A key factor in the expansion and economic success of new cleantech enterprises in South Africa, and globally for that matter, pertains to the demystification of cleantech as a business model.

Since the heady 1960s, when man first walked on the moon and gazed back in wonder at our blue planet, there has been a sustained trend to associate environmental goods and services negatively with activism rather than positively with commercialism. It is only in recent times, and as the clock ticks down the end of this first decade of the twenty-first century, that global commerce and industry have come to digest the now potentially catastrophic consequences of generations of environmental neglect and inappropriate business practices.

Yet, notwithstanding the growing body of scientific literature and the increasingly strident media attention now given to climate change and global warming, the cleantech approach to business continues to encounter barriers to entry, premised on two key perceptions.

Firstly, there is the perceived ‘hassle factor’ associated with switching from business-as-normal to a cleaner means of production or service. Anecdotally, the glacially slow global market uptake of the electric vehicle (EV) or hybrid transportation system is a function not of the aesthetic attractiveness of these vehicles – South Africa’s own Joule enjoys superb design credentials – or even of their performance output – the Tesla, a South African/US offering, is a high-performance vehicle – but rather of the market’s scepticism with respect to the infrastructure required to enable the widespread distribution and use of EV transportation.

In the absence of conveniently located charging points, consumers are reluctant to switch models and, in response, mass car manufacturers remain unwilling to invest in retooling their production lines to produce EVs at scale.

This will change. In California, the ‘Governator’ has given notice that the state intends facilitating and investing into the electricity exoskeleton required to support a substantive roll-out of EV models. In the UK, government is providing British motor manufacturers with incentives to produce EV models and recently announced plans to follow the Californian approach to creating an EV charging grid. In Iceland, a country that prides itself on using renewable energy, motorists travelling around the capital, Reykjavik, are able to charge their EVs at points dotted throughout the city and, hence, there has been a noticeable uptake of this kind of transportation.

The second major perception that frustrates market adoption of a cleantech approach to enterprise is that of cost, perceived either as a profit concession or an additional cost to company. Many business leaders continue to regard the introduction of cleaner technologies and business practices as representing additional capital investment and overheads. Yet the opposite is proving true.

One only has to consider the advances made in energy efficiency technologies to understand that business perfor- mance can, in fact, improve through the more effective and cost-efficient consumption of energy resources.

Radio-frequency identification, or RFID, devices attached to transport containers have greatly improved port logistics and the transportation sector, considerably reducing vehicle time and work hours, not to mention the substantial reduction in economic losses through theft. In the agricultural sector, humidity sensors are being linked to irrigation systems in order to more effectively and efficiently regulate the distribution of water and, hence, optimise resource use, thereby reducing overheads.

Commerce and industry are about to undergo a revolution the likes of which have not been seen since the global market adopted information technology and the Internet in the late 1980s and the 1990s, changing forever the way in which business is conducted.

Cleantech is poised to become the new best business practice. We expect to see a rush to find new technologies, new systems and innovative business models with which to transform the way in which businesses operate.

Whereas government policy has a key role to play in triggering this revolution – and the South African government’s newly announced renewable-energy feed-in tariffs exemplify this support – it will be the consumer that drives the market adoption of cleantech business.

Already, the production and sale of organic foods are scaling exponentially, today representing one of the fastest-growing product lines in our national chain stores. We expect this trend to gain traction in manufacturing, travel and transportation, energy generation and use, in building design and construction and in the consumption of water and the discharge of waste by-products. With this cleantech revolution, commercial savvy is replacing environmental activism to the overall advantage of our fragile planet.

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