Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Sustaining great strategies
Family’s values helped mould entrepreneurial spirit
CREATING two hitherto non- existent multi- metallic complexes capable of “communicating” with each other was the impressive kernel of Jaisheila Rajput’s doctoral thesis in chemistry.
It is a fitting metaphor for her work these 10 years later as a designer of sustainability strategies for businesses in which social and environmental gains are fused with profitable outcomes.
Waste, in this context, becomes a resource, a core part of the business process and sustainability becomes at once a tool and an outcome.
If it’s not alchemy, it calls for no less conviction in the possibilities of thinking beyond the limits of convention.
Rajput grew up in Port Elizabeth in a mercantile immigrant family. In the abbreviated name of her central Cape Town consultancy, TOMA-Now (for Tomorrow Matters Now), the first element, “To Ma”, is an affectionate tribute to her maternal grandmother, Reva Amtha.
She came to South Africa when she got married, but was widowed at a young age – with a family of six children, the youngest of whom was only 1 – and was left to run the family business single-handed.
“She did an amazing job,” Rajput said this week.
Independence of mind and a belief in self were reinforced by her parents, Bhayendra and Hansa.
In her broader family setting, Rajput noted, was a sense of a resilient “immigrant mentality” that remained meaningful to her.
Her career began with a passion for science, nurtured from her school days in Port Elizabeth, and led to increasingly prominent posts, first in the automotive industry in South Africa and, latterly, within the German chemical multi-national BASF, in Hong Kong, elsewhere in the Asia Pacific region and Europe.
She, with her siblings and cousins, became the first generation in the family “to work for somebody else”. In the long run, the experience led to her setting up her own consultancy in Cape Town three years ago. It is engaged in projects in South Africa, has completed one in China, and is looking at new opportunities in Britain.
Something of an epiphany for Rajput was an encounter with a business leader in Hong Kong some years ago.
“I had become increasingly interested in sustainability and I remember approaching business executives with what I thought was a fantastic idea and I’d either be patted on the head, or shoved out the door. And then one day, someone took the time to listen and he said, ‘The problem is your angle – you are saying, there are all these problems in the world that need to be dealt with and dealing with them in a better way could benefit our organisation. You’ve got to turn that proposition on its head: start with the business benefit’. And that’s exactly what I do in my consultancy.”
Sustainability was usually viewed either as an environmental issue or as part of social upliftment and typically relegated to the corporate social investment or corporate responsibility sphere.
“We are not in either space. We focus on the business of sustainability, making it as mainstream as possible, a part of ‘business as usual’.”
This began with an analy- sis of an organisation’s “value chain” – the parts of the supply chain that provide the most value or benefit – and devising a strategy to refine the elements to gain the most advantage.
TOMA-Now’s website provides an international example. In 2012, Nike launched soccer jerseys made from polyester fibre from recycled polyester ( PET) bottles, mainly from landfill sites in Japan and Taiwan.
Each jersey is made from eight plastic bottles. Nike consumes nearly 13 million recycled PET bottles, with a 30 percent energy saving in the manufacturing process.
“People often talk of sus- tainability as a fringe topic,” she said, “but we are talking about bringing it directly into the core business.”
Diverting tons of plastic, paper, wood, iron and even rubble away from landfill sites into recycling plants (and in balance sheet terms, into the income stream) at a major Western Cape fishing company was a project TOMA-Now undertook last year.
Rajput credits site hygiene leader, Francina Eksteen, at the company’s Saldanha operation with the initial persistence in getting the company to think differently about waste. “The entire process is managed effectively using data, understanding where waste is being generated and developing opportunities to improve the manufacturing process and generate income.” Another TOMA- Now project this year, working with the World Wildlife Fund, is examining ways to turn the clearance of water-wasting alien vegetation in the George-to-Riviersonderend area into a more effective enterprise, with environmental, business and social gains.
The strategy seeks to match the need to clear biomass (alien trees and bush) with existing or potential uses.
Rajput pointed out that by examining not merely the environmental requirement of saving the ecosystem, but also the needs of people and the economic potential of the district, it was possible to form linkages between businesses, communities and services.
This went well beyond mere “greenwashing” – the tempting pretence of doing good – and incorporated a range of small and large businesses, from transport companies to chicken farmers, who might all benefit from an overarching strategy that factored all their activities into an over-arching sustainability scheme.
“It’s not a theoretical concept. We can say, this is where the biomass is, how much there is, and what kind and build practical concepts around that.”
Rajput highlighted a telling socio-economic element of the process.
“When I started saying that alien clearing – which is a back-breaking task – should be mechanised, there was some resistance on the grounds that this would reduce the job-creation potential.
“But my argument is different.
“On the one hand, we don’t give enough attention to the dignity of jobs, to creating dignified jobs. And here is an instance where, if you mechanise, you upskill workers, and though there will be fewer jobs at that point in the value chain, you will be creating others by doing the clearing more efficiently, stimulating other businesses, or the growth of new activities.”
Neither sustainability, nor job-creation, hinged on giving poor people back- breaking work.
“Creating dignified jobs is part of sustainability, which is as much about alien clearance as securing profitable businesses that feed off it.
“What we are showing,” Rajput said, “is that sustainability on this holistic scale is something you cannot afford not to do.”