Green.org sat down with Yuval Susskind, the sustainability solutions lead at Matrix, to learn how they set up a system for sustainable accounting made easy.
Yuval, thanks for being here. Tell us a little bit about you and your background:
Been involved in several cleantech startups to sprout out of the Israeli cleantech ecosystem, be it in solar technologies or wastewater treatment solutions. In the past few years I’ve turned to the digital world and have recently taken up implementing roll-outs of monday.com ( a SaaS company for work management). As a result, I’ve created an ” ESG reporting tool” on monday.com used by industrial companies to manage their sustainability accounting initiatives. You can read up more about this tool here: https://www.ecoos.co/lp-1
What is a fun fact about you?
At age 19, I hitch hiked across the US, ending up in Fairbanks Alaska, after 10 days of going coast-to-coast
Why do you think climate change and sustainability is such an important topic today?
The meeting point between innovative technologies (which are already out there) and government regulations which will require their adoption, seems to finally be coming onto a visible point on the horizon. There is no doubt that we need to change our ‘business-as-usual’ (BAU) mindset in order to keep living on this small planet, yet it takes regulations to kick the business ector into action.
What do you envision your industry looking like 10 years from now?
First, I hope that industrial leaders will be more aware and educated, and sustainability will not be preached only by the ‘head of sustainability’ point of contact, sitting at the end of the corridor. It will be common practice and part of leading business decision making across the table.
What can the average person do to make a difference?
I truly believe in power being applied by smart consumer behavior. The public needs to be offered smart alternatives which are sustainable and affordable and go in line with forward thinking regulation. Once better choices are put in front of consumers, they will be able to act more responsibly.
I always go back to the example of the composting bin that is in our back yard, and the two garbage bins that we have under our kitchen sink. As a result of this little thing, my kids have NEVER in their lives threw food to waste. And they pick the fruits from our trees in the garden, growing up on that very same food waste, that has decomposed.
What problem are you looking to solve?
Increasingly more companies are being required to comply with disclosing their Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) metrics as a result of increased pressures by regulators, investors and industry overseeing organizations. Such disclosures are cumbersome and offer monumental task as collecting, analyzing and reporting the data is a complex cross-company initiative.
We’ve developed an all-inclusive platform that enable to easily manage this large initiative over monday.com which is a popular (SaaS) Work Management platform, that is being used by many large enterprises.
How does your solution work?
Our solution is a combined integration between the monday.com platform and ECO-OS, also a SaaS company which offers a Sustainability Accounting platform to manage all your ESG reporting initiatives. This can include such metrics as: Energy (gas & electricity), water, wastewater, process emissions, refrigerants, to name a few. Since collecting the data for such metrics is a very cumbersome task that involves stakeholders across the company, across many different manufacturing sites, running such an initiative over monday.com makes the task much easier.
