20 years ago, you’d walk down the street and see shop signs decorated with names of local people as opposed to corporations. ‘Heseltine’s Butchers’ rather than ‘Tesco Express’; ‘Daisy’s Tea Rooms’ over ‘Starbucks’. It was a time when community meant more. Local people shopped at local stores and supported them because they were convenient……Then larger corporations came along and offered convenience along with low prices. With global development of transport and technology, that eventually led to home deliveries and I’m sure you know the rest of the story. The bottom line is, people became obsessed with convenience. The easier the better. Why would we use local businesses who may not have had the financial clout to offer rapid delivery, when we could use Amazon and receive our package the next working day? Why would we continue to rely on the local milkman when we could buy cheaper milk in Aldi only a few minutes drive away, and pick other bits up at the same time?
I think it’s fairly safe to say that convenience and price lies at the top of our priorities. However, It’s also becoming super clear that ‘sustainability’ is right in the mix too. The guilt of throwing something into the trolley covered in plastic packaging is only becoming more difficult to bear; maybe not seeing Fair Trade certification on a bag of coffee is a deal-breaker for you.
Well now we’re in the midst of a crazy crazy time and having to quickly adapt to life in a world recovering from Corona Virus. Human behaviour has been forced to change, we’ve had restriction thrust upon us and that in turn has completely turned what we knew to be customer behaviour and consumer demand, on its head. The UK is currently in lock-down as I write this, as well as many other countries around the world. That means each and every person in the country is quarantined and in isolation; we’re only allowed essential trips for food/medication etc and one form of exercise per day. Surely that means everyone would turn to Amazon for their famously quick home deliveries right? or Tesco online shopping for food? Well I can assure you, we tried an online Tesco shop for my coffee shop and they’re fully booked for at least two months; I used to be able to get one the next working day. Amazon have stopped all deliveries for at least a few weeks at this point. A pandemic is never going to be a positive event for global supply chains and my word are we reliant upon global products in modern society. We love our avocados from Chile to smash on toast and our clothes from Bangladesh etc. The question is, if so many countries are in a state of complete lock-down, blocking flights in or out; how are we meant to access those products?
I used the phrase ‘Bring Back the Milkman’ for the title of this blog post. Mainly because it stands out for me as being the trademark community service but it’s also a brilliant example of a circular model. One that would definitely meet the criteria for a circular economy. The milk is delivered in the morning in glass bottles; the milk is consumed and the bottles are left to be collected by the milkman when the next delivery is scheduled. The collected glass bottles can then be cleaned, sterilised and re-used, entered back into the production process. I.e. No packaging is being sent to landfill and the loop is closed.
With huge demand and stockpiling causing disruption of stock in supermarkets, people are turning to farm shops and more local suppliers for groceries. An interesting development during this time is that people are also turning a blind eye to sustainable consumerism and opting for plastic covered products. After all, it’s an incredibly effective material for maintaining high levels of hygiene and for preserving food. It seems that ‘sustainability’ has taken a back-seat for a while, until we overcome this hurdle. SMEs in the UK are going through, to put it lightly, a turbulent time at the moment. Small business owners, like myself, are endlessly scrolling through articles and social media to get the slightest idea as to how we can get through this. Our attention is completely wrapped up in what funding we can access and how we can ensure bills are being paid. I’ll be the first to admit that making my company more sustainable hasn’t exactly been a priority recently.
But why? The truth is, they needn’t be separate entities. A huge part of being a sustainable business is altering the business model to become more resourceful and that often results in reducing your expenses and increasing profits. I mean, switching the lights off in the office whilst we’re all working from home, seems pretty logical right?
So that leads me into the circular economy, which has been coined as the future of business and one of the only feasible ways that we can reduce global emissions whilst not having to compromise on economic growth. The problem is, we’ve been waiting to transition into it, which takes time and a significant push from policy makers. The systems just weren’t in place to allow companies to easily become circular. That’s why you often see companies announcing targets 5-10 years down the line to move away from single-use plastic, for example.
What excites me about small businesses is just how agile they are. Being lightweight allows you to pivot more easily. I’ve spoken about this before but I’ll mention it again; now is the time to be a chameleon in business. Adapt to a changing economy. Adapt to what your market demands. The quote from Charles Darwin will never stop being so perfectly applicable to business and I live by it.
“it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself. - Charles Darwin”
With the aforementioned return to a more localised way of living and a more community focused society, maybe it’s the perfect opportunity to start small and trial circular business models. Experiment with circular processes, identify the downfalls, the challenges, the opportunities. Iron out the creases and develop the model. A truly brilliant book called ‘The Lean Start-up’ by Eric Ries was based around these principles. Start small, start lean and collect data; then improve and develop along the way. His approach gained huge global accolades in theory surrounding start-ups and tech but also because it could be so widely applicable and multi-industrial.
A Belgium based start-up called ‘ASmartWorld’ have begun reconditioning second-hand electronic equipment and have recently acted upon the idea of collecting and distributing reconditioned smart phones, free of charge, in old people's homes. The idea is to help family members reconnect during this period of Covid-19 isolation but its also a circular business model. Taking old phones and re-manufacturing them to become functional again. ASmartWorld may not be charging for this service at the moment due to the conditions we find ourselves in, but it’s safe to say that similar models will become the norm once the dust settles and we have greater evidence of a circular economy being effective in practice.