At a concert, it sometimes takes one brave soul to get a reluctant crowd dancing.
The same is true for convincing businesses to embrace the value of sustainable practices, said Heather Burns, CEO of the fledgling Connecticut Sustainable Business Council, which held its Hartford-area launch last week in the downtown offices of law firm Shipman & Goodwin, one of its founding partners.
Tesla, 3M and a variety of other companies with representatives at the event are examples of those leaders who have started the sustainable dance, Burns said.
“As aspiring as these first movers are, and like the guy dancing alone in the field, these folks can’t succeed alone they need that critical group of followers to make their vision a reality,” Burns said.
Such companies still need supply chains, technologies and employees, investors and customers who are place a value on sustainability and “who might be willing to pay a little bit more for an environmentally or socially responsible product,” Burns said.
Shipman partner Andrew Davis, a member of the firm’s environmental practice group, said the council, which launched in October, has applied for nonprofit status, aims to be a convenor to help businesses aim for a triple bottom line that balances financial, environmental and social risks, obligations and opportunities. It’s a growing trend in the corporate world, though Davis said the trend line may “ebb and flow depending on what happens in [Washington] and during the election cycles.”
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin also addressed the approximately 70 attendees, which included representatives from LEGO, 3M, the Connecticut Green Bank and a variety of other public and private entities.
Bronin noted the recent completion of a Parkville fuel cell-powered microgrid as well as the recent grant-funded hiring of a sustainability coordinator, Shubhada Kambli, and infrastructure specialist for the Hartford Climate Stewardship Initiative, which was created early last year and aims to make the city more sustainable in its energy use, food consumption, green space, transportation, waste and water.
“Economic development and sustainability go hand in hand, just as creating a liveable city and environmental sustainability go hand in hand,” Bronin said. “It’s all the more important now that Washington seems to be stepping back a little bit. Climate change may disappear from the White House website. But we can step up.”
It wasn’t the last reference to politics of the evening.
Will Nicholas, a government relations manager for Tesla – which is pushing the state legislature to allow it to sell cars directly to consumers rather than through dealerships – said “thousands” of reservations for the coming Tesla Model 3 are from Connecticut residents, though they must travel to surrounding states to actually purchase the cars. Auto dealers oppose the bill, which passed the legislature’s Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee this week in a tight vote.
Between May 2016 and February of this year, Tesla’s Model S and Model X vehicles accounted for 465 new registrations in Connecticut, according to data Tesla compiled from the Department of Motor Vehicles. The next highest was the Nissan Leaf, at 61, followed by the Volkswagen eGolf, at 29.
Nicholas said he finds it counterintuitive that Connecticut, which has lofty emissions and electric vehicle goals, is such a tough nut to crack for direct sales.
“It’s crazy to me I can go to a state like Indiana and have people not care about electricity as long as it’s at their sockets, and they could care less about EVs, and they could care less about climate change, and they’re happy their former governor [Vice President Mike Pence] is up there in Washington eliminating a lot of the policies that were putting us on a really good trajectory,” Nicholas said. “But when it comes to selling these products that are American-made, they could not be more embracing.”
