My work mainly with clients from the energy industry. In one of my recent projects, my team and I helped a company to find ideas in managing their waste sustainably at a lower cost.
When we think of waste, there is more to a single bag of garbage than meets the eye – there is a whole value chain from the point of consumption to collection, finally to forking choices between recovery at recycling facilities and disposal at landfill. As our first step, we set out to map the entire “journey” of waste to pinpoint where the issues were.
Then came the first challenge – all we managed to map out was the locations for the many pieces of a very complex puzzle (data). My colleagues and I then interviewed over 50 of these “puzzle owners” (e.g., waste-generating department, waste collectors, recyclers). We worked as a team to join together all these puzzle pieces and eventually completed the full picture of a waste map and identified the bottleneck.
Thereafter, we needed industry guidance to devise solutions. We immediately tapped onto our vast network of subject matter experts to seek support – one of the many perks of working with a global company like Accenture – and bounced ideas to eventually come up with a series of sustainable solutions.
Working at Accenture has helped me fulfil my purpose to contribute towards sustainability, at the same time taught me that instead of thinking outside of the box, just get rid of the box and tap into the great minds around me!
