Group items tagged

A durable product may require investigation of disposal options, which delays action.

With this, good intentions fade, resulting in recyclables that are tossed into the trash or hoarded for lengthy amounts of time. 

he perceived value of a product can determine many aspects of its lifecycle, from how long it is kept to how it is disposed.  Not surprisingly, more expensive products are perceived as “more valuable” and less disposable, even at the end of their usable life.

profound differences in commitment to corporate purpose. 

This close involvement of owners and founders in SMEs means that commitment to purpose is much easier to engender than in a large, publicly-held corporation. 

more personal. 

SMEs increasingly find that they are part of a value chain where a large company downstream (for example, a major brand or a retailer) is demanding attention by suppliers to sustainability metrics and performance.

ikely to mean that less funds are available to invest in initiatives that might be socially or environmentally beneficial, especially if the economic pay-off is less obvious or longer term.

SMEs might also be less able to bring to scale the efficiency gains that can come from attention to CSR or exploit the business opportunities that might come through innovation in the form of new, more sustainable products. 

In sum, while size matters, not least in what gets done, SMEs have many of the same reasons for engaging in CSR that large companies have, both in avoiding downside risk and in exploiting upside opportunities.  In many cases, they may also be more intrinsically, if not better motivated, to give CSR attention.

the tax frame affected the outcome

I think there’s an attractive version of the carbon tax if somebody thought about its design,”

The crucial question, at least to her, is whether (and when) we want to use the tools of decision science to try and steer people toward better choices. If our preferences aren’t fixed the way we think they are — if, as Weber has argued, they’re sometimes merely constructed on the spot in response to a choice we face — why not try new methods (ordering options, choosing strategic words, creating group effects and so forth) to elicit preferences aligned with our long-term interest? That has to be better, in Weber’s opinion, than having people blunder unconsciously into an environmental catastrophe.

“Let’s start with the fact that climate change is anthropogenic,” Weber told me one morning in her Columbia office. “More or less, people have agreed on that. That means it’s caused by human behavior. That’s not to say that engineering solutions aren’t important. But if it’s caused by human behavior, then the solution probably also lies in changing human behavior.”

we have a “finite pool of worry,”

which means we’re unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem — a plunging stock market, a personal emergency — comes along. We simply move one fear into the worry bin and one fear out. And even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a “single-action bias.”

Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.