Tomorrow's Natural Business
Friday, November 11, 2011 at 2:20PM Co-running Tomorrow's Natural Business at ICAEW in London, with Tomorrow's Company and Atos. Currently on is Michael Bremans, Chairman of Ecover International - currently used by around 1.2m households in the UK.
'80 - founded
'92 - first ecological factory
'93 Roll of Honour UNEP
All of these were part of the evolution of consciousness of toxicity of products on our environment, that probably started with the publishing of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in the '60s
Our work on sustainability started with our products, and we relied on our own staff. We learned the hard way about who needs to do the measurement - half of our lab staff are now biologists, and we've developed our own model as we couldn't find what we needed in the market. The Ecover Diamond model looks at:
1. Sourcing, 2. Usage, 3. Absorption
Usage is important but 7 out of the 13 elements are part of the Absorption phase, not the other two. One key element is CDV - critical dilution volume - the theoretical minimum level to neutralise the effect of the amount of product that you've just used. A standard 60g of Ecover washing powder needs 2500 litres of water to neutralise; the standard for the European eco label it's 4500, and the standard is 10-15000 litres. 50,000 litres of water needed to neutralise one dose of shampoo, as the minimum European standard.
Fermentation using naturally occurring bacteria to create surfectants is the process we use to get the products we need. Ecover are using bottles made out of 'Plantastic' sugarcane derived PET.
Ecover give triple travel benefits to people who travel by bike, double to those who car share. They've used social media a lot to get a voice out to the market that would have been too expensive within traditional comms channels.
"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future" JFK
ecover, innovation, sustainability, waste 
