Sustainability and SMEs: translating emissions into added value for the company
Sustainability in business, in particular the calculation of environmental indicators such as the Carbon footprint (CF), the Water footprint (WF) or the various ISO 9000, 14000, etc. certifications, is increasingly seen by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as a mere formal obligation fulfilled unwillingly; a completely unnecessary operational cost that does not help to improve business management. For the majority of small entrepreneurs, sustainability is just another unnecessary administrative burden, a fulfilment imposed to impose 'new hidden taxes' that would be detrimental to paths of innovation and growth. Yet, ENEA's Annual Reports on Energy Efficiency for 2024 and 2025 show how savings from monitoring and managing driven data have made it possible to identify energy waste whose costs often remain invisible in traditional accounting and that improving them leads to tangible reductions in energy expenditure.
What is needed is a paradigm shift, which is rather widely absent today, to make people realise that the environment ↔ margins economic growth connection is a concrete aspect and, likewise, sustainability is not an imposition, a caveat of the Banks or the European Union to build obstacles to free enterprise, but on the contrary represents a series of practical actions to monitor and improve business efficiency.
The challenge in the coming years, therefore, is to transform key performance indicators of environmental impacts from mere 'compliance metrics' to indicators of opportunity, where sustainability does not only mean ESG (environmental, social, managerial) compliance but a real management control tool. There is a need to incentivise SMEs to measure their ESG performance, not because they have to comply with European laws or to mitigate climate change, but to realise that monitoring production efficiency enables management benefits such as lowering costs while improving competitiveness.
For example, after having calculated the Carbon footprint of a product and/or organisation (expressed as tonnes of CO2 per unit of product, service or entire organisation) or the circularity of raw materials, it is necessary to include this information more and more pervasively in management tools or to raise awareness among managers on the same to highlight how the optimisation of resources (energy, water, raw materials) is the first driver for reducing costs and increasing competitiveness. In fact, the limit so far is represented by the fact that the calculation of an environmental indicator, such as the Carbon Footprint, is often a silent data for those who have to manage day-to-day production as it is often disconnected from operational decisions. The difficulty is that environmental and economic aspects speak different languages and, even if they have a lowest common denominator, it is complicated to achieve a full completion of the two aspects. Talking about environmental emissions (or emissions of any other nature) is misleading for the company, as the numerical figure is seen as a separate function, an externality, and not a key to an integrated understanding of the company's numbers.
This is why one should avoid silo reporting and consider carbon intensity as an indicator that weighs the product/environmental emissions ratio in order to give evidence of corporate eco-efficiency. In this way, ad hoc investments to reduce energy, water volume or the amount of raw material needed to create products or services become important to generate value and protect margins.
