Stefan Phang, director, sustainability & corporate social responsibility, Diversey

Stefan Phang has pioneered a number of projects that convert hotel waste into useful commodities for at-risk communities, as part of his sustainability role for chemicals firm Diversey. One of his initiatives is Linens For Life, which upcycles discarded hotel linen into saleable bags, aprons and school uniforms. This year, the focus shifted to face masks. "People living on 50 cents a day should not have to choose between food or a mask," said Phang. He has struck deals with 88 hotels in 34 countries to source used linen, which is donated to poor families around the region who sew and sell the masks. So far, the project has yielded 800,000 face masks. Phang is aiming for one million masks by the end of the year.

Phang is best known for the Soap for Hope programme, which recycles used hotel soap and provides income and cleaning products for poor families. Though the pandemic forced many hotels to close, Soap for Hope was still able to distribute soap to underprivileged families in the earlier months of the year. The same concept applies for Phang's Coffee Briques idea. Used coffee grounds are recycled into a cleaner fuel alternative to charcoal or firewood. The scheme has launched in Myanmar. Phang has had to oversee operations from his base in Singapore because of Covid travel restrictions, and compares running operations remotely to "Pablo Escobar running his empire from his prison cell". 

This year, Phang also trialed a single-use plastic upcycling venture called PlasticShreds, which uses shredded waste plastic bottles from hotels to make structures such as basketball courts and roads.

Phang hasn't let the pandemic get in the way of his ambitions. "There are three types of people in this world," he said. "People who make things happen, people who watch things happen, and people who wonder what the hell just happened. It's a matter of choice. We can make a difference."

Lavina Sequera, founding member, Soil of India

In 2017, Lavina Sequera founded Soil of India, a network of more than 600 artisans making and selling crafts in rural India that aims to be the world’s most valuable sustainable lifestyle brand. 2020 was supposed to be the year that Sequera built a robust supply chain for the business. Then Covid-19 happened.

“I saw people losing their jobs, families suffering, people dying. It was chaos,” she said. “I thought, how do I provide some relief to those who need it most?” Though business dropped, Sequera continued to buy from the artisans, 70 per cent of whom are women surviving on less than US$5 a day.

She also wanted to help another community hit hard by the pandemic: Migrant workers. Millions migrate to India’s cities in search of work, but as informal jobs dried up as cities went into lockdown, migrant workers were left with no means to earn a living. “For these migrants, there was no food to eat, and no health or hygiene. Forget about wearing masks,” she said. In April, Sequera, together with a group of lawyers, filed a writ at the Supreme Court petitioning for bed-and-breakfasts to be converted into treatment centres to help the needy as Covid-19 cases rose exponentially in India. She also worked with animal welfare charities to help street animals that were dying of starvation and a lack of medical attention over the lockdown period.

“My ambition and goals have remained the same this year — compassion. As we works towards the Sustainable Development Goals, everything starts from that point,” she said.

Luanne Sieh, head of group sustainability and corporate responsibility, CIMB

Luanne Sieh’s role was created just over a year ago, and she volunteered for it. Formerly a strategic programme manager, she is as new to sustainability as her employer, which devised its first responsible banking strategy in 2019. Sieh and her team have helped Malaysia’s second-largest bank take some big early steps in a short span of time — in a difficult year. “I’ve had to upskill and deliver at the same time,” Sieh said.

A highlight of CIMB’s efforts was the Cooler Earth Summit, one of the region’s most ambitious sustainability conferences, which ran for eight weeks from September. The event was targeted by NGOs, who dubbed the conference the ‘Hotter Earth Summit’ in a campaign that attacked CIMB’s links to planet-warming coal financing. Sieh noted that the campaign actually drew more attendees to the conference, which cost 90 per cent less to produce than the previous year. “The NGOs are trying to push an agenda. But we’re not opposed to it,” she said, adding that the campaign had the effect of accelerating the bank’s work on a coal policy. Three months later, CIMB produced Southeast Asia’s most ambitious coal commitment yet.

Sieh has had to learn and adapt over an unpredictable 12 months, and push CIMB’s sustainability agenda in a country still new to green finance. She was instrumental in driving sustainability through the CEO Action Network, a club of influential business leaders in Malaysia, and her work has seen CIMB climb the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. She’s also helped the bank’s customers weather the Covid-19 pandemic. CIMB’s sustainability team helped to create a support package for small- and medium-sized businesses, and devise a bereavement programme for people who’d lost family members to the virus.

Mikkel Larsen, chief sustainability officer, DBS Bank

Larsen has been driving DBS towards addressing environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk and improving operations for the last three years, and 2020 was the year that he flexed his influence beyond the bank.

Larsen was appointed as the DBS lead for the working group of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), an international effort led by Global Canopy, the UN Development Programme, the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative, and the World Wide Fund for Nature to help corporates better understand their impact on nature and redirect finance towards nature-positive initiatives. He also sits on groups set up by Singapore's Emerging Stronger Taskforce to work out how to bring about a carbon-conscious society.

“It’s been an amazing journey of trying to get companies and public entities to work together,” he said. ”We want to build a global hub for nature-based solutions in Singapore. For that, you need a carbon marketplace and to build an entire ecosystem around it.” He has also played a leading role in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s green financing work group, which aims to position Singapore as the green finance capital of the region.

Closer to home, Larsen’s efforts have focused on measuring the bank’s own impact, which has been under close scrutiny from NGOs because of its links to coal financing. He has integrated the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures at the bank, and now leads DBS’ pilot impact measurement study for the automotive and palm oil sectors, with a view to re-evaluating DBS’ lending decisions. 

A vegan who carbon-offsets work travel, avoids air-conditioning and takes cold showers, Larsen lives by his own low-carbon goals, but believes that companies shouldn’t be as rigid in their approach to sustainability. “Chief sustainability officers are never going to be working alone. While you don’t want to duplicate efforts, you shouldn’t be competing [to be first or best]. Everyone wants to do something in sustainability now. You need to stay focussed on your own game and do it, because it’s the right thing to do.”