Voices | Responsibility Thinking Upstream IMAGINE YOU AND A FRIEND are taking a nice walk along a river when suddenly you see a little girl floating through the rapids, calling for help. You both jump in to rescue the child and get her to safety, only to spot another child floating down the river. You save that one. Then you spot two more kids in the river. Expecting you’ll each take one of the kids drifting through the water, you dive in again, only to turn around and discover your friend is running upstream. You scream at her, “Why are you running away instead of helping!?” She yells back, “I’m going to tackle the lunatic who’s throwing children in the river!” This is the parable that opens a great book by Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest To Solve Problems Before They Happen. According to Heath, humans get stuck in a cycle of response. They focus on addressing problems and putting out fires. People rely on response and reaction because it is easier to see and measure than seeking to identify the root cause of the problem. The concept of upstream thinking applies to virtually all areas of your professional and personal life, but that type of root cause analysis is particularly relevant to work in sustainability. You can seek to measure and reduce waste all day long, and you will have positive but incremental results. What could those results look like if you instead took an upstream approach and sought to eliminate waste from being created in the first place? Our industry tends to get labeled as “brandfill”. We’ve all heard the term. But when I look at waste in the industry, I am confident that, when done right, promo does not fall into this unflattering category. However, even the best promo contributes to waste through its packaging. We aren’t alone in that. A few days ago, I received an Amazon delivery. It was a relatively small item packaged in a brown paper shipping bag, inside a larger plastic bag. Why did the paper shipping bag need to be protected from the elements by the plastic bag,? I wondered, while throwing the plastic bag in the trash and the brown paper mailer in the recycling bin. That just took a moment, but my dissatisfaction from the experience has lingered. Can we focus on elevating the products we sell while simultaneously eliminating the waste associated with the packaging? The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a thought leader in sustainability, has produced an Upstream Innovation Guide focused on root-cause A search for the ultimate answers to promo’s problem of plastic packaging waste by Anne Stone, MAS, CAE Access a glossary of sustainability terms at ppai.org/media/ 7691/glossarysustainableterms.pdf. Dernkadel / Firn / Shutterstock.com 34 • JULY 2023 • PPAI
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