Some companies are born green; others have
greenness thrust upon them, especially lately. The U.K.-based cosmetics company
Lush ranks among the former. A strong environmental ethos—reflected in its use
of minimal packaging, for example—baked in from its inception in 1995 explains
why Lush today has one of the most rigorously sustainable managed travel
programs on the planet.
Lush's program includes a no-fly policy for
door-to-door journeys under eight hours, heavy restrictions on taxi usage and
deployment of an in-house travel team that vets all bookings for compliance
with sustainability policies.
In the past, Lush also has imposed an internal
carbon tax on flights. For the future, it aims never to return more than 20
percent of travel and transport emissions recorded in 2019.
“We really don’t think like a corporate. We
think like activists most of the time,” said Lush strategy lead for Earth care
Ruth Andrade. “How can we make sure we are contributing to life rather than
contributing to human extinction? The environmental crisis is so existential
that, even for us to make sure we have a future, it’s so fundamental we
actually contribute to creating the conditions for life to exist.”
Travel is problematic for Lush, as it is for
any business with an avowed commitment to sustainability. CO2 emissions by
corporations are divided into three categories: Scope 1 (direct emissions from
owned or controlled sources), Scope 2 (from power sources consumed by the
company) and Scope 3 (indirect emissions, including business travel). Partly
because of successful efforts already made with the first two, Lush’s “Scope 3
emissions completely dwarf our Scope 1 and 2 emissions,” said Andrade. Within
Scope 3, “when you take out the supply chain, then the next one is transport.”
Yet Lush has more than 900 shops spread across
49 countries. Thus, it faces a familiar dilemma. Stopping travel completely is a
scarcely conceivable option, but “the transport sector is one of the hardest to
decarbonize,” said Andrade. “It’s really tricky to replace aviation fuel. Our
strategy is partnering with the early adopters of new technology and making
sure we’re reducing the need for travel as much as possible.”
Since its early days, Lush has operated a
no-fly rule. Originally, this applied to all domestic travel in the U.K. and to
shorter international journeys with good train options, such as Eurostar. Five
years ago the policy was refined. “To get a train from Scotland down to Poole
[the south coast town in England that is the company’s home], you’re looking at
10 hours door to door,” said global travel manager David Blackhurst-Evans.
“This is where we have to start looking holistically at the welfare of the
travelers and their safety, and also it’s their personal time. To take an
entire working day out to travel just isn’t viable. That’s when we said that any
travel over eight hours door to door can be done by flights.”
Travelers can book journeys through an e-mail
or a call to the in-house travel team with a reservation request, or they can book
online or offline themselves through Click Travel, Lush’s retained travel
management company. Either way, a reason for travel always must be provided,
and all bookings ultimately come for scrutiny to Blackhurst-Evans’ department.
There “really is no bending” the no-fly rule,
he said, even if, as is frequently the case for U.K. domestic travel, the rail alternative
is significantly more expensive. “We do have travelers asking, ‘Do you want me
to pay £180 for a return train ticket when I can get a flight for £50?’ ” said
Blackhurst-Evans. “That makes no difference. If the train fare is £180, we have
to pay £180 because that fits with our being sustainable.”
Taxis are permitted at unsociable hours but
otherwise employees are expected to use public transport for short journeys,
and sometimes travelers are issued local transport tickets alongside their
inter-city train tickets. For company events, the travel team provides
instructions on how to reach the venue by bus, local train, mass transit system
or on foot.
In addition, Lush has introduced an electric
bus, nicknamed Electra, to shuttle between its various sites in Poole and provide
a commuter service in the morning and evening.
There are similar rules for Lush personnel worldwide,
although inevitably they have to be adapted for the United States, owing to the
sparseness of its rail network. In “those type of countries they fly a lot
more, but that’s because they have to, so they don’t do as many trips as we
would here in Europe,” said Blackhurst-Evans. “The trips tend to be longer
because they are making good use of their time before they fly back again.”
Wherever they are based, employees are trained
in carbon literacy and educated about sustainable travel on joining Lush, “so
there’s no shock when they start traveling that we have these policies and
guidelines in place,” said Blackhurst-Evans. “We give them a copy of the policy
and sit down and go through it with them.”
In any case, Blackhurst-Evans added, thinking
sustainably “comes quite naturally to us within the business. I’m a travel
specialist, but I work for Lush because I agree with their ethics. We’re
already on the same page and have the same goals.”
For that reason, employees frequently opt for the
train even for journeys longer than eight hours. On the day BTN interviewed Andrade,
she was speaking from Germany, where she had traveled by rail from Poole.
According to Blackhurst-Evans, interventions by
the travel team when they judge a flight reservation unnecessary are “regular,”
but “I wouldn’t say it happens a lot.” But how can a travel department
determine whether a flight is justifiable? “We as the travel team have the
autonomy to push back and say we don’t think a trip is needed, but we have to
remember we are a global business,” he said. “We understand the business very
well and are connected to all parts of it. When we see a conversation needs to
be had, we will do it. We talk to the traveler and their manager to fully
understand why they are traveling and whether it is in line with our travel
policy.” Usually, the line manager makes the final decision.
A Tax Detour
Not all deterrents introduced at Lush have been
successful. In 2008, the company introduced a “carbon tax” on every flight it
booked because there is no taxation on aviation fuel. “We thought we would set
a good example and tax ourselves on flights, so we set a carbon price of £50
per metric ton of carbon, which is the minimum it should cost if the carbon
market is going to curb carbon emissions [the typical carbon price for
offsetting in 2021 is $3-$5 per metric ton],” said Andrade.
Lush used the “tax” revenue to fund groups
opposing aviation, road schemes, fracking and coal, but, said Andrade, “we ran
it for 10 years and then realized it wasn’t doing what we needed it to do. It
wasn’t really disincentivizing people from flying. People were feeling ‘Oh,
we’re funding so much cool stuff through flying.’ The financial barrier wasn’t
there for people or even for the business.
“We are already funding activism anyway, so we
can continue to do that, but it’s better to use that money on a robust climate
strategy that actually helps reduce transport emissions.”
Now, Andrade and Blackhurst-Evans are confident
Lush can keep travel-related emissions well below where they were in 2019. “One
good thing which has come out of the pandemic is that people have realized they
don’t need to travel as much,” said Blackhurst-Evans. “There is going to be
travel needed, but the phrase ‘travel smarter’ has come out of this, and people
are thinking ‘Do I really need to travel?’ ”
Blackhurst-Evans sees controlling demand as the
only serious way to make business travel more sustainable, but there are
limited opportunities on the supplier management side too. Most fundamental
among these is favoring flights on routes and aircraft with lower emissions.
With regard to accommodation, Lush adds hotels with good records for
environmental and social responsibility to its preferred vendor program
wherever it can.
Overall, however, Blackhurst-Evans has become skeptical
about many sustainability claims made by companies, especially if their green credentials
are based on offsetting, a concept Lush derides.
“Offsetting is a cop-out,” said Andrade. “It’s
so easy now to buy offsets. We’re hoping we can decarbonize without resorting
to offsets. You do get gold-standard offsetting projects that have really
thought out the communities they are in and take a more systemic view toward
what are called co-benefits. They are OK as a transitional strategy, but people
are relying too much on it. They say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll do an alternative
fuel project in Africa or a re-forestation project in Brazil.’ Of course, all
those things are needed but in their own right, not as a cop-out so we can
continue our lifestyles in the global north.”
Andrade is almost as dubious about sustainable aviation
fuel, which several mega-corporations in recent months have pledged to buy from
airlines. “We don’t think this is a panacea,” she said. “SAF is not a solution
that is going to allow us to fly as much as we want. A lot of the discourse
around climate change at the moment is as if we don’t have to change anything
else. We don’t have to look at the business model. We don’t have to do the deep
changes in our economy or our culture. We’re betting a lot on simply replacing
with different technology. SAF can fill a short-term gap while we go for deeper
changes, but we cannot stop at SAF.”
Lush is a company which has made some of those deep
changes to its travel program already and plans even more. How many other
businesses are both willing and able to act similarly?