Coworking Plus has visited Italy, Arezzo as a part of a European Project SUSNET. As the name hints, its aim is to create sustainable networks across companies. Like this the companies can share inspiration on how to be more sustainable, unite and work towards the same green goal.
As a part of this trip we have shared the best sustainable practices of companies from the nations that were represented on the meetings. For this purpose we have decided to present practises used by Ørsted and Colorful Standard. Examples presented by other nations included Staramaki (alternative for environmentaly friendly straws) or Alce Nero (Fairtrade business which unites 1000 farmers in Italy and 10 000 small family farms in South America). These represented creative and innovative takes on sustainability which can be shared further to ensure their international application.
While doing so, we have visited 2 companies: AISA impianti SPA and Estra. The main focus was to see how their sustainable reporting is done. The companies provided us with impactful insight into sustainable practises in the backstage of everyone’s lives.
AISA is a public company owned by local municipalities and their purpose is waste management; its selection, burning, compost and biomethane production. In order to improve on their journey towards sustainability they make studies on carbon footprint and implement the findings from the conducted sustainability reports which showed them perspectives of their stakeholders but also intangible assets which are hard to notice in day to day situations.
Estra is a complex company known mainly for its gas and electricity sales and gas distribution. It has emerged from merger of 3 companies and their growth strategy is up until today based on mergers and acquisitions. That not only makes the company bigger in terms of its size in number of employees but also broadens their scope of action. They have shown a great deal of proactivity when it comes to sustainable reports. They have started early on in 2015 before it has become mandatory which gave them a head start to improve across the years as it has become more ane more relevant. What has been having a profound effect on them is allowing their key stakeholders to choose the topics for their sustainable reports as it moved them towards issues which wouldn’t be brought up just based on the internal analysis. Based on their findings they can conclude that sustainable reports not only help in green matters but also shape strategies and can improve customer image.
To summarise this trip, it has underlined the importance of sustainable focus in businesses and has started an improtant process of creating a bond between likeminded companies which will hopefully create a global impact with more companies joining and more data gained and shared.
