The Green Industry Platform convened a workshop on 20 May 2021, bringing together leading experts to address how to help drive small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) towards improving resource efficiency in their day-to-day operations and throughout supply chains.
The workshop provided an opportunity for participants, including representatives from international organizations, research institutions, non-governmental organizations and business organizations, to learn more about the Green Industry Platform’s Integrated Greening Operations (I-GO) initiative.
The I-GO initiative is designed to build on the vast amount of support services, including SME networks, financial solutions, training programmes and technical assistance, which the Green Industry Platform has put together to better serve SMEs and leading organizations and companies that work with them.
Specifically, I-GO aims to help SMEs simplify access to tailored knowledge and support services; facilitate SME and supporting organization networks; and support implementation actions and performance reporting. Among the tools used to achieve these goals are the SME Support Centre and resource efficiency self-assessment tool, both currently in beta version.
The SME Support Centre has over 350 resources, including case studies, technical guides and online tools – with training solutions, technical assistance and financial incentives to be added soon – to help SMEs develop a resource efficiency strategy and implement targeted actions in a range of areas, such as energy and waste management, material efficiency and chemical sustainability.
The centre’s database supports the online self-assessment tool, which quickly determines an SME’s resource efficiency status, provides a tailored list of recommendations, along with curated knowledge and support services most relevant to their specific needs.
“The self-assessment tool enables an SME to better understand their current resource efficiency status and then learn about the opportunities to improve their specific needs and operations,” said Hannes Mac Nulty, Senior Green Industry Advisor with the Green Industry Platform. “The aim of the self-assessment tool, as well as the database, is to help both SMEs and supporting organizations.”
This includes engagement from multinationals and supply chain clients who can help drive the process. Participants also identified additional functionalities for both tools and highlighted possible avenues to increase their uptake and application, including with tenant companies in eco-industrial parks.
“I-GO’s valuable approach and associated tools could be used by resource efficient and cleaner production (RECP) experts when approaching SMEs to increase the uptake of such strategies and measures,” said Lee-Hender Ruiters, Regional Manager responsible for business development, strategy and innovation at the National Cleaner Production Centre South Africa (NCPC-SA).
Another important aspect of the I-GO initiative will be the need to define a benchmarking system based on a common metric for assessing and standardized reporting on the performance of SMEs, taking into account certain specificities such as location and business sectors.
“I-GO’s pilot deployment phase will crucially test how effective the combination of in-country I-GO partnerships and user-friendly I-GO tools are in helping SMEs access tailored resource efficiency knowledge and support services,” said Beatriz Martins Carneiro, UNEP Regional Coordinator for the Global Opportunities for Sustainable Development Goals (GO4SDGs) initiative in Latin America and the Caribbean.