Sustainability NGO
I spent more than four years in sustainability and environmental NGOs before joining McKinsey in Beijing. During the early years of my career, working for NGOs allowed me to observe how forest, climate and other critical environmental ecosystems have been degraded in many places and understand how urgently we need do something about it.
Driving tech-enablement in sustainability
I joined McKinsey in 2017, primarily focused on driving clients’ sustainability and resource productivity through building and scaling tech-enabled approaches. In late 2017, I joined a long-term project with a big retail client to cut their scope three greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by increasing resource efficiency among their global suppliers. Considering the complexity of the supplier network across 10+ product categories in different locations, it’s difficult to build and track scalable impact without adopting a digital approach. Our team developed a solution that digitized our knowledge on resource efficiency, including features to calculate GHG emission and track the progress of initiatives. Suppliers got their own interface to receive lever recommendations on how to improve their resource efficiency, while clients can track network impact online. With this, we scaled this project to ~1,000 suppliers in the last four years and reached millions tons of GHG emission reductions.
In early 2020, I led adoption of a group of new tools focused on baselining and benchmarking product environmental footprint. We worked with our product design team to develop recommendations for sustainable product design that help clients improve their products’ sustainability. For example, I joined a team couple of months ago to assess the environmental footprint of a tiny electronic product (about the size of AirPods) that contains more than 50 components. By embracing new capabilities through these tools, we could assess the environmental footprint with granularity of each component level, and provide improvement recommendations to cut at least 25% of the carbon footprint.
A green firm citizen
Apart from my professional work, I now lead the Greater China Green Team to make the firm greener. Green Team members in six locations in this region work closely on topics such as procuring office supplies, reducing food waste, increasing use of paper-based or bio-degradable packaging, and sharing options for greener travel. We regularly invite external speakers and organize outdoor events on green topics for our colleague to build knowledge and drive changes in the way we work and live. Working at McKinsey makes me realize how important it is to have a green culture inside one’s organization.
In my spare time, I like travelling with family and friends and enjoying the beauty of nature. The best environmental education is to teach people – young and older – to observe and treasure what we’ve gotten from nature.