According to Tim Keaveney, there’s never been a better time to set up “a business with a purpose”. He should know. He is a co-founder of Homethings, one of the five environmentally minded, entrepreneurial companies that have been picked as winners of the Times Earth Advertising Fund, this newspaper’s competition to reward small businesses with bright ideas about reducing waste, cutting emissions and boosting sustainability.
“All around the world, you see that entrepreneurs are acting faster than governments and big businesses to solve our environmental problems,” Keaveney said. “For me, the inspiring thing about being an entrepreneur in this time is the feeling that the bigger we grow, the more good we can do in the world.”
Winning the competition should help him and the other winners do just that: the companies will each receive free advertising space worth £200,000 to help them to spread the word and win customers eager to make a change. Here is the story of these five companies.
HOMETHINGS
Keaveney, 30, got the idea for Homethings, a producer of zero-waste cleaning products, while in the bathroom of a house in London that he was sharing with strangers. Each housemate had their own stash of lotions, gels and sprays, with countless single-use plastic containers spread around the room.
The experience inspired him to create a business that could help to turn the rising tide of plastic. When he read that household cleaning sprays were 90 per cent water, he saw his chance. Why not simply sell the remaining 10 per cent of active ingredients in a pill that consumers could dissolve into a reusable bottle? That way, you not only would reduce packaging, but also carbon emissions from shipping.
Advertisement
Homethings, based in London, now sells a range of tablets that turn into cleaning products when dissolved in tap water. It also sells reusable bottles. About half its 40,000 customers are subscribers, regularly receiving cardboard boxes of tablets in the post.
Keaveney sees his business as one small part of a new, less wasteful economy that will have to emerge to fight our overlapping environmental crises. “The notion that we buy something, use it once and chuck it away, that has to die out and it has to die out quickly,” he said.
UFO DRIVE
This car rental company combines two innovations: it offers its customers electric cars only and it does so via an app that does away with the tiresome paperwork and queueing usually involved in renting a car. It leases cars in 19 locations in Europe, four of which are in London.
Aidan McClean, its co-founder, thought of creating an app after waiting an hour to rent a car at Vienna airport in 2017. “The return process was the last straw,” he said. On the flight home, he wrote a list of everything he wanted to correct about car rental.
As eager as he was to make the process quicker, he also wanted to make it greener. A keen cyclist, he was sick of breathing in the toxic fumes of petrol cars. When his wife asked him what he would call his Portsmouth-based company, he said he didn’t know, but that its customer service had to be “out of this world”. She replied: “Like a UFO?”
Advertisement
McClean, 49, claims that the company’s app allows its customers to register, book a car and unlock it with their phone, all in two minutes. “There’s no human interaction,” he said. “That’s a big attraction.”
CLIM8 INVEST
In recent years, investors have flocked to companies that say they have strong ESG credentials; that is, companies that hold themselves to a high standard environmentally, socially and in their governance. Clim8 Invest is a trading app that claims to go “far beyond ESG”, catering for users who want to know that their investments are helping to build a net zero economy.
“ESG is BS,” said Duncan Grierson, 52, who founded the London-based company in 2019 after nearly two decades in clean energy businesses. “It just screens out the worst offenders in each industry, the worst-offending oil and gas companies but not all oil and gas companies. They’re not screening for companies that are having a positive impact.”
That is what Clim8 Invest aims to do. Its team of experts in sustainable investment offer users the chance to invest in companies in six fields: clean energy, clean technology, sustainable food, electric mobility, clean water and the circular economy.
Last year users reaped, on average, a 25 per cent return on their investments, “which should help dispel the myth that you need to give up good returns to invest with impact”, Grierson said.
Advertisement
He argues that “in moving your money into the sort of companies we’re investing in, you can feel you’re making a difference. It’s partly about empowerment.”
SURI
When Gyve Safavi, 38, and Mark Rushmore, 36, told toothbrush factory owners that they wanted to design a fully recyclable electric toothbrush, it took them a while to realise they were being laughed at. They were pitching their idea over Zoom and the owners’ titters were hidden by muted mics.
“We told them we wanted to make it modular so people could repair it,” Gyve said. “They said, ‘Why would you want to repair it? Just sell them a new one.’ ” Recently, however, the two co-founders have received a vote of confidence, raising £800,000 for Suri, which is short for sustainable rituals.
The company is taking pre-orders for the world’s first fully recyclable electric toothbrush. Its bristles are made from corn starch and castor oil, which will degrade in landfill but not in use. When it breaks, Suri will recycle its aluminium body and send you a new one if you post it to them.
“We’re trying to make it as easy as possible to choose a sustainable product,” Rushmore said, “one that looks beautiful, that’s really effective and is easy to recycle.”
Advertisement
CREATING TOMORROW’S FORESTS
A couple of years ago, Charlotte’s Wood in Somerset was a boggy field, with little but grass growing on it. Now, however, it hosts saplings of willow, alder, cherry and birch and families of voles, barn owls and kingfishers.
This is all thanks to Creating Tomorrow’s Forests. Founded during the pandemic by Nick Hollingworth, 38, and Elisabeth Boivin, 31, a Canadian couple, it’s a habitat-restoration company funded by both individual and corporate donations. Whereas many forestry companies try to cram in as many trees as possible, the focus of Creating Tomorrow’s Forests is biodiversity.
Simone Webber, the company’s senior ecologist, said that “when we select our tree species, we think what nectar and berries they produce and whether they will draw in birds and mammals to create a thriving ecosystem”. The company plants only on its own land in Somerset and Devon, allowing donors to visit and witness the biodiversity they have helped create.
“It’s really amazing,” Webber said. “They can see how all the species interact. So there’s an educational element to what we do. I don’t think companies support us just to burnish their corporate image. The people who work in the sustainability departments of the businesses we work with seem genuinely to be trying to make their businesses operate in a more ethical manner.”
How to get ahead in advertising and still go low-carbon
Is the advertising industry helping to push the world towards a climate catastrophe? Jonathan Wise had been working in it for 15 years when he surmised that it was.
Advertisement
Having been a planning director at the advertising agency J Walter Thompson, he became convinced of this while studying for a master’s in sustainability and responsibility at Ashridge Business School in Hertfordshire in 2010. His studies taught him that household consumption was a big driver of carbon emissions.
“My job was to drive household consumption,” he said. “So I came to the realisation that the better I was at my job, the more damage I was doing. There were tears. It was a midlife crisis.”
A 2015 paper in the Journal of Industrial Ecology corroborated his view. Its authors found that household consumption was responsible for more than 60 per cent of global CO2 emissions. Wise, now 50, later worked on a study that found the sales boost from advertising was responsible for 28 per cent of UK emissions.
Wise quit his job and began to wonder how advertisers might repurpose their skills to help avert an environmental disaster. In 2018 he co-founded Purpose Disruptors, a network of advertising professionals who want to do their bit in the transition to net zero. The group, based in Manchester, encourages agencies to ditch clients that are not investing enough in a low-carbon future, and clients in industries where low-carbon technologies will not be available for a long time, such as aviation.
It also encourages agencies to work with new firms building a low-carbon future and with polluting companies that are trying to change their ways, such as carmakers transitioning to electric vehicles.
On the face of it, Purpose Disruptors seems to be asking marketing agencies to choose planet over profit. Yet to Ben Essen, an affiliate of Purpose Disruptors, that’s a false choice. Essen is the global chief strategy officer at the marketing agency Iris, which decided not to help Qatar advertise the 2022 Fifa World Cup because of the state’s large fossil fuel business and poor human rights record.
“Being more choosy about what we take on has meant missing out on short-term income opportunities, but the bigger picture is very different,” Essen said. “Our sustainable futures consulting is one of our highest-growth areas. We’ve also found we attract more like-minded clients who share our values and want to drive transformation in their sector.
“And finally, it’s great for reputation. The marketing consultancy Oystercatchers has just named us agency of the year.”
