In 2018, Justin and Mark, two members of our Australian Green Team—a group educating and inspiring colleagues to use environmentally sustainable practices—drove a highly effective campaign to reduce single-use plastic in our Sydney, Melbourne and Perth offices to zero.
While many of us are working from home right now, this is an important story for when we return to working from our offices. No one knows exactly what the next normal will look like but with passion and successes like this story we are hopeful it will be more sustainable.
Justin, a law and business economics graduate of The University of New South Wales, joined McKinsey’s Sydney office three years ago. He brought insights from his studies, namely on how people, businesses and governments can work in step to encourage humans to make small, but important behavioral changes, like saving money throughout one’s career for retirement.
Justin was fascinated with these ‘nudge’ tactics and how solving big social problems often requires lots of people to continually make the right small decisions.
“When I first joined McKinsey, I was encouraged by senior leaders to pursue my passion for sustainability and was honored to be chosen as one of 25 One Young World Summit 2018 delegates. During the conference, I was inspired by leaders like Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus, former President of Ireland Mary Robinson, and McKinsey managing partner for the UK and Ireland Dame Vivian Hunt. I met like-minded people who shared my interest in protecting the environment. What I learned there had a huge impact on me. Estimates that the mass of plastic in the oceans will be greater than the mass of fish by 2050, motivated me to work with my Australian colleagues to identify sources of waste throughout our offices.”
Justin worked alongside Green Team member Mark, who joined McKinsey four years ago and whose commitment to sustainability and decarbonization is spurred by his desire to leave his two young sons without a mess to clean up. Mark’s expertise in operations and waste elimination has been instrumental in identifying opportunities to reduce emissions throughout the office.
In partnership with their colleagues, Justin and Mark applied simple tactics to change people’s behavior, including ‘nudge’ tactics Justin studied at university. The Australian Green Team “created posters, showing how many plastic bottles were used each year and the environmental impact of plastics. We placed them on the refrigerators so everyone could see them regularly. We then took simple steps like placing water jugs in front of the water bottles, so people had to move them in order to grab a plastic bottle,” Mark commented.
These tactics were enhanced by working with building management to install filtered and sparkling water taps. Within 10 months, plastic water bottle usage was down 70% and we achieved the goal of getting to zero single-use plastic in October 2019.
“By showing the bigger picture of plastic bottle consumption and making alternative choices available and easy, we reduced our environmental footprint in a relatively short time,” Mark explained.
News of the success in the Australian offices spread throughout the firm and soon the posters urging colleagues to “Use a glass” were in McKinsey offices globally.
Mark and Justin’s success is one example of how the passion of our Green Teams is minimizing our environmental footprint. You can read more about our sustainability work and carbon neutral committment here.