In this exclusive interview with TheCSRUniverse, Mr. Vivek Mehra, Co-Founder and Chief Sustainability Officer, Onlygood, discusses the company's innovative approach to empowering businesses for genuine sustainability. Founded on the principle of aiding companies in achieving environmental responsibility while promoting social good and economic growth, Onlygood's software platform tackles a critical hurdle for businesses seeking to go green: accurately measuring their carbon footprint. We get a chance to delve deeper into Onlygood's methods and the positive impact they're making in the world of sustainable business practices.
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Q. Can you share what inspired the founding vision of Onlygood, and how has your understanding of "good" in the context of businesses evolved over the years?
A. Onlygood was founded with a mission to help companies grow sustainably, without resorting to any greenwashing or mis-representation of their activities. The software platform we have built helps companies to become environmentally ‘good’, or sustainable in their business practices. We help them think of social ‘good’, and economic ‘good’ as well by using the power of data and analytics to accelerate growth, even as they remove inefficiencies and costs from their activities and communities.
Q. Can you tell us about a specific company that significantly reduced its carbon footprint through your platform? What were the quantifiable reductions inemissions achieved?
A. While private companies are sensitive about publicly disclosing their business practices, virtually all of our clients in manufacturing - automotive, apparel, chemicals, polymers, etc. are in the process of, or have realized 10-20% of energy cost savings. This is possible through insights where they can compare and contrast energy, water, and transportation waste and best practices across different facilities & suppliers.
Q. What are some of the biggest challenges’ companies face when measuring their carbon footprint, and how does the organisation address these data gaps orcalculation complexities?
A. The first challenge companies face when measuring their carbon footprint is not having serious intent. Many companies announce net zero target timelines without consideration of how that will be achieved on the ground across their supply chain, and do not prepare their organizations to build a carbon conscious culture. Behavioral resistance to technology adoption and an over reliance on traditional manual, consulting approaches makes decarbonization at scale impossible. There are very few cost-effective technology options that can adapt to the complexities of a given enterprise IT environment, and even when they are available, continuous data collection is a challenge. Companies that are successful at decarbonization begin by educating their employees and suppliers on the value of carbon source data, the environmental risks to their growth and the need for establishing decarbonization pathways. They are eager to adopt data automation and analytical technologies such as the Onlygood software, and free up capital for carbon mitigation. They see carbon taxation and ESG compliance reporting not as a burden, but an opportunity to differentiate in the marketplace.
Q. Beyond businesses, does Onlygood collaborate with environmental NGOs or research institutions to further its mission? How do these partnerships enhance your impact?
A. Onlygood works actively with several NGOs. Notably, Onlygood is a mentor for Shiksha Prayas – focused on primary school remedial education for underprivileged urban village children in Haryana. Onlygood also supports Reset Planet, an NGO focused on re-forestation and water-bodies rejuvenation for carbon capture, using CSR funds from global enterprises. Onlygood is also a partner with IITM in Chennai.
Q. Looking ahead, how do you see emerging technologies like AI or blockchainshaping carbon footprint analysis and reduction strategies?
A. Onlygood uses generative AI for querying the expanding data set for carbon emissions. AI is also useful for forecasting emissions based on an existing carbon ledger. This forecasting is used to create models and scenarios for how companies can allocate capital for renewable energy implementation, use alternate materials at design time, and alter supply chains based on carbon considerations. AI-based modeling can be used to predict carbon emissions for new facilities and installations, and prescribe the best-case scenarios using industry and climate variable trained data sets. Blockchain is a key technology that can be used for data veracity and automatic certification of carbon footprints across global supply chains.
Q. How do you measure the success of carbon footprint reduction for your clients? What data do you make publicly available to ensure transparency and encourage accountability?
A. Currently Onlygood does not make data publicly available without client consent since we follow global and GDPR data compliance rules. Clients do get their carbon footprints assured and certified by 3rd party agencies that are authorized for the same. However, companies do release their carbon trends and strategic goals internally within their organizations and their supplier communities.
Q. Does Onlygood set long-term goals beyond a company achieving net-zeroemissions? How do you help clients transition towards a more holistic approach to environmental sustainability?
A. Onlygood helps clients set goals and identify decarbonization pathways. The transition to greater environmental sustainability and net zero is multi-faceted. We work with various consulting partners – management consultants, system integrators, energy auditors and consultants, etc. to help clients with domain-specific solutions for achieving their sustainability goals.
Q. What advice would you give to someone looking to build a career in environmentalconsulting or sustainable business solutions?
A. In today’s complex enterprises with global supply chains, any sustainable business has to keep data at its core competency. The ability to collect, collate, verify and analyze data is critical. Without a trusted data set any sustainability related recommendations and solutions will remain ad-hoc with minimal impact at best, and non-impactful in the worst case
Q. What message do you have for other social enterprises or sustainability initiatives? How can cross-sector collaboration be strengthened for greater positive impact?
A. Sustainability initiatives cover a broad spectrum, ranging from climate risk strategy and roadmap development to decarbonization roadmaps, energy transition methodologies and implementation, project tracking and governance, data collection and technology implementation, etc. Social enterprises need to think of sustainability solutions that follow a systems thinking approach – with clear cause and effect, handoffs and complementarity of benefits. For example, recycling initiatives have to factor in not only costs, but also the carbon emissions from recycling and its impact on the enterprise carbon ledger. Social and sustainability enterprises should keep a collaborative mindset and use data-backed technology approaches to unify and track individual initiatives, to measure impact at each stage and eventual impact to the environment and society.
Q. Can you share some compelling data on the cumulative carbon footprint reduction achieved by companies using your platform? This could be presented as a total tonnage or percentage decrease.
A. In the short 1.5 years of being in production, Onlygood platform is tracking more than 2M Tonnes of Enterprise Carbon already. We are expecting the tracking to grow exponentially as supply chain (Scope 3) carbon becomes transparent through the platform. Even a modest 10% reduction will have a significant impact in the respective local communities.
