The words ‘sustainable’, ‘green’ and ‘eco-friendly’ are now used so frequently by businesses that sometimes it can be difficult to know what they actually mean. Buy a product in recyclable packaging, switch an ingredient for a natural alternative, plant a tree somewhere along the way and, before you know it, something is being marketed as sustainable.
But what if we set the bar a little higher?
Rather than asking how we can make a business less bad for nature, what if we asked whether the existence of that business could actually leave nature in a better state than it found it?
This is the idea behind nature positive, and it sits right at the heart of what we are trying to do at Seilich.
So what exactly is nature positive?
Nature positive is a global goal to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030, compared with a 2020 baseline, and continue that recovery towards 2050. Put more simply; by 2030 we need there to be more nature, not less. Importantly, this isn't just about having good intentions, it requires measurable improvements in things such as the abundance and diversity of species and the health and resilience of ecosystems.
Which is quite different to sustainability.
A sustainable business might aim to reduce the amount of plastic it uses, lower its carbon emissions, use renewable energy or source ingredients with a lower environmental impact. All very worthwhile things to do of course, but essentially these actions are about reducing the negative impact of doing business.
Nature positivity asks a slightly different question; can the activity of the business actually help nature recover?
It is worth pointing out that technically nature positive is a global goal rather than a badge that an individual business can simply award itself. Businesses can however contribute towards nature-positive outcomes, which is why measurement is such an important part of the idea.
And this distinction is important to us. We don't want to simply call Seilich ‘nature positive’ because we have a lovely meadow and grow some flowers. We want to work out whether we can build a business model where, as the business grows, the amount of nature we are able to protect, create and restore grows with it.
In other words; can we actually make the economics work?
Why does any of this matter?
Unfortunately, because nature is in rather a lot of trouble.
The latest State of Nature assessment found that across the UK the abundance of the species studied has declined by an average of 19% since 1970. In Great Britain, 54% of flowering plant species have decreased in the places in which they are found.
Now, biodiversity decline is obviously enormously complicated and there isn't one single cause. Changes in how we use and manage land, climate change, pollution, invasive species and the loss and fragmentation of habitats all play their part.
But fundamentally, wildlife needs somewhere to live.
And this is where I think businesses, particularly those of us making products from plants, need to start asking ourselves some fairly difficult questions.
Where did those plants come from? What was growing there before them? How were they grown? What insects were able to feed from them? What happens to the land after harvest? And perhaps most importantly; is nature better or worse off because we decided to make this product?
As a botanist, these questions have always fascinated me.
They were also one of the reasons I started Seilich.
What if the habitat itself was productive?
Most agricultural systems start with a product.
We decide that we would like to grow wheat, lavender, potatoes or peppermint, for example, and then create the conditions required to grow as much of that crop as efficiently as possible.
At Seilich we turned that idea on its head.
We started with the habitat.
We create species-rich wildflower meadows, manage them for biodiversity and then sustainably harvest a small proportion of the plants growing within them to make our herbal teas and skincare.
The product therefore comes from the habitat, rather than the habitat being removed to create the product.
The idea is fairly simple; create meadow → carefully harvest some of its botanical abundance → make products → sell those products → use the income to look after and create more meadow.
If Seilich becomes twice as big, ideally we should be able to support more nature, not simply make twice as many products.
Simple enough.
Except of course, nature has an irritating habit of not being particularly interested in business efficiency!
Meadows need looking after
A beautiful wildflower meadow may look wonderfully wild and carefree, but unfortunately it doesn't stay like that without a bit of help.
Our meadows need cutting and raking. Thistles and docks sometimes become overly enthusiastic and need removing. Areas need monitoring and occasionally overseeding, and new areas require ground preparation and seed.
All of this takes time.
Or more specifically in business terms; staff time.
Then there is the seed itself. Good quality native wildflower seed isn't cheap, particularly when you are creating habitat at any meaningful scale.
And of course before you can grow a meadow you need somewhere to put it, so there is the rent we pay for the land too.
None of these costs appear on the ingredient list on the back of a bottle, but they are very much part of the cost of producing that bottle.
Then we have to pick everything
There are, unsurprisingly, much faster ways to harvest plants than wandering around a meadow with a basket and a pair of scissors.
But hand harvesting allows us to be incredibly selective.
We can move through the meadow picking a little here and a little there, rather than mechanically removing everything in one place. It means we can see how much of a plant is flowering, how much is being used by insects and, importantly, how much we're leaving behind.
This matters because the plants aren't there solely for us.
A flowering plant is also food for pollinators, habitat for other organisms and potentially next year's seed crop.
So harvesting slowly and carefully inevitably makes our ingredients more expensive.
Could we harvest them more cheaply?
Absolutely.
Would I want to?
No.
But how do we know we're actually helping?
This is perhaps the bit that interests me most.
Because creating something that looks natural and creating something that is genuinely beneficial for nature are not necessarily the same thing.
A field full of flowers can look wonderful to us while being relatively poor habitat. Equally, calling something ‘wildlife friendly’ doesn't automatically make it so.
So if we are genuinely trying to contribute towards nature-positive outcomes, we need to measure what is happening.
This is why we carry out pollinator surveys within our meadows. We want to know who is visiting, how the community changes over time and, importantly, whether our harvesting is having any negative effect.
We also look beneath our feet.
Soil surveys allow us to start understanding what is happening to the soil as our meadows develop; something that isn't quite as photogenic as a bumblebee sitting on a wildflower, but is arguably just as important.
Over time, we want this monitoring to become increasingly detailed.
Because ‘we think we're helping nature’ isn't really good enough.
The whole point of nature positive is that improvement should ultimately be measurable.
And then there are the meadows we don't own
There is another part of all this which is rather difficult to measure on a spreadsheet.
We want more people to grow meadows too.
So we run skill-sharing days here at Seilich and within our local community, teaching people how to create and manage wildflower habitats.
We hold workshops, give talks and speak at events. We talk to other businesses about ingredient production and about how growing plants commercially doesn't necessarily have to mean squeezing every last bit of productivity out of a piece of land.
And yes, all of this takes time too.
Time spent standing in a village hall talking about yellow rattle is time that could technically have been spent making or selling products (although anyone who knows me will probably confirm that persuading people to grow wildflowers isn't something I need much encouragement to do!).
But this matters.
Because ultimately I don't just want there to be a lovely Seilich meadow.
I want there to be meadows everywhere.
Nature positivity has a price
And now we get to the slightly uncomfortable bit.
All of this costs money.
The meadow management costs money.
The seed costs money.
The land costs money.
Hand harvesting costs money.
Pollinator surveys cost money.
Soil monitoring costs money.
Community days, workshops and sharing what we've learnt costs money.
If our sole aim at Seilich was to produce skincare and herbal tea as cheaply as possible, quite a lot of those things could simply disappear.
We could buy ingredients grown elsewhere at scale. We could avoid paying for meadow management. We wouldn't need to spend time surveying insects or soils. We wouldn't need to buy meadow seed and we certainly wouldn't need somebody spending an afternoon pulling docks out of a field.
Our margins would probably look rather better!
But then Seilich wouldn't be doing what it was created to do.
Can nature be part of the business rather than something we donate to?
This, for me, is the really interesting bit.
Traditionally conservation is often paid for through grants, charitable donations or public funding. All are incredibly important and we need much more of them.
But having worked in conservation before starting Seilich, I became increasingly interested in whether there could be another source of money available to nature; business.
Not simply businesses making money and then donating a small proportion of their profits to conservation.
What if looking after nature was actually part of the cost of doing business in the first place?
At Seilich, meadow management isn't the charitable arm of the company.
It is part of our production system.
Our plants come from the meadow, and therefore paying for the meadow to exist, paying someone to manage it, monitoring its wildlife and ensuring that our harvest doesn't damage it are all, in my mind, legitimate production costs.
Just as another skincare company might pay a supplier to grow and process an ingredient for them, we pay to grow ours within functioning wildlife habitat.
And this is really the experiment that Seilich has become.
Can we prove that this model works financially?
Can we make beautiful, genuinely desirable products, sell enough of them to support a healthy business, employ people, pay all the normal bills that every small business faces and carry the additional costs of restoring and monitoring nature?
Because if we can, things become rather exciting.
What happens if it works?
One small nature-positive business obviously isn't going to reverse the biodiversity crisis.
But a business model can be copied.
Imagine if growing botanical ingredients amongst functioning habitat became normal.
Or if businesses started thinking of hectares of restored habitat alongside turnover and profit when measuring their growth.
Or if the commercial success of a company automatically meant that the area of habitat it supported increased too.
That is what we're trying to demonstrate with Seilich.
We certainly haven't solved it yet (ask me about the cost of meadow management and I'll happily show you the spreadsheets!).
But we're trying.
And perhaps most importantly, we're trying to be open about the fact that doing things this way does cost more.
Nature isn't free simply because nobody has traditionally put its costs onto an invoice.
And finally... you
There is of course one rather important part of this nature-positive business model that I've conveniently left until last.
Someone has to buy the products.
Which is where you come in.
Every time somebody buys a Seilich moisturiser, face oil, cleanser or jar of herbal tea, some of that money works its way backwards through the system.
It helps pay the rent on the meadow.
It buys wildflower seed.
It pays somebody to cut and rake the meadow.
It allows us to pick our plants slowly and carefully.
It helps us survey the insects, monitor the soil, run skill-sharing days and talk to other people about creating habitat.
So when you buy something from Seilich, you aren't simply buying a product that has come from our meadow.
You're helping to make the meadow possible in the first place.
And if we can keep growing Seilich while growing the amount of habitat alongside it, then perhaps we can prove that nature doesn't always have to lose when a business wins.
That's the plan anyway!