“Despite the fact that I am working in Tourism Department of this town, I personally never expect there will be more tourists coming to this island”, the manager said, giggling softly.

We all laughed. The irony was not lost on anyone in the room.

But his words stayed with me longer than the laughter did. Because there I was, one of six graduate students on a field trip to Amami Oshima Island, studying sustainable tourism in a place that, at least in part, would rather be left alone.

We were, by every honest definition, tourists first.

An island that has everything

Amami Oshima is blessed with 87% occupied by mountains and forests, and landscapes shaped by coral reefs. The mountains are home of endemic species found nowhere else on earth: Amami black rabbit, Amami Ishikawa frog, venomous Habu viper. Under 80% subtropical evergreen broadleaved forests, the ecosystem hums with a richness that reminded me, a Vietnamese, of home in the best possible way. The banyan trees here carry the same quiet mythology as the ones from the old stories I grew up hearing.

I used to hate snakes. But I have learned that a snake sighting means a healthy ecosystem is doing its job. On Amami, snake warning signs appear around nearly every trail. And if you actually find one, you can bring it to the local government office and receive 3,000 yen as part of a rescue program.

And what's more, the sea here is really a thing. Time your visit right and you might encounter whales, sea turtles, or even the endemic Amami starry night puffer. Come at any other time and you still get extraordinary coral reefs, clear sandy seabeds, and one of Japan's largest mangrove forests. The island became a UNESCO World Natural Heritage site in 2021, and spending 4 days here makes it easy to understand why.

The real treasure of the island

But the island's most valued treasure is not only its biodiversity but its people. Similar to other remote areas across Japan, the declining population is a big issue here.

We visited a small settlement hamlet where once held thousands of residents but now only 18 people remain. The ojisan and obasan there showed us omotenashi that genuinely warmed my heart. Despite the natural tide of aging, the effort to keep their cultural heritage alive has not aged with them. They renovated a closed elementary-junior high school into a thriving community hub: accommodation, restaurant, local shop, gathering space...

More than that, their wisdom of someone who have long coexisted with the sea, mountains, islands preserve in-depth local ecological knowledge that are intangible treasure and never can be replicated or replaced.

Two hotels, two visions of what tourism can be

During our stay, we lived inside one of the most interesting places I have ever been: Zero Gravity Seisui Villa, the world's first all-inclusive scuba diving, boating, and snorkeling facility built specifically for handicapped persons. Beside a quiet stretch of beach and translucent waters, this hotel has engineered barrier-free access into every single detail: restrooms, guest rooms, dining tables, karaoke bar, the boat, and the practice pool. The ocean, with its weightlessness, becomes available to everyone.

On the other side of the town stands something else entirely: the only 5-star hotel, a tall building visible from a great distance, its upper floors blocking the mountain view. Inside, it might advertise eco-tourism. Outside, its scale and silhouette interrupt the natural landscape in the same way I have seen along the Vietnamese coastline, where massive beachfront resorts now define what the shore looks like.

I am not writing to criticize anything, but the contrast is hard to ignore.

A man in Ha Giang, and what he lost

Traveling in northern Vietnam years ago, I met an old man who belonged to an ethnic minority group in Ha Giang. He was furious about a large hotel that had been built near his community. He hates everything about that hotel, from the hotel’s architecture breaking the traditional aesthetic of the landscape, the hotel’s construction dust disrupting his cattle route, to the noise shattering the mountain silence that his family had lived inside for generations. And the land around him was now being sold at prices and in a market he did not understand.

Since the hotel opened, he had noticed the smaller changes too. Fewer snakes. Fewer insects. Birds rerouting their flight paths.

I thought about him again on Amami.

I have also worked on the other side of these conversations. I once helped train government departments, local authorities in Son La and Lao Cai on crisis management for tourism stakeholders. From that viewpoint, the picture becomes more complicated. Ethnicity has been packaged as tourism capital in these regions, and the responses from within indigenous communities are not uniform. Some families protest tourism facilities construction. Others pull their children out of school to earn money by dancing for tourists near those hotels.

Tourism has changed the land so polarizingly that it is difficult to define who should be held responsible for its negative environmental and social impacts.

Katoku Beach and the seawall that divided the community

The most unresolved tension I experienced on Amami centers on Katoku Beach, so-called the “Jurassic Beach”. It features a rare geomorphological process where the river's seasonal flow accumulates sand along the coast each winter, creating a natural buffer that protects both the shoreline and the village during typhoon season.

However, after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated eastern Japan, massive seawalls become the government’s answer to coastal vulnerability. On Amami, the proposal to build a seawall at Katoku has splitted the community. Some residents want the protection from the potential tsunamis. Others argue that the walls offer little defense against a major tsunami while causing real harm: the destruction of the ecosystem, the disappearance of nesting giant leatherback turtles, and a false sense of security that might actually slow evacuation when disaster comes.

What I keep returning to is not whether the seawall should or should not be built, but a bigger concern about the future of this environmental conversation. Katoku has pristine rainforest, untouched river systems, a natural delta, a wide sandy beach, and cultural heritage layered into the landscape. It could be a symbol of a different kind of relationship between people and coastline. But that symbol will only survive if there are people left to carry it forward. The local population is already too small to sustain a long conservation fight. The people who know this beach best are aging, and there are fewer of them every year.

I wonder:

Were the conversations actually had? Not the social media posts urging people to save the island or stop the tourists. The real ones are between local communities and each other among themselves, between communities and scientists, between communities and the government, between communities and the tourism industry.

Is there a governance system that integrates scientific evidence, political accountability, ethical business practice, and human rights? One that makes decisions that are cautious and thoughtful without being captured by any single interest?

The priorities, as I see them, should run in this order:

• The community must be heard first. Their voices and their wellbeing.

• The science must be seen. Natural, social, environmental, political science together with measurable evidence and tangible metrics.

• The business must be willing to speak and act purposefully and responsibly.

These kinds of conversations in Vietnam, rarely have a happy ending.

In our buffer zone of Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site, a 32-ha coastal reclamation project was launched. No informed consent from the communities. No published environmental (and social) impact assessment. One day, people simply opened the newspaper and saw it: soil and rocks already dumped into nearshore waters, even no surrounding embankment.

The public pushed back, loudly enough that the government suspended the project for review. Then recently, the provincial authority announced it will resume, citing what they described as an environmental impact evaluation they had conducted. They also complain that the current buffer zone is too extensive, making conservation management difficult while constraining the province’s socio-economic development.

If the buffer zone itself has become an obstacle to the decision-makers who are supposed to protect it, I find it hard to imagine what transparent, inclusive governance for Ha Long Bay could even look like anymore.

Why an island?

In a previous role, I worked on the Rebirth Station initiative, a collecting and recycling program that explored Deposit Return System modeled on successful European examples for Vietnam market. When the board of management decided to pilot the program on Phu Quoc island, I pushed back immediately:

Why an island?

My concern was not just about location. It was about the logic underneath the choice. If a policy permits single-use packaging consumption to keep growing, and then offers a take-back program with financial incentives as the solution, the total volume of material that needs to be handled will still increase. Whether that material gets recycled on the island or shipped to the mainland does not change this logic.

My partner’s answer was direct: Islands are isolated. The boundaries are clear. We can design a controlled, closed system, and if it works, we scale it up.

But I kept thinking: what if it fails? On an island, a failed experiment means you fail the whole ecosystem, and the people living inside it.

For investors and policymakers, islands are attractive precisely because they look manageable. What gets missed in that framing is that an island is not a sandbox. It is someone's home. It's vulnerable. It has no backup copy, no overflow, no adjacent system to absorb the damage when things go wrong. It only live once (ITLO and you too YOLO).

If you need a single image to sit with, watch this video of Tuvalu, a shrinking country not as a projection or a warning, but right now in real time.

That image of shrinking islands, both in physical and intangible ways, more than any governance framework, is what I carry home from Amami Oshima. Seeing and feeling the island in person, I wonder do we still want more tourists, and at what costs would the island have to carry?

I have seen a hundred products like this. A pen mixing plastic with "biomass material". A lantern blending recycled aluminum with recycled PET for a "better glowy effect”. Water bottles claiming 50% recycled plastic. I recognized them because of the logic behind them. It's the same logic I fought against for years in my previous position.

The battle I fought (and still fight)

Imagine you are the champion of your company's recycling agenda. Your goal is to reach 100% recycled content in your packaging portfolio by 2035.

For your 2030 checkpoint, you plan to achieve at least 50% recycled content across all packaging material. The question is: Which pathway, and which measurement approach, should you adopt to get there?

Scenario 1: The Blended Approach

You choose to mix 50% recycled content with your existing virgin, fossil-based materials across your entire portfolio. Your calculation becomes:

Recycled content % = Total recycled materials ÷ Total material volume (virgin + recycled) x 100%

Scenario 2: The Full-Conversion Approach (SKU by SKU)

You start by launching 100% recycled packaging on selected (and strategic) SKUs, then establish a roadmap to convert the rest over time. By 2030, after converting a portion of your portfolio, your recycled content rate reaches 50%. The formula becomes more SKU-specific:

Recycled content % = Total volume of 100% rPET (converted SKUs) ÷ Total material volume (virgin + recycled) x 100%

Both approaches can hit the same 2030 KPIs (50% of recycled content), but which one can lead to 2035 target (100% of recycled content across portfolio)? Although the formulas may look similar, the underlying calculations and the strategic implications are completely different.

So which pathway would you choose? 50% or 100%?

Blended option is not a stepping stone

Partial measures rarely function as transitions. More often, they become destinations.

When companies blend 50% recycled content into their packaging, there is a sense of moral accomplishment: “we’ve done our part”, and the remaining 50% becomes harder to justify. That halfway point becomes the new status quo, when you build supply chains around 50% recycled content. You sign contracts that assume continued virgin plastic supply. You create internal systems, reporting structures, and stakeholder expectations all calibrated to this midpoint. Over time, switching costs accumulate.

The “gradual transition” approach has a poor track record precisely because each intermediate step creates new stakeholders invested in not progressing further. Infrastructure develops in response to committed demand. It doesn’t appear spontaneously, waiting to be discovered.

A mixed system: 50% rPET + 50% vPET signals uncertainty to suppliers and business partners. It says: “We might go 100% rPET eventually… or maybe not”. This level of ambiguity is not enough to justify large-scale upstream investment.

Go BIG or go home

In contrast, when a company launches the first SKU in 100% rPET, it send a clear signal that they are no longer experimenting. It's saying: “We guarantee off-take. We converted this entire SKU to 100% rPET and there is no going back. Let's build capacity for the remaining transition".

This kind of certainty changes behavior. It accelerates capacity expansion, drives improvements in feedstock quality, reduces costs through scale, competition, and the first-mover advantage. Each converted SKUs becomes a proof point, showing that 100% recycled works, consumers accept it, operations can manage it and the system is resilient. Employees see clear progress, and leadership gains confidence to accelerate.

Unlike the blended model, SKU-by-SKU conversion builds capability toward a fully circular portfolio.

However, speaking is always easier than doing. When I proposed our roadmap to achieve 100% recycled content across our packaging portfolio, I aligned it as a sequential transformation, so it needs a incremental investment on technical feasibility, supply chain stability, and brand communication. Each successful SKU transition would prove viability, build supplier relationships, develop internal capabilities, and create a lighthouse example for the next SKU/next brand. By the end of the journey, we wouldn't only have a 100% recycled portfolio, we would have transformed our organization's capacity to execute sustainable packaging at scale.

There were many moments when stakeholders tried to persuade me to shift to a blended approach. The arguments were familiar:

“The local recycling infrastructure isn’t ready.”

“We need better sorting first. The feedstock quality is too poor so the rPET bottles come out yellowish.”

“Why don’t we mix 50% virgin and 50% recycled resin? The bottle will look brighter, and consumers won’t notice the difference.”

“What if we add a green tint to hide the yellowish from low-quality feedstock?”

Eventually, I realized that none of these were truly technical arguments. When recycled materials cost more than virgin plastic, and when closed-loop initiative requires long-term and comprehensive investment rather than immediate savings, the underlying issue is always cost comfort.

A diluted approach proves nothing. If everything sits at 25–50% recycled content, you never demonstrate that 100% is feasible. And as for adding green color: this is one of the worst solutions anyone can propose. Clear rPET can become a bottle again. Green vPET or green rPET cannot. It is downcycled into fiber, strapping, or park benches, materials that eventually exit the loop entirely. That is not circularity; that is delayed linearity.

Japan even has regulations addressing this exact issue because policymakers understand that color determines destiny in plastic recycling. Whether you achieve genuine circularity or fall into greenwashing often hinges on these very technical realities of material flow.

Why closed-loop is the only loop that matters

That Disney mug bothered me for a reason beyond the blended approach. It represents something more fundamental: the difference between genuine circularity and delayed landfill.

When we talk about recycling, we are actually describing a spectrum of outcomes, and not all recycling is created equal.

Closed-loop recycling is genuinely circular.

Bottles → Bottles → Bottle again

Fabric → Fabric → Fabric again

Aluminum can → Aluminum can → Aluminum can again

Open-loop recycling, however, is simply linear with extra steps.

A mug made from a mix of PET and ABS cannot return to being a mug. PET is recyclable. ABS is technically recyclable. But PET mixed with ABS? The material stream is incompatible.

A pen made from blended plastic and biomass cannot be separated at end-of-life.

A lantern combining aluminum and PET was never designed with recyclability in mind.

The "recycled content” in those products has only one additional lifecycle before the entire product becomes waste. It's resource destruction dressed up as innovation. Furthermore, in the 3Rs, Reduce comes first. Creating new mixed-material products does not reduce impact, it simply shifts the burden downstream and increases systemic waste.

So…

Next time someone proposes the Blended approach instead of implementing complete solutions sequentially, ask them: "If we can achieve full circularity, why stop halfway?".

As long as we have a roadmap for 100% with timelines, milestones, and accountability, the system still has a chance.

As long as someone is paying attention to the details: the bottle colors, the incompatible materials, the material compositions, the end-of-life realities…, circularity remains within reach.

As long as practitioners, engineers, product developers are willing to push for the full commitment when the easy path is to settle for half, progress continues.

But when we ignore these details, when we allow “good enough” to replace “good”, when we settle for a diluted version of circularity, the outcome is predictable. That mug will end up in a landfill someday, long before its marketing slogan fades, and the “Circulating Smiles” will stop circulating.

Circularity is a discipline, and it only works when we have the courage to drive the full loop, not just comfortable half.

These results will be used to map with satellite data for research purpose. Around 6 students of us, 22 hectares of carefully managed forest stretch up the slopes of Mount Asama. This forest belongs to the university, not for logging but for exactly this: education.

The forest I watched disappear

Five years ago, I stood in a very different forest. I was working for an education organization in Vietnam, working with schools and press media. On paper, our investor were dedicated advocators of education and committed to Vietnam's future. Their marketing materials glowed with promises of world-class learning quality.

In reality, I watched them lobby the government to reclassify primary forest as commercial land, to "build schools", on the used-to-be primary forest areas. They never ask how many decades the trees there had been growing. Nobody asked what ecosystem services it provided, what carbon it stored, or what watershed it cultivated.

Within nearly a year, the forest was gone. In its place: an international school campus. And somewhere in my chest, something hardened into a question I couldn't shake: Why does education require cutting down forests, while universities in Japan or somewhere else maintain forests specifically for education?

The forest Vietnam keeps losing

That international school wasn't an only single case. It was a pattern I kept seeing, kept reading about, kept trying to think about.

Tam Dao, Phu Quoc. Both mountain forest areas converted into “eco-tourism” resorts. The irony was suffocating: we destroyed the ecology to build eco-tourism. Environmental groups presented evidence. Local communities objected. The projects proceeded anyway.

Then there was the 600-hectare Binh Thuan primary forest, over a hundred years old, approved for conversion into a reservoir.

I read the project justification carefully. The language was polished and reasonable-sounding: “Supplying water for agricultural purposes and daily water needs", they said. The project would "serve flood prevention and control, environmental enhancement". And finally, “the reservoir will contribute to the development of tourism and service sectors in the province".

I don't understand, if Binh Thuan province suffers from groundwater shortage during the dry season, why cutting down watershed forests? Those forests preserve groundwater. They capture rainfall, allow infiltration into aquifers. Without them, underground water reserves face even greater risk of shortage. The forest they wanted to cut down was actually solving the water problem they claimed they needed a reservoir to fix.

Before that approval announcement, I actually had been there, in Ham Thuan Bac, Binh Thuan, to plant 60,000 trees in watershed areas within my company's sustainability program. During 3 years of implementation, we planted 165 ha in watershed areas, with the purpose of cultivating water (because we are beverage manufacturer so we want to return the water amount we used in our production).

I couldn't wrap my head around it. We were struggling to measure our impact, to build community trust and stakeholder accountability, and to manage incremental budget for long-term expansion plan, and at the same time, others were actively legalize forest destruction of century-old forest. Different agendas. Different priorities. Different futures.

What that forest could have been

I came to Japan carrying questions I didn't know how to ask. I'm learning how to measure what forests do, not just count trees, but quantify ecosystem services. Water purification capacity. Carbon sequestration rates. Erosion prevention. Biodiversity support. I'm learning how Payment for Ecosystem Services works, how to design systems where people who benefit from forests pay to maintain them. How to structure incentives. How to verify compliance.

I'm learning that long-term commitment isn't about 5-year corporate social responsibility programs. It's about institutional structures that last decades. University forests operated for generations, and my university's forest has operated for 10 years. Water supply systems designed for centuries.

Here's what Japan taught me: The choice isn't between forests and development. It's between short-term extraction and long-term investment. Between measuring value only in timber and land use, or measuring value in ecosystem services.

Yokohama residents pay approximately $6-8 per person per year in water source taxes. For that, they get reliable clean water, flood protection, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity conservation.

New York City invested $2.5 billion in watershed protection to avoid spending $10 billion on a filtration plant plus $365 million per year in operating costs. 25 years later, they are still saving money. The forests are still there. The water is still clean.

Sometimes I imagine an alternate timeline for that international school in Vietnam. Instead of cutting down the forest, they could integrate it. The forest becomes a living laboratory. Vietnamese sustainability practitioners study watershed management where watershed actually exists. Students learn forest ecology in an actual forest. They measure soil moisture, carbon storage, water quality, observe seasonal changes.

I wish I would know the words then to say: The forest is the biggest school. Nature is the wisest teacher. Education should teach us to learn from it, not give us excuse to destroy it.

But somewhere in Vietnam, there is another forest. Maybe it's facing pressure from developers right now. Maybe someone is arguing that we must sacrifice it for progress.

In that case, I just want to be there for that conversation.

While the utopian organizational systems fully operating with sustainability practices may truly exist elsewhere, the reality I faced presented a classic dilemma: if I pushed too hard, I risked being sidelined as impractical or idealistic; yet if I play loose, the company would continue celebrating commercial achievements as always without any ecological consideration.

To be honest, there exists a unique fortune in leading sustainability within such challenging environments. Low levels of domain knowledge maturity. Constant resistance from business-as-usual perspectives. Hinder political gameplay in the workplace dynamics. To not only survive in the corporate sustainability battle but also win as a sustainability champion, you must steel yourself to defend your small voice when bringing the proposal of collective efforts across functions to the table.

My below “defensive triangle” may benefit those who need a little bit of courage to step up and protect our green notes in front of business decision-makers.

Part 1:

Horizontal foundation: Build your own cross-functional alliance network asap

Case Study: Defending absolute emission reduction targets

Disclaimer: This is a hypothetical example created for illustrative purposes only and does not relate to any real-world business. Any similarities to actual organizations or situations are coincidental.

Background: Your organization has publicly committed to a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 but hasn't disclosed specific measurement protocols. Executives want to use intensity-based metrics (emissions per production unit/per employee/per revenue/per kilowatt-hour of energy) rather than absolute emission (total quantity of emissions released, typically expressed in metric tons of CO2 equivalent).

As a sustainability leader, you must defend absolute emission targets as the ultimate goal, while keeping intensity metrics optional for efficiency improvements, ensuring transparent disclosure in the next annual report.

Note: To better understand absolute vs. intensity metrics, kindly read more at this link. In short, intensity-based targets don't guarantee absolute emissions reductions. If a company's emissions intensity decreases but production volume increases at a greater rate, total GHG emissions may still increase.

Before entering the boardroom, have you visualized the scene that awaits you like this?

Because, the moment your opening slide appears showing greenhouse gas emission target commitments, the executives already had their fixed assumption in their mind:

You (Sustainability Manager):

*Talking about environmental integrity, global climate best practices requiring actual emission decreases, stakeholders expectations and industry benchmarking analysis on absolute reduction, reputational risk concerns and potential accusations of greenwashing if shifting to intensity metrics, future-proofing against tightening regulation on disclosures, action plan to achieve 50% absolute emission reductions…

CEO (Chief Executive Office):

“Intensity targets provide ambitious goals without constraining our strategic flexibility for growth.”

CFO (Chief Financial Officer):

“Intensity metrics better align with our financial performance indicators of efficiency and return on investment. If absolute metrics require costly capital expenditures, please show guaranteed returns even if business growth exceeds projections.”

CSO (Chief Sales Officer):

“Intensity metrics better reflect our reality as an emerging market player. They incentivize innovation while allowing us to pursue market expansion opportunities.”

CHRO (Chief Human Resources Officer):

*Remain silent, not seeing their role in this discussion.

But when it comes to boards, the differences are even more surprising. According to the EY Long-Term Value and Corporate Governance survey of 200 of Europe’s most senior business leaders in January 2025, boards and senior management teams think about sustainability very differently. This could be one reason why sustainability is tackled separately within the broader business. This fundamental misalignment often explains why sustainability remains isolated from core business strategy, creating the very boardroom battles we’ve just witnessed.

But that still represents the best-case scenario, where you at least have room to highlight environmental values into the board discussion and receive C-levels feedback. In many organizations, sustainability topics never reach business forums because leaders don't perceive climate commitments as material to their business, prioritize more “urgent” matters, assume greenhouse gas reduction commitments are just voluntary with no penalties for misleading claims, or simply assume they can adjust objectives closer to the deadlines when pressure comes.

Flipping the script:

Instead of walking into that boardroom as a standalone function, consider building your cross-functional alliance network before the meeting ever happens.

Map your company's emission footprint, conduct life cycle assessment, identify stakeholder roles, understand each function's goals and pain points, decode your organization's cultural dynamics, do your homework of connecting every dot between your desired outcome of alignment and the business rationale that makes it inevitable.

Cross-functional collaboration isn't naturally harmonious. Functions often compete due to conflicting priorities and hidden agendas. Your role becomes understanding how to influence peers without direct authority, building consensus through shared interests rather than top-down assignment.

For this emissions example, I would analyze potential allies across two critical dimensions:

1. Impact creators: functions whose operations directly drive emissions, and

2. Competency enablers: departments with the capability and accountability to implement governance solutions.

Impact creators bear obvious responsibility.

Manufacturing operations that run emission-heavy facilities. Sales teams whose aggressive targets drive production volumes. Supply chain functions managing transportation and its expanding scale. When their activities directly correlate with emission increases, they cannot reasonably argue against accountability for reductions.

The complexity emerges when determining primary accountability among impact creators. Does responsibility lie with manufacturing for operating emission-intensive facilities, or with sales for creating the demand that drives production? Your analysis must focus on the most tangible, measurable impacts, such as facility ownership, direct material usage, rather than getting lost in the political gameplay of causation arguments.

Competency enablers possess the expertise and organizational mandate to champion proper governance.

Communications teams tracking competitor disclosures understand reputational risks of greenwashing accusations. Legal and finance departments monitoring regulatory developments recognize the future-proofing value of absolute metrics against tightening carbon regulations. These functions naturally become your proposal's defenders because environmental integrity aligns with their professional responsibilities.

Your expert allies often become your strongest advocates, both from their technical knowledge and their direct C-suite reporting lines. Communications teams who represent the company at industry forums cannot afford to defend weak intensity metrics when the whole world accused intensity metrics as greenwashing. Legal and finance departments who track domestic and regional policy developments recognize that absolute emission tracking creates verifiable evidence for future carbon compliance requirements, transforming potential future costs into present competitive advantages.

Multiple departments benefit from absolute emissions frameworks, primarily driven by external pressures, including government policies, market expectations, industry standards, investor requirements, rather than internal enthusiasm. Your role becomes closing their knowledge gaps early, helping them understand how sustainability connects to their functional success. When alignment meetings occur, C-suite leaders arrive already educated rather than blindsided.

During the whole process, try to make a cultural change to your organization. Sustainability topics require a fundamentally different approach from conventional business norms. While functional boundaries are needed for operational clarity, they should become welcoming for cross-functional collaboration. When departments possess expertise in sustainability and implementation pathways, they need to step forward boldly and challenge traditional practices, regardless of whether it falls within their traditional scope.

Stay tuned, I'm writing the part 2 and 3!

Part 2: You can't choose your manager, but you can choose your manager

Part 3. Starting small to win big

As someone who has worked in corporate communications for various companies, delivering reports has always been part of my responsibilities. These documents demonstrate information, achievements, objectives, philosophy, and more. They're a legacy for not only disclosure archive purpose but also management strategy.

While there are many global standards and frameworks to follow, audits to conduct, and a need to present a professional, world-class document, my manager said,

"Just make a report for our consumers who can read it and understand it easily."

I pondered over this seemingly simple advice. Over the years, I often wondered who the actual readers of my reports were. Apart from government authorities or company leaders, our target audience was diverse: our employees, partners, clients, media, the general public, and so on. The corporate communications jargon often used in these reports, however, made them inaccessible to a 10-year-old child, making them challenging to read. But how can we claim our business is consumer-oriented and consumer-centered if our communication fails to reach people in a straightforward and simple way?

This time, I decided not to treat it as a “tick-box” exercise anymore. With a fresh perspective, I aimed to engage consumers in our quest for true impact, with intent, to be real and vulnerable. The report turned out to be short and sweet, without adhering to any long and complicated frameworks. It still contained sufficient, verified information to avoid greenwashing and greenhushing.

However, after releasing this report to our internal and external stakeholders, I quickly realized that our current governance was lacking in many areas, thanks to valuable stakeholder feedback.

We lacked science-based tracking indicators and measurements, which meant we hadn’t actually implemented them in our daily manufacturing operations.

We lacked evidence of social impact despite having initiated programs more than ten years ago, which meant that we hadn’t truly integrated social considerations into our ongoing and long-term governance strategies.

We also lacked comprehensive financial data to assess our environmental impacts and investments in driving positive change, as well as other regulatory compliance measures. This lack of transparency meant we remained conservative in our approach and weren’t genuinely open about our progress, leading to numerous questions and doubts from our stakeholders.

(Economics is critically important to our stakeholders because it’s the common thread that connects everyone, which is why I believe the ESG - Environment, Social, Governance framework alone isn’t sufficient for sustainable business. At the end of the day, money matters.)

These insights, along with many other lessons learned, helped me strengthen my subsequent sustainability strategy for the business. Through valid feedback, meaningful engagement, and purposeful dialogue with stakeholders, I came to assume that if I had written in an overly academic, formal, or complicated manner, I would never have received such clear direction for improvement.

Ultimately, we don’t need to chase perfection in a domain as complex as sustainability, we need continuous improvement, day by day. Simplicity and authenticity fuel this process, not only in reporting but also in communication and messaging around sustainability.

As a nature lover like myself, this name clicked immediately. From folk tales like Giong to iconic village landscapes, bamboo has been woven into Vietnamese identity. Through a manufacturer's lens, bamboo hold a powerful potential to be used more commonly in our modern lives.

Have you ever wondered why we can't count tree rings on bamboo like we do with other timbers? This is because bamboo doesn't form rings as it grows. Instead, its special structure features a hollow center with vertical carbon fibers. This design makes it flexible and strong, allowing it to bend and stretch under pressure from various directions. Due to those advantages, bamboo was once a cornerstone of Vietnamese culture and history, used in every aspect of daily life, from housing to tools.

But then, the colonial era replaced such a natural gift with compound and artificial materials, like steel, concrete, and plastics. Local communities were convinced that a "higher quality of life" came through adopting Western modernity over conventional practices. As part of industrial revolution, these composite materials were marketed as standardized, durable, and aesthetically superior, in contrast to bamboo, which was seen as cheap, old-fashioned and problematic.

In professional considerations, many corps plant trees for carbon credit. I often view this practice as more political than genuinely impactful. Interestingly, my company took a different approach by focusing on water cultivation through watershed forest plantation. This stems from the understanding that water is the lifeblood of our business. And this give bamboo a chance to attract the attention of corporate sustainability taskforces.

Collaborating with local forest farmers, I've witnessed the incredible benefits of bamboo. Its deep root systems prevent land erosion and cultivate underground water flow, complementing other types of trees we planted through Million Green Trees and Revive Water Run plantation programs. Bamboo grows quickly without chemical intervention, absorbs carbon, and helps local communities protect their land, thereby enhancing their livelihood and well-being. Unlike abstract and vague strategy of carbon offsetting, bamboo offers tangible, immediate benefits that align with both short-term and long-term needs from our business and all stakeholders.

As I've deepened my understanding of bamboo, I've grown even more inspired by the beauty and wisdom of nature. I now see nature as the best designer and also the best recycler in this great world.

You could watch this movie trailer and share your experience with bamboo in the comment if any. Let's give bamboo the spotlight it deserves, in our sustainability dialogue.