Sustainable Leadership Framework

At Primal Patch, we want to offer our community a business that can hold integrity to its environmental statements.  We want to share with you a brief overview of how we make environmentally inclusive decisions within our business. 

It might first be helpful to touch on greenwashing.  Greenwashing is a term meant to describe deceptive green marketing practices.  For example it might mean a business claims to be carbon neutral but really isn’t.  Or that a 0 waste business is actually producing waste.

Well, we aren’t here to make claims about being carbon neutral or having no environmental impact.  

We do use gas powered machines, we get to and from site in our gas powered vehicles and our office is not net 0.

What we are doing is making the best decisions we can within the reality we live.  

When it came to running a Sustainable business we reached out to Gudrun Ludorf-Weaver, founder and President of Sustainable Cobourg.  She has worked in close connection to the township of Cobourg and is a leading pioneer of environmental change in Northumberland.

Together, we have developed a framework to help business’s answer the questions we must be asking in the name of the environment. 

Questions like, what if a customer wants to plant an aggressive invasive species or wants to install rubber mulch?  What if the more sustainable option is more expensive and we stand to lose a bid?  What tools can help us determine which path to take?

Let’s think about it in terms of how we manage health and safety.  How is that streamlined throughout a business?

Health and safety becomes embedded into the very culture of our business’s.   The WSIB and the Ministry of Labour worked closely together to create policies and procedures we can follow.  Policies we train on, meet about and track.  Policies that if broken, have assigned accountability.

It is our belief that by creating an environmental policy to help guide us, we can start to act in the best interest of our planet. 

Now let’s talk about the meat and potatoes of this framework.  It has 6 steps that we will briefly review below.  

First, we make our organizations aware of the reality. 

This is the stage of research.  We ask questions about our global, national and local environment.  We look at the innovations taking place in our industry or how our business might align with that.  We also touch on the three pillars of sustainability and how those pillars might impact our decisions. 

Second, we look at reality. 

This stage of the framework is when we take a hard look at our reality.  Where is our business in relation to the current global climate or our industries innovations? 

Next we begin to talk about the specific goals we may have for our business.  

Having reviewed the environmental reality of our planet and our industry we can start to pull out parts of our organizations that we would like to improve on.  

Once we have written our goals, we then attach some data.

Every goal needs a data point or we would never know once we’ve won.  If you want to cut down on emissions, how much do you produce and how much can we lower it?  We need to quantify our goals so that in the last step, we can measure them.

The next step is accountability. 

Who will be monitoring that goal?  What is its deadline?  Make it official. 

Lastly, we measure our progress and revise as needed. 

We have to assume we won’t get it right the first time.  Sit down and look at the goal and the efforts made towards it and see if the data moved as a result of our actions.  This is how we optimize our efforts. 

Along with Sustainable Cobourg we have put together a presentation to act as a free resource to promote holistic thinking within our organizations, families and projects.  We will attach that video below if you would like more information on our Sustainable decision making process.  

At Primal Patch, we research the products we use, mindfully choose our plantings and avoid toxic materials.  We make our decisions through an environmentally inclusive lens.  Although we might not always be able to provide a 0 foot print service, we can promise that it has worked through the above framework.