Aussies Seek Sustainable Shopping: The Rise and Impact of B Corp Certification in Australia
As more businesses sign up for certification, sustainably minded consumers take note
4 min
Shopping never used to be this hard. Once a matter of whether there was enough cash in your wallet or room on your credit card, now consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about the cost of buying something new not just for themselves, but the planet as well. Nearly 60 percent of Australians value sustainability more than they did two years ago, according to a recent survey by market analysts NIQ.
Yet just 37 percent say they could shop sustainably with ease versus
a global average of 50 percent. Bombarded with slogans and social media touting a brand’s “eco- friendly” or sustainable credentials, consumers struggle to cut through the greenwash.
Environmental claims are a powerful marketing tool and in Australia it is illegal for business to make false ones. But for customers or investors looking for certainty, the market has provided it through a growing movement called B Corp.
Companies that meet high sustainability standards can attain B Corp Certification — an internationally-recognised tick of approval. It was introduced by B Lab, a United States non-profit organisation founded in 2006 by three friends wanting to make business a force for good.
Companies have to prove to B Lab they’re making a positive impact on the “quadruple” bottom line: people, planet, profit, purpose.
‘B’ stands for ‘benefit for all’ and the fee-based application process is rigorous.
Unlike Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting frameworks, B Corp measures a company’s entire footprint, from supply chain practices and input materials to employee benefits and governance structures.
Businesses submit detailed evidence to B Lab on these standards and must be scored 80 or above on their B Impact Assessment. Once verified, a company’s score appears on the global B Corp Directory.
They can also use the distinctive B Corp logo — an encircled black B — in marketing.
While B Corps don’t carry any particular legal or government status in Australia, the logo carries weight with consumers.
“Most market research finds
that the most important thing to consumers is a company’s reputation or credentials,” Emma Herd, EY Oceania Partner in Climate Change and Sustainability Services, says.
“B Corp Certification is a
quick and recognised way of demonstrating you are taking voluntary action to address sustainability issues that affect your markets, consumers and banks.”
There are more than 6,000 B Corps globally, including about 470 in Australia and New Zealand.
Big names include Danone and Patagonia.
The latest Australian business to join the ranks is designer furniture and lighting supplier Living Edge.
With showrooms nationwide, the luxury retailer has a 15-year history of sustainable practice, from partnering with eco-friendly brands to using electric vehicles.
Living Edge Sustainability Strategist Guy Walsh says that certification — a “great validation of what we have achieved so far” — has provided pivotal business insights.
“We always believed we had a sustainable portfolio of products but going through the B Corp certification process was the first time we could look at an actual metric,” Walsh says.
“We found in the 2021-22 financial year, 69 percent of our revenue was generated from the sale of products certified to internationally recognised environmental accreditations.
“Another one that I found interesting, and which is so important for creating industry circularity, is that 21 percent of our revenue is coming from recycled materials. This data gives us a clear baseline to improve on.”
Constant improvement lies at the heart of B Corp. Businesses must recertify every three years as standards evolve. Australian firm WOWOWA Architecture, known for its whimsical and sustainable creations, was recently recertified after gaining B Corp status in 2019.
Director Monique Woodward says they “lost some points but gained others and that’s OK.”
She says certification has provided a “road map for growth” and helped the firm attract environmentally- focused clients.
“Our favourite residential family clients come to us because they believe what we believe, then also want a deliciously colourful and wildly textured home,” Woodward says. “Crumpler came to us wanting a fresh but nostalgic look thatspoke to their motto ‘bags that will probably outlast you’. We are now doing all their stores.”
For Woodward, industry and supply chain sustainability can improve if more firms jump on the B Corp bandwagon.
“Moving forward, all projects need to far exceed current regulatory requirements. Award winners
need to push hard and set new benchmarks for zero carbon, no waste, no gas as the bare minimum,” she says.
According to B Lab, B Corps are 4.5 times more likely than other businesses to use 100 percent renewable energy and 7.3 times more likely to be carbon-neutral.
EY Oceania sustainability expert Herd says the pressure is on business to be more sustainable.
“The investment thesis of ESG and sustainability is that a well-managed company on ESG credentials is generally better run and more profitable,” she says.
“We are seeing it’s harder for companies to do nothing on sustainability and ESG. We’re also seeing an increased push from business in Australia to government to provide consensus building around accredited certification schemes. There is a hunger from business to have a benchmark.”
For newly-minted B Corp Living Edge, certification is a gamechanger for business and consumers.
“Now we have got a measure for how sustainable our products are, we can be more targeted when we bring brands to market,” Walsh says.
“Our brand is not about throwaway consumables or fast furniture. We’re building a socially responsible and sustainable business. B Corp Certification is valuable to our customers because it gives them third-party assurance that we’re trying to do the right thing.”
For Central Element, the start of work at Pearl represents another step in the company’s growing eastern suburbs pipeline.
All three vehicles will form part of a broader charitable initiative benefiting Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the American Red Cross and Starlight Children’s Foundation
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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