More than finding answers, what matters is asking questions “, he explains Luca Colombo, Country Director of Meta in Italy. And this will do Meta Boost: guide to green, launched by Meta. It is a program to help Italian SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) to take actions for the climate, reduce CO emissions2push them to grow their business sustainably and build an online presence.
But the starting point is precisely the awareness of how and how much a company pollutes. “A step that large companies have taken for some time, but that smaller ones are struggling to take”, observes Colombo. “SMEs represent 99.7% of European companies and one third of total employment. They are essential for economic growth and development, but have a high ecological footprint, which corresponds to about 70% of the pollution caused by enterprises in the EU “.
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Alongside Meta, in the Italian version of a project already active at an international level, there are Sme Climate Hub, Legambiente e Confcommercio Young Entrepreneurs.
Giorgio Zampettigeneral manager of Legambiente, goes into more detail: “Making businesses, especially small and medium-sized ones, aware of the measures and tools available to them to minimize the direct and indirect impacts of their activities is the goal of this collaboration. From the reduction of energy consumption to the implementation of renewables, the steps to be taken are different, but essential to tackle a climate crisis that requires us to halve climate-changing emissions by the end of the decade and to eliminate them by 2050. A challenge to be taken. win all together “.
Meta Boost: guide to green is divided into a webinar openheld on April 21 in Romeit’s a online platform with training videos and case histories. “We focus mainly on the hospitality, agri-food and catering sectors. Facebook is a showcase for companies of all kinds, but these companies in Italy are more numerous and have the greatest potential for growth”, continues Colombo.
“The materials available concern five points: first, gather the working group and reflect on how the need for an eco-sustainable company policy is recognized as a choice of the whole company. After analyzing the direct impact, we move on to the indirect one. , for example the emissions deriving from the type of energy used, whether renewable or not. So it is the turn of the value chain, and here we must go back to the behavior of suppliers. In the first three points we try to understand the ecological impact of the company , and for this it is also necessary to be able to quantify it with measurements that are as reliable as possible, and only then is it possible to imagine intervening, perhaps rationalizing the management of warehouses, reducing or renewing the car fleet, using machinery that consumes less, and so on. fifth point is to take note that it is not always possible to reach zero emissions, and then it is necessary to find a way to compensate for the part that is not n you can delete “.
Saving energy also means saving tout court, and therefore ecological awareness is also good for the balance sheet: “The data show that those who have chosen to invest in green have performed better in recent years in terms of turnover, internationalization and the ability to generate employment. you can improvise: sustainability choices are a matter of corporate culture but also of skills; this is why training is an essential ally “, he declares Andrea Colzanipresident of the young people of Confcommercio.
The objection that could be made to Meta in general, ea Facebook in particular, is that with nearly three billion connected users, and enormous amounts of data exchanged every day, the social network still has a considerable ecological impact. “But it is decreasing: in the last 4 years, emissions have fallen by 94% and in 2020 we have reached the zero emissions milestone for our global operations,” observes Colombo.
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Meanwhile Metacon Stripe, Alphabet, Shopifye McKinsey Sustainability announced the launch of Frontier, with investments of $ 925 million over nine years to purchase permanent CO removal2 from suppliers capable of creating innovative solutions. And the metaverse? “Certainly it will lead to higher consumption, given the computing power required, but we count that on the whole it will also result in a positive move for the environment: meeting in a virtual office means not being forced to travel, and thus pollution is avoided. of airplanes, cars and other means of transport “.