Our day started early in the morning last Friday, at a meeting with our funders, Contact Singapore. At the meeting the group presented our findings so far, as well as talked about our progress and future plans for continuing the project. At our presentation, there were two representatives from the Contact Singapore Graduate Project supervisor team, as well as their in-house writer that took notes and asked questions so that we may be featured in their magazine. After our presentation, we got our photo taken by a professional photographer for Contact Singapore’s magazine!
Almost immediately, (after a quick coffee/lunch of course) we had another meeting, this time with former Executive Director of the Singapore Environment Council, Howard Shaw. We had been introduced to him, through Evelyn Wong, an extremely helpful and kind woman that moved from Canada to Singapore, and is involved in the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. I personally found our meeting with Howard Shaw to be one of the most interesting and enlightening experiences of our project. The amount of knowledge he had about Singapore the area of sustainability was astounding. Also, I found his perspectives to be very down to earth and practical. I also noticed my MBA mindset starting to creep in as he talked about some of the inefficiencies that existed within this area; one example being the recycling system. He mentioned that recycling bins had been installed in his office building, yet it was all dumped in to one truck and then resorted again at the plant! Our team discussed the potential business opportunity that may exist in this situation as we left the building…
Then we were off to a meeting with Mr. Thomas Thomas at Compact Singapore, a focal point in Asia for the UN Global Compact. It was very interesting to hear Mr. Thomas’ perspective on the role of CSR as compared to Howard Shaw. CSR in its true form according to Mr. Thomas was virtue, as opposed to something that could be used towards financial advantage. One interesting thing he talked about was implicit CSR, something that individuals within a corporation do out of their own good will to help others. The example he gave was a woman that worked for a company that bought chilli from local farmers. Often there would be excess harvest, that would drive prices down and result in a large amount being wasted. This woman decided that she would teach the farmers how to make chilli sauce so that they would be able to sustain their products for a longer time, and still able to sell them in the future.
After an already eventful morning and afternoon, we headed to High Commisioner of Canada’s house. We had met him at the earlier event with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and he invited us to an event at his house; a networking event surrounding the recent ‘Green Building Week’ in Singapore. Surrounded by Canadians again, as well as others from Singapore and other countries, we were able to meet many very interesting people from architects and green building auditors to exterior paint product salespeople and engineers. We even met someone from BCA, an organization that certifies green buildings under a set of criteria. He was very interested in our research as he had indicated the challenge in persuading hotels to become BCA certified. After an eventful day, with our minds full of things to think about, we headed back to get a good night’s sleep so that we would be refreshed and ready for the next day.
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