It's been a long hard slog for Pete Spark, an entrepreneur who has been trying to raise money for revolutionary software that allows companies to assess the environmental impact of all their business decisions.
The founder of Ecsponent, Spark has been trying to get funding for his idea for the past three years without much success. But now he has got a foot in the door at insurers Royal and Sun Alliance.
"Suddenly, people aren't thinking I'm a mad fool, people sit down and listen now," Spark says.
R&SA, along with a handful of corporate giants, has taken the first steps to incorporate environmental and social factors into their business activities. R&SA this year issued its second environmental and social report, setting out the company's progress in meeting targets in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, waste production and water use.
Spark is working with R&SA on a six-month project to create a framework that incorporates guidelines established by the global reporting initiative (GRI) in 1997. A loose-knit group that includes representatives from industry, human rights organisations, unions, and the UN environment programme, the GRI developed bottom line guide lines on social and green impact issues.
As Pritchard at the R&SA notes, one of the great difficulties in trying to adopt green business practices is the lack of good quality data.
"With a large organisation, it's much harder than I anticipated to collect comparable data," says Pritchard. "There is a lack of benchmark comparability."
R&SA has made a start by collecting data in several areas such as electricity consumption, gas consumption, water consumption and waste from its operations in different regions. So, for example, waste created per employee is highest in the US, 414kg/emp, and lowest in Australia, 274kg/emp. The UK comes in somewhere in between at 330kg/emp.
Ecsponent seeks to take the process further by coming up with software that allows a company to quantify the environmental impact of all its business transactions.
"In order for a company to fully understand the environ mental impact of its economic activity," Spark explains, "that organisation needs to understand the environmental impact of all the companies with which it does business. For instance in the supply of energy services, is that energy produced renewably or non-renewably? And therefore what emissions is the 'buy-side' company culpable of as a result?"
Spark believes that it is possible to come up with software that allows companies to incorporate information that would lead to "green accounting". Say an executive buys a plane ticket on company business. The purchase is done via the net and the confirmation is sent back to the company and entered into his costs. "There is no reason why that information channel can't use that data to work out the energy emission of that transaction," says Spark. "You would be able to work out the emission costs of that specific plane journey, based on the fuel it uses and the number of people travelling on it."
The idea is to integrate the kind of environmental reporting that already goes on at companies such as R&SA into their procurement system, so that every transaction is done though a "green goggles" perspective. Ecsponent would give away its software and then charge for verification, to see that it is installed and working properly. "We give away the razor and charge for the razor blades," as Spark puts it.
This kind of environmental accounting would not be possible without the internet, said Spark, given the vast amount of data that needs to be exchanged.
"Using the internet reduces complexity," he says. "By hand it would be very expensive."
