Business as a tool for change

On capitalism done right.

I was the kind of teenager who read No Logo and The Beauty Myth and Chomsky (I forget which Chomsky) and watched bankers and governments do things they obviously shouldn't (sub-prime mortgages, illegal wars) and concluded that capitalism was the cause of all the world's problems.

It's an opinion that didn't change much as I grew up. I spent a year buying clothes only from charity shops. I moved jobs until I was sure I was employed in something other than maximising shareholder value. I buy as little as possible, and I try to buy it from local and sustainable businesses, and I normally feel quite guilty about it.

I should have noticed, perhaps, that those local and sustainable businesses were... well, businesses. Managing to sell things that people need, for money, without accumulating wealth into the pockets of a very few and not paying their taxes and poisoning large swathes of water and lobbying governments to act against the public interest and ignoring accumulating evidence about the harm they're causing.

"A lot of people look at big corporates and point the finger," says Leo Hewett, founder of Core3, "but the collective power of small and medium businesses is probably even bigger, in terms of how we can actually move the needle on capitalism in general."

In 2022, Leo tells me, he got tired of working for a traditionally capitalist company and decided to set up a better one. "The more senior you get in a big, listed, global business, the more you start to see what they really care about. It's not their fault, it's how they're structured; they have to please their shareholders," he says.

"I did a lot of reflecting on my values, and then tried to find a structure which would actually hold me accountable to them. If I want to give back, or help others, how do I measure it? How do I track it? There's a book called the Conscious Capitalism Field Guide, which I read. And that talks about how to move away from that traditional capitalism that just measures profit and drains resources, towards a holistic, multi-stakeholder way of looking at things.

"And as long as enough people move in that direction, then everyone has to follow suit, because that becomes just the way that we do business now. I think both corporate and individual customers are demanding more conscious businesses, looking at packaging waste, how companies recycle, do they have a circular model? Is there a B Corp logo on the bottle? And if you don't keep up, you're going to get left behind."

The way Andy Hawkins sees it, he tells me, is that we're on our way towards that tipping point, when responsible capitalism becomes just the way that things are done. Andy runs Business on Purpose, a Bristol-based organisation that helps companies achieve B Corp status, a certification that a business meets high standards of environmental and social responsibility. There are over five million small and medium businesses in the UK, and so if enough of them can start to do business at least responsibly, if not explicitly for good - B Corp isn't the final destination, Andy says, but it is a great set of principles to hang your hat on as a starting point - then that will make a big difference.

Ellie Good, Chief Purpose Officer at Reuseabox, is surprised by the number and variety of positive initiatives she's become aware of since she started connecting with the B Corp community. "I’ve met so many amazing people," she says, "doing sustainable funerals, getting people to get coffins that biodegrade, or doing a sustainable clothes swap so people don't put all their clothes in landfill - there's so many different things happening that you wouldn't even think of.

"I find the climate crisis pretty terrifying, actually," she says, "and I think as individuals we're quite powerless; this is a problem that politicians and world leaders have to face. And it does get overwhelming if you feel like you have to solve the whole problem. But for me, I feel like I can have an impact in the company that I work for now.

“We need thousands of different solutions. The answer isn’t just that everyone gets an electric car, or everybody stops flying. We need to have solutions in every single sector. I think my advice to anyone wanting to help would be to look at what you enjoy doing, what you're good at, and seeing how you can help."

I loved this. What if you didn't have to solve the whole problem all at once? What if you could, in fact, eat the elephant with the spoon? Or even just pick the bit of the elephant that looks edible to you today?

Reuseabox, for instance, sells used cardboard boxes to save them from recycling; their reuse model has saved around 20,000 trees, 6,000 tonnes of carbon and a billion litres of water over the last nine years¹ . Core3 does recruitment that doesn't treat people like commodities. Paycaptain has created a payroll service that makes gender pay gap reporting easy and helps improve employees' financial resilience. None of these are the whole solution, but they're all a small - and most importantly, possible - bit of a bigger solution.

Then there's the relationship to profit. "You can't change that businesses need to make a profit to survive, but you can change what they do with that money," says Simon Bocca, Paycaptain's founder.

Paycaptain plants trees, buys carbon credits to cover emissions from suppliers where they can't find ones aligned with their values, and covers the costs of payroll charitable giving. Reuseabox is part of the Million Tree Pledge and 1% for the Planet. Core3 invests 3% of its revenue (it's why there's a 3 in the company name) in three social partners, one each for people, planet and progress.

"For those three organisations, we've raised just over £45,000 that we've given back in two years. It changes the feeling when you make a placement. We feel it, our clients feel it, our team feels it," Leo says.

"While we're growing and investing, that 3% of revenue can be 40% of our profit. And people have asked, 'Would you change it, now that you know what it actually means?' but I wouldn't. It's our identity, it's who we are.

"Yes, that £45 grand could have been in my back pocket, and that would have been lovely. But I don't see it as a loss. I see it as a gain, because we're gaining at our social impact, we're making a difference, we're gaining fulfilment as a team."

"You don't have to be Patagonia overnight," says Andy, "it's just ordinary people, wanting to be a little bit better." And that, maybe, adds up.

¹ Ellie cautions that the model Reuseabox use to measure their impact is reviewed and changed as the underlying data changes, so this isn’t an exact science. 

Their latest model, created  with independent environmental consultants and Dr Lan Qie from the University of Lincoln, finds that every tonne of cardboard reused instead of recycled saved 3.5 trees, 1.1 tonnes of carbon and 202,000 litres of water. 

Ellie estimates they’ve reused around 11 million boxes since the business started in 2015, and the maths above is based on the 1,950 average-sized cardboard boxes that make up one tonne.