What is a regenerative business?
Tackling the growing environmental crises is going to take some serious work. In the first instance, businesses are going to have to commit to making and taking less; cutting plastic, reducing road miles, and making products that are designed to be repaired rather than just replaced.
All of this cutting back is necessary. But what replaces it? What’s a positive model for business should look like in the future?
Today we’re looking at the positive model of regenerative business, and how we’re using our environmentally friendly toilet paper and tissue products to bring about change.
What is a regenerative business?
At its core, a regenerative business doesn’t just aim to do less harm to the planet - it seeks to do more good, actively improving the environment and the wider communities it serves.
So rather than just cutting out negative impacts, the climate footprint, plastic pollution, and water waste we talk about regularly on this blog, regenerative businesses try to leave the world better than they found it.
Imagine a farm that doesn't just avoid using harmful pesticides but also brings back traditional farming practices that harmonise with the landscape, cultivating hedgerows and crop rotation to ensure a better diversity of planting and habitats. Far from damaging the local environment, now the farm is enriching it.
Or picture a clothing company that makes all of its clothing with wool from free-roaming sheep herded on land managed to maintain biodiversity and making sure this wool is properly identifiable through the supply chain. The clothing company is making sure that their raw materials aren’t doing any harm, and helping protect the flourishing ecosystem in the region where the sheep graze.
Regeneration vs. sustainability: what’s the difference?
You might be wondering, “Isn’t this just another form of sustainability?” It’s a fair question, but there’s an important difference between the two.
Sustainability is about maintaining balance - keeping things going without depleting resources. The renewable energy we use to manufacture Naked Sprout is more sustainable than fossil fuels because the solar power, wind power, and biomass we use at our factory isn’t going to run out.
Regenerative business, on the other hand, is about restoration and enhancement. It’s about creating systems that are not just sustainable but restorative. Think of sustainability as hitting the pause button on environmental damage, while regeneration is about pressing the rewind button and improving what’s already there.
If we think of environmental impact as a field of flowers, a polluting business would just take flowers from the field until none were left. A sustainable business would take care to make sure it replaced the flowers that it took. And a regenerative business would be actively planting more flowers, enriching the soil, and maybe helping to reintroduce some species of butterflies as well!
While we’re talking about adding more than we take away, we should make a note on offsetting, because offsetting is one way that some companies claim to be regenerating the natural environment, by paying agencies that plant trees.
So, we could include an example of a company that calculates exactly how much CO2e their operations are responsible for, and then pays a company to plant enough trees to hopefully balance it out, and more. We don’t consider offsetting to be a reasonable example of regenerative business, and we don’t offset at Naked Sprout, because there’s just not enough evidence that it works. Greenpeace agrees with us on this!
Four principles of a regenerative business
If offsetting isn’t going to cut it, what does? There are several core principles that guide this approach:
1. Holistic thinking: Regenerative businesses see themselves as part of a larger system, considering the broader impact of their actions on the environment, society, and the economy. They work to bring something valuable on every level.
At Naked Sprout we discuss our environmental credentials at length on this very blog and our website. For social impact we work with the Trussell Trust in the UK Just a Drop abroad, supporting local food banks and global water and sanitation projects. And when it comes to the economy, we believe we are having a positive impact on a market level, as our fantastic customers help us to prove that it’s possible to have a flourishing business while cutting out plastic, reducing reliance on fossil fuels, and paying everyone who works for us at least a living wage.
2. Circular economy: Regenerative businesses embrace the concept of a circular economy, where resources are repaired, reused and recycled, rather than discarded.
We’d highlight our unbleached recycled toilet rolls as a great example of rethinking product design to be more circular. They’re made from a category of everyday paper and cardboard waste - packaging materials - that is growing. And as we produce more and more of them we’re supporting the recycling networks among businesses and waste disposal companies in the area local to our factory.
3. Resilience and adaptability: A regenerative business is designed to be resilient and adaptable in the face of change. This involves building strong, healthy ecosystems—both natural and organisational—that can withstand challenges and continue to grow.
We’re very proud of the fact that our factory makes our environmentally friendly toilet rolls, kitchen rolls, and facial tissues using renewable energy. It’s not just better for the environment, it makes us more resilient as well. You may have noticed that toilet rolls are getting more expensive (like many other items!). There are many reasons for this, but one of them is fluctuations in the price of fossil fuels in recent years. Cutting fossil fuels used in manufacturing means less dependence on global fuel markets, and a much more reliable and resilient energy supply.
4. Transparency and accountability: Regenerative businesses should be at the forefront of transparency and accountability - if you’re working to make positive changes it’s important to be clear about what those changes actually are.
At Naked Sprout we’re committed to providing the best documentation we can about all of our sustainability credentials, and climate labelling on our boxes.
The hope here is not just that people can see what we’re doing, but that these moves inspire change among our competitors in the tissue industry, and beyond. The aim behind publishing our own facts and figures is to create a virtuous cycle, inspiring other companies to publish their own details, and work to improve them.
A call to action
We’re all facing up to the scale of the changes needed in the face of the mounting environmental crises, and it’s becoming clear that it’s not going to be enough for businesses to just do less harm. Purpose-driven businesses are going to have to start doing better, actively working to restore, rejuvenate, and improve.
Regenerative business might seem like marketing speak, but the principles guiding this approach; holistic thinking, adaptability, circularity and transparency can be put in place in a thousand different ways that will bring real benefits - to a business itself and to the communities that they’re part of. Hopefully you’ve found something inspirational in our list of concrete examples!
Fancy trying everyday tissue products made with regeneration in mind?
