August/September Business View Magazine

96 97 German car industry,” explains Nuno da Silva, Di- rector of Product Sustainability for the company’s American division. “And they were asked to carry out the first evaluation of the environmental profile of a car. In order to do that, they had to come up with the software to do the complicat- ed calculations involved in such an endeavor. The software, eventually, got into our core prod- uct, called GaBi, that uses a methodology called Life Cycle Assessment. It enables companies to calculate the environmental profile of any product in the world– from airplanes to cars, to packaging, to paper towels. A large number of companies in the world use our software, our databases, and our services to do those types of evaluations, and they usually do that to see how sustainable a specific product is when pitching it either to consumers or other businesses.” Worldwide, thinkstep has about 250 employees, half of whom are in Europe, mostly in Stuttgart. The company also has offices in Australia, New Zealand, India, South Af- rica, and China. The American office is in Boston, Massachu- setts, with 25 staff members covering North America. Regarding competition in the field, da Silva reports that there aren’t that many companies that provide similar products and services. “And most of those companies are THINKSTEP NUNO DA SILVA relatively smaller,” he states, “mom-and-pop consultancies or, on the software side, most are startups that come and go. There are only three or four established places that, more or less, do what we do. And within that space, we essentially are the ‘Cadillac.’What we supply tends to be of the highest quality, the most compre- hensive, and also the most expensive when compared to our competitors – that includes the software that we provide, the data that we provide, and most of our services. That’s why we tend to work mostly with large companies that have the budgets that allow them to do the work properly from the beginning to the end.” While many companies have come to recognize the value of operating under sustainable guidelines, there are still those that cynically try to market their un- sustainable products or services under a practice known as “greenwashing,” i.e. disseminating disinformation so as to present an environmentally responsible image. “There are standards and guidelines that companies should follow in or- der to avoid the pitfalls of greenwashing,” da Silva explains. “In the U.S. there’s the Federal Trade Commission that, many years ago, issued a series of guidelines about green marketing–what information you need to have available in order to substantiate a marketing claim about how sustainable, or green, or low-carbon, or recyclable a product is.We don’t work with anyone that does not support those JAN POULSEN, CEO