Sustainability has unfortunately earned buzzword connotations among some sectors of the population, and many members of the general public have started to doubt its actual ability to bring forth actual change. In fact, the term “greenwashing” has been coined to show this tendency of masking processes that are harmful to the environment under false pretences and show them as the real deal. However, customers have largely started to become aware of these methods, and many are now doing careful research before making a purchase.
If you’re a business owner and want to show that you are committed to sustainability and eco-friendly practices, here are some of the things you should be sure to integrate into your business processes.
Energy management
The amount and type of energy your business consumes are directly correlated to your carbon footprint, so if you want to lower your impact, you must also find ways to be more sustainable in how you use energy. Managing the amount of power you consume is a proactive process and should be part of a more extensive system rather than a one-time thing. Your aim should be to decrease the amount of power you consume to decrease costs and embrace more efficient, pragmatic sustainability.
There are many things you can do to ensure this. Upgrading to newer appliances that can save more energy and are not as power-intensive helps. Monitor energy bills and determine the areas where you could reduce consumption. More elaborate steps include switching to renewable energy, a process which will likely take some time considering that you’ll have to add all the necessary infrastructure to get the system to work as well. You can adopt plans that seek to reduce your energy consumption gradually over the next few years.
Using technology can naturally help as well. There’s software that can predict future energy usage and plan budgets for power consumption in advance. This helps with strategic objectives and decision-making and allows you to ensure that your plans correlate with the reality you can create.
Waste management
Waste management includes everything concerning waste materials collection, transport and processing. While standard disposal is well-known, recycling is the one that’s sustainable. Making sure your waste management is effective can save you a lot of money in the long run, all while guaranteeing that you’re helping the environment. Getting waste compactors for plastic and cardboard from Miltek can save you a lot of trouble, as they are incredibly efficient and create no mess. The pressing cycles are rapid, and they can be connected anywhere since they work with compressed air.
The first step to better management is to measure the waste your business creates. Afterwards, you should see if you can reduce the amount that gets thrown away. For example, you can ensure that you don’t use as much paper by making more processes digital. Then, you need to reduce the rubbish that will end up in landfills because that’s what contributes to higher greenhouse gas emissions.
There are three main ways to minimise the waste you send to landfills:
- Reducing straight from the services from where you purchase by getting less so that you will also waste less. This doesn’t mean having less than you need, but instead making sure you don’t get more than you need and then have to throw a lot away.
- Reusing items, since although recycling is crucial reusing is just as, if not more important. When you reuse, you guarantee that no item gets thrown away before the end of its lifetime. There’s a considerable amount of natural resources, including water and various materials, that go into creating each and every product. Throwing them away without using them at all means wasting all of that.
- Recycling to create new products from materials that could still be reused and repurposed.
Supply chains
Supply chains are huge and include a considerable number of businesses, people and routes. That’s why making this process sustainable can be challenging, as you’ll have to bring everyone on board with your ideas. But it’s vital to implement eco-friendly practices to create a sustainable business environment. The supply chain is the backbone of any enterprise, the one thing that keeps all the components moving.
Here, too, the first step towards understanding what could be improved is to identify the problems. You may uncover various issues in the aftermath of an audit. For example, you could notice that you lack an Environmental Management System that helps you address regulatory requirements systemically. You might find areas that lack the means to handle social issues, such as workplace harassment. Upholding human rights and ensuring ethical practices are also part of sustainability.
Other concerns include dangerous working conditions, overtime issues, and unfit environmental practices. Even if your company has amended all these issues, or perhaps never even had them to begin with, the practices of your suppliers can affect your reputation as well. Even some of the firms considered to be stalwart examples of sustainability deal with these problems. It’s pretty difficult to manage because working with businesses that may not uphold good sustainability standards often means delivering products much faster.
The current markets are incredibly competitive, and many customers expect products to be delivered very rapidly, something that is contrary to eco-friendly processes that typically last longer and deliver products of more sound quality. If companies can’t keep up, they are usually replaced by competitors, losing revenue. So, what’s the way to solve this conundrum? Ideally, you should only work with suppliers that have established long-term sustainability goals that are in accordance with yours.
You can discuss your procedures with them and encourage those who don’t follow the same standards to consider them. Remember that this is a step-by-step process, and it requires consistency. You want to see follow-up and commitment to change.
To sum up, implementing sustainable practices can be challenging. You have to think of several different aspects and find ways to manage even those factors that you don’t control directly. It’s tough work. It will also take some time to get everything right. And just when you think it’s all done, the standards will change because sustainable practices are constantly evolving. And you need to keep up with them.
A New Year Brings a New Start for Crypto
By Duggan Flanakin
“For cryptocurrencies,” says Forbes staff writer Maria Gracia Santilana Linares, “2023 was neither the best nor the worst of times.” On the one hand, the overall crypto market, which fell hard in 2022 after reaching $3 trillion in 2021, rebounded to $1.7 trillion. On the other hand, the industry “found itself in the crosshairs” of regulators, led by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and lawmakers.
For all those, and other, reasons, many in the crypto universe are looking for a brand-new start in 2024, including the SEC. Noting that Blackrock recently adjusted its bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) application to allow JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs access and the recent allowance of ETF trading as authorized by the SEC, Eric Swartz, who heads up the Web3 practice at the Sterlington law firm, says he is “super excited” about crypto’s future.
Swartz, in an exclusive interview, added that the historical resolutions to some crypto problems in the past provide “an important lesson about compliance, about working on the tough, nitty-gritty details of making sure crypto products are properly administered.
While Congress remained in a stalemate between those who seek appropriate regulations for the industry and those, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who want to ban crypto altogether, regulators were quite busy suing and prosecuting crypto companies and their corporate leaders for violations including securities fraud. The SEC’s strategy for reigning in crypto companies relies on the Howey Test that stems from a 1946 court case.
Simply put, if an asset is based on a transaction that includes investing money in a common enterprise that could profit from the labor of others, it qualifies as an investment contract under Howey. When that contract is sold to an investor, it becomes a security, and those who do not register under federal securities law are subject to prosecution.
Using that strategy, the SEC brought cases against five crypto exchanges in 2023, including Binance, CoinbaseCOIN, and Kraken, alleging they had sold unregistered securities via their platforms. In a separate case filed against Ripple Labs, a federal court ruled in July that the sale of its xrp token was a security only when it was sold to investors – not to retail traders. As of now, the SEC lawsuits against Ripple, Binance, and Coinbase are still in pre-trial mode.
Last January, the SEC charged cryptocurrency lender Genesis Global Capital and the bankrupt crypto exchange Gemini Trust with offering unregistered securities. They also accused Avraham Eisenberg of misappropriating about $116 million in crypto assets from Mango Markets.
In February, the SEC charged Singapore-based Terraform Labs PTE Ltd. and Do Hyeong Kwon with producing a multi-billion dollar crypto asset securities fraud involving an algorithmic stablecoin and other crypto asset securities. At the end of July, the SEC sued Richard Heart and Hex, PulseChain, and PulseX (unincorporated entities controls) for conducting unregistered offerings of crypto asset securities that raised $1 billion from investors.
In August, plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit against 18 venture capital firms they claim conspired with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX Group to commit multi-billion dollar frauds. Then in November, Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven counts of fraud for stealing billions of dollars from customer accounts and of defrauding lenders to the FTX sister company, Alameda Research. The government then dropped a host of other charges on grounds that a new trial would delay his sentencing.
In a separate class action lawsuit, Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) were accused of violating federal and California antitrust laws by attempting to monopolize the cryptocurrency market. In November, the Department of Justice sued Binance and CZ for money laundering, unlicensed money transmission, and criminal sanctions violations. In a landmark settlement, Binance admitted to the violations and agreed to pay more than $4 billion to resolve other violations, and CZ pleaded guilty to criminal charges.
In a roundtable discussion, John Mannino, chief compliance officer at sFOX, which bills itself as the only federally chartered crypto for institutions, agreed that 2023 saw some “really terrible things” that gave the crypto industry a “big black eye.” But, he added, everyone now knows that bad actors are going to be held accountable. Mannino predicted that BlackRock’s ETFs can fill a huge pent-up desire to enter the crypto space, and that Bitcoin will drive demand in 2024.
In Mannino’s view, “Many who took some dubious actions have fallen by the wayside and the true players who focus on compliance and look to the future are beginning to see some fruits.” Referring to the Binance case, Mannino focused on some “extremely problematic” things that compliant organizations do address.
First, while the government estimated that Binance should have filed at least 100,000 suspicious activity reports, they never filed a single one. They helped finance terrorist groups, took money from ransomware criminals, never reported activity that came from child sexual abuse, and never reported dark web activity from drugs and counterfeiting. Lastly, they allowed customers to sign up with just an email and without any Know Your Client process. They just did not care.
During the discussion, Ryan Kirkley, managing partner at Singularity Venture Capital and Cryptan Labs, cautioned that the courts are saying that any Bitcoin used to launder money or for other nefarious activities cannot enter institutional funds like an ETF, and that 30 to 60 percent of Bitcoin in circulation can be traced back to Silk Road activities.
Only those wearing rose-colored glasses, he said, could ignore the takedowns of SBF and CZ. For those and other reasons, Kirkley added, crypto confidence and exchange confidence are at all-time lows. And, he added, there is no preeminent leader showing a serious attempt at compliance. But it is worse in the Middle East, Asia, and Russia, where it is a “wild west.” Middle Eastern nations have no qualms about laundering Russian money, for example.
Westerners today are careful not to buy oil from Russia because the fines for doing so can be as high as the exact dollar amount of the oil being held. The same is now holding true for crypto assets, especially if there emerges a global regulatory environment that can trace coins all the way back to the first date they were mined.
Still, said Kirkley, blockchain is still “the future,” and one reason is that today you can move money in 15 minutes that used to take three to five business days. Yet many today do not see Bitcoin or Ethereum as realistic solutions to institutional financial problems. Mannino chimed in that large Wall Street traditional finance players like JP Morgan are betting on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology as part of the future.
Swartz suggested that a lot of confusion about blockchain comes from not understanding that it is simple – even boring – to keep books and records in immutable ledgers that cannot be easily altered. Private ledger technologies can provide additional trust, and trust is key to the future.
Mannino was hopeful that the regulatory framework being developed in Europe can guide Congress toward creating comprehensive crypto regulation to the United States, though he doubts anything can happen in a presidential election year.
Swartz pointed to compliance managers (like Mannino) as essential to the future of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Venture capitalists and growth equity firms have known this, as have the public markets, yet every sector continues to have its shar of noncompliant actors.
At the end of the day, Swartz said, “it’s just we need to be good stewards of the future and good fiduciaries.” We need to give people confidence that we can do business without breaking the law or even bending the law into gray areas with questionable transactions.
Today, he concluded, we are having a bull market where people are actually talking about compliance and taking it seriously – and that’s a good sign. We need people who will stop bad transactions from occurring – true heroes who spread the word that bad actors are anathema to the future of the digital economy.
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