweed market is estimated to become $11.8 billion by 2030 and at 35 million tons, has doubled over the last decade.   

Seaweed can be harvested in as little as six weeks and is both moisture and heat resistant. As a result, we’re seeing an increasing number of new companies emerge that are looking to leverage seaweed “plastic” to make items such as restaurant take-out boxes, seaweed film for wrapping food or cosmetics, small sachets that contain liquids, condiment packages, and even edible cups. These essentially fight the battle against single-use plastics. 

Mycelium plant leather is an alternative to animal leather

Mycelium is the largest organism in the world and is a strong fibrous underground plant. Its structure makes it versatile in its applications across several industries, such as fashion, food, construction, and packaging.  

Mycelium leather can drastically minimize the carbon footprint compared to animal-based leather due to reasons like: it has low water and energy requirements, does not need land mass, less waste production, biodegradability, use of agricultural bio-waste, and localized production.  

Raw mycelium can grow as quickly as two weeks and from there, its intricate fibers are manipulated to different thicknesses, flexibility, strength, and patterns. This allows mycelium leather to not only feel like the soft and strong leather consumers are familiar with, but is also more breathable, water-wicking, a natural antibiotic, and can grow to have equal to higher tensile strength than traditional animal-based leather.

Sustainable aviation fuels are an alternative to traditional aviation fuels

Sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) are created more sustainably using bio-wastes that accumulate across the farming sector, as well as through our everyday lives. Items such as cooking oil, solid municipal waste, and wood waste are often used to manufacture this type of fuel.

From a sustainability standpoint, these biofuels are promising due to the circularity of their lifecycle emissions, as SAFs on average deliver a carbon savings of 70% or more.  

As SAFs are created to resemble conventional jet fuels and they can be used without any alterations to most existing aircrafts. At this point, SAFs have already powered 250,000 flights globally. The goal is to have 10% of all global jet aviation fuel come from SAFs by 2030, and the aviation industry be net zero by 2050.

Final thoughts

I recognize that these solutions still need further work and significant scale to make them more cost-effective and they will even need to continue evolving their sustainability journey. But let’s not let perfection be the enemy of progress. As these solutions slowly penetrate our market, through revenues, funding, strategic partnerships, and collaboration, companies can find the strength to continue that evolution.

I believe that to mobilize this activity, it is critical that we start positioning and discussing these solutions as simply having great value so that we can capture the attention and needs of many, not only those that resonate with sustainability. The power of scale lies in critical mass and with that mass, I do believe we can mainstream sustainability and that these blueprints will actually lead us to building the type of world that we need to create.

Shila Wattamwar is the founder of Radiant Global Advisory.