How to publish your intentions

If you drive over the Anzac Bridge in Sydney, you might spot the Hymix concrete silo off to the side.

For months I’ve noticed the little “Carbon Neutral Signage” at the bottom and wondered what it was referring to, so I finally remembered to look it up.

Mesh Direct are the signage company who painted the silo, and on their website they state that they’re 100% carbon neutral… through offsets.

If you’ve been on this mailing list for more than 5 minutes, you may know what a bugbear offsets are for me… I don’t think they’re bad, I just dislike when they form an entire net-zero strategy over a strategy of reducing emissions (ICYMI, read this).

You may also have caught my strong preference for an organisation to publicly declare it’s intentions with regard to sustainability, even if the initiatives behind those intentions haven’t started yet.

This is exactly what that looks like:

So… far from being a public shaming of Mesh Direct for putting all their emissions eggs in an offsets basket, I actually think this is a great example of how an organisation can get rolling with it’s climate initiatives AND create momentum for even higher impact next-steps.

COPY THIS.

You can absolutely publish what you’d love to achieve, what you intend to do, what you hope your organisation will look like, even if it’s a long way from looking like that.

Big round of applause 👏👏