Sustainability is a topic that impacts each of us personally and plays an increasingly integrated role in the business landscape. From the perspective of how companies comply with and support sustainability requirements to how they aid customers with sustainable offerings or their own initiatives, it’s a topic that impacts just about every area of today’s business. Perhaps one area that is underrepresented though is the intersection of service and sustainability.

To discuss this and more, I recently welcomed back to the UNSCRIPTED podcast Rainer Karcher, sustainability enthusiast, “climate activist in a suit,” and former Chief Sustainability Officer, who has recently departed the corporate world to start helping companies work toward their sustainability objectives through his own organization, Heartprint.

As the Founder and Managing Director of Heartprint, he brings more than 25 years of IT experience from companies like Allianz Technology, IBM, and Siemens AG. His expertise spans support, infrastructure, data centers, service operations, and IT sustainability. For Rainer, sustainability extends beyond environmental protection to encompass a holistic approach aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Agenda, addressing all ESG aspects – and his passion for this work is contagious, so I strongly recommend listening to the full discussion.

There’s Always a “Why” for Sustainability

Let’s start with ensuring we’re all operating from the same understanding that everyone – and every business – should be invested in this topic and committed to taking action. There’s always a “why” for sustainability, it’s just a matter of through which lens the view resonates with you most.

“Start with your own health,” says Rainer. “If you take the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, good health and well-being is part of sustainability. So, this is already a first advantage. The second is, if you for example eat less meat, you help the planet. Even by reducing consumption to maybe once or twice per week, you can consume the higher quality products, helping animal treatment, saving you money, and more. From the perspective of a company, there’s the topic of inclusion – a company that is inclusive has an advantage. If you provide a surrounding for employees to work towards a better future, the growing numbers for whom it’s a private passion will be happier in their jobs – so it can play a role in talent attraction and retention. Then we get into all of the ways these trends are impacting companies, there’s just so many reasons why this matters.”

As you read through the trends we discussed, you’ll see that whether you share a personal passion for this topic, feel invested in leaving a better future for your children, or are looking at it from strictly a business perspective, sustainability matters. There are demands to comply with, but also opportunities to win customer mindshare and marketshare by leading the way, and even create offerings to help customers on their own sustainability journeys.

Current Sustainability Trends

So, what are those trends? In an hour discussion there’s no way to cover everything, but Rainer and I focused on talking about the areas that would be especially relevant for service-centric businesses. Here’s a synopsis:

• Regulatory pressures. “With the European Green Deal, but also impacting companies in the U.S. and across the world, there are guidelines impacting how companies do business. Depending on revenue, but going down to even the small business world, is the CSRD, Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, and it is replacing the non-financial reporting of the past. This is nothing completely new, but brings a broader and deeper granularity when it comes to sustainability. It contains the typical environmental aspects like carbon footprint, like water consumption, air quality, it goes into biodiversity aspects as well but also goes into social, including pay gaps, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, all those features. And finally, the governance aspect goes into the supply chain aspects. What is the code of conduct of a company to work together throughout the supply chain? It is impacting companies all over the world. We do have, depending on relationships and customer scenarios, for sure, always the need to make things transparent. And this is the biggest achievement of initiatives like CSRD and some others as well. On the other side, it does regulate where investments are going into the part of CSRD and that Green Deal called EU taxonomy. So, this is defining what is sustainable investments. I think the equivalent in the US is a bit the Inflation Reduction Act.”
• Increasing Transparency. “Regulations require you to create a transparency on where your emissions are coming from and how you are making progress to further reduce and to get to carbon neutrality in the future, then until 2050 by latest to stick with that 1.5 degree Paris Agreement. To those of you who are not familiar, the objective of that is to limit the global average increase of temperature to 1.5 degrees. To achieve that, you have to look into, for example, the way you travel. In field service, employees normally spend a lot of time on the road. To get to your customers the sooner the better, you mostly aren’t taking any public transport or trains. You jump maybe onto a plane or into a car to get there. This is part of the regulatory for the environmental aspect, but also brings us to finding ways to lower that footprint.”
• Lowering Environmental Footprint. “We have to find ways to lower your footprint, meaning maybe changing to electrical vehicles if it's on short ranges or mid ranges. Maybe changing to sustainable aviation fuel if you have to fly and if you have to.” There are also a number of ways in field service to use modern technologies to reduce your environmental footprint. For example, the incorporation of remote service capabilities that allow customer self-service and/or remote resolution help organizations avoid unnecessary on-site visits and also ensure that when a visit is needed, the information to achieve first-time fix has already been gathered. Moreover, technologies like IFS Planning & Scheduling Optimization (PSO) help to maximize efficiency and reduce travel time, helping to make sure you are keeping the footprint that is necessary as small as possible.  
• Accessibility. “The accessibility aspect in the U.S. is now coming over to Europe. We're quite behind here in Germany and in Europe. We have the European Accessibility Act, which is now enforcing companies starting in summer of next year to make their products and services accessible for anyone. That means inclusiveness for blind people, for people with any kind of mental diseases or disabilities. That is something which affects for sure service and field service as well.”
• Human Rights. “In Germany, for example, we've started already last year, the German Supply Chain Act and now the European Union is enhancing that most likely in 2026 with the CSDDD (Corporate Supply Chain Due Diligence Directive). This focuses on the whole aspect on human rights treatments, children, labor, modern slavery and so on, throughout the whole supply chain. If I'm, for example, working with a call center in India, I have to ensure being the company who is providing the service, that even if it's a third or fourth tier supplier, that they are treating humans right and providing fair payment the way it is defined in the local area region. So, I have to ensure this is in my own responsibility and not just handed to the supply chain.”
• Investment Decisions. “I don't make an investment into a company which I have to be afraid might not be existent in a year or two. I'd like to understand that whatever they do is resilient, in regard of the whole supply chain and even reputational aspects. I do not want to work with a company, invest into a company, or insure a company I might see a risk of getting into press and media in a negative way, or maybe in a year or two and they go bankrupt. I don't know for the U.S. market, but I know for the European and in particular German market, banking is heavily looking at who is getting loans and for what conditions. Companies who have a clear sustainability commitment, the target setting, and resilience and transparency already, they get loans to far better conditions than companies who not.”
• Supply Chain. “A perfect example we've seen already throughout the pandemic. If you remember that ship blocking the Panama Channel for a couple of days, brought a lot of companies really to their limits. If I have an understanding of my suppliers throughout the whole chain and transparency of what is their impact and what could bring my supply chain to risk. With human rights, the fashion industry has been an example of poor working conditions and reputational aspects. Every company leader, every C-level in a company, whether it's 50, 500, 5,000, 500,000 employees, has to take responsibility.”
• Sustainable Product Design. “If you design a product in the way that you're first of all able to repair it quite well, and when it's not able to be repaired anymore can be fully reused, you are acknowledging that our resources on Earth are limited. We don't have unlimited resources. In many cases today, we produce something, we use it, and at the end of the life cycle we throw it away often to landfill, often exported to sub-Saharan Africa or elsewhere, and we just waste and dump. This has to change. If we design products for longevity and to where we can dismantle components, separate metals from plastics, and so on, it will not only lower costs but create more circularity and lessen the environmental harm.”
• Circular Economy’s Service Potential. The circular economy is not only better for the environment, but it can present opportunity for service providers. In a recent post on LinkedIn, Lucas Rigotto, CSO, Liquid and Powder Technologies at GEA Group, shared how he feels many research organizations and news sources discussing sustainability miss the opportunity to touch on the intersection with service. He says, “In some of our recent Sustainability and Circular Economy discussions, I came away feeling incredibly energized about the crucial role service plays in our organizational goals but even more on impact for the industry to be more efficient, profitable and really deliver outcomes from a circular approach. Service is in a prime position to help our customers achieve their sustainability goals by focusing on upgrades, modernizations, service contracts, and digital solutions. We’re ensuring products run smoothly and efficiently for longer periods, reducing waste, and conserving resources. How do we do it? Upgrades and modernizations give our customers’ assets a new lease on life. Service contracts provide ongoing care to keep everything in top shape and minimize unnecessary downtime. Our digital solutions bring process insights, help optimize their operations with our autopilot like applications and real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance, ensuring our customers and their industries are always one step ahead. By adhering to these practices, we’re not just assisting our customers; we’re also making a significant positive impact on the planet. We keep pushing forward, embracing the 5Rs, and demonstrating how our strategic service activities are paving the way for a more sustainable future. It’s a win-win for the environment, for our business and mostly for our customers and society!”
• Artificial Intelligence. “If you look into the digital and IT world, everyone is talking AI. Everyone is looking into trying to find real use cases for AI. I just recently had a service experience myself where I called my mobile provider with a need and after about five minutes of conversation, realized I wasn’t talking with a human. We are just at the beginning of that – AI capabilities are tremendously changing the way we live, the way we work, what we do and how we do things. In service areas, you can take the simple first-level support and free up the people doing that on a day-to-day basis to work on creative, innovative things. From that aspect, there is a huge opportunity to improve our lives with artificial intelligence. On the flip side of the coin, it always comes with a price. And AI is consuming already a huge amount of energy. For example, if you Google yourself versus putting your name into ChatGPT4, ChatGPT will bring up more or less the same results but costs you 100 times more energy than Google does, and this goes for any AI solution. The energy consumption is incredible, and it requires a huge amount of data centers to be built. There’s also the ethical aspects of artificial intelligence, including the treatment of people entering the data, the issue of bias, and the question on its impact on humanity as a whole. If it sounds like I'm an enemy of AI, I am not. I am quite sure we need to have it. It's part of a solution, but we have to treat it right.”

The Issue of Greenwashing

I was curious to ask Rainer whether, with the mandated increases in transparency, greenwashing is still a major issue. According to him, greenwashing won’t go away. “As long as you have humans who are intelligent and smart at using the right words and the right visuals, there will always be greenwashing from an outside perspective,” he says. “Things like the CSRD are aimed to reduce that and it is being enhanced with a clean claims directive to regulate how you have to set up your strategy to be allowed to talk on carbon neutral or net zero. For example, to stick with that, you have to reduce your own footprint by 90% and only 10% is allowed to be compensated and offset with certificates. If you have to compensate more, then you are not allowed officially to use the term net zero. Does it keep all the companies away from greenwashing? Surely not I’m pretty confident if you keep your eyes open and trust your gut feeling, you’ll be able to identify those who are serious in their efforts and those who are doing the check-the-box thing.”

What’s Next?

Curious what Rainer anticipates the next 12 months will bring in terms of the trends discussed above, and more? “Twelve months will definitely be the time in which we’ll see AI dramatically increasing. I think we need to have a way bigger focus on resilience and the awareness that what we’ve already seen in terms of the effects of climate crisis aren’t going away. We’re still focused on things like transparency for the as-is, but we need to put a dramatically fast focus on what will happen in the future. So AI will have a huge role in prediction and helping us adapt to situations and find alternatives. I also think the world is connecting more and more – we as humanity and as the enterprise world are connecting globally. We have a global issue, so we have to treat it as such – not as competitive advantage, not with intellectual properly, but with collaboration and working towards one goal together.”

And with that, you can likely understand why Rainer named his new company Heartprint. His enthusiasm for and view around this work comes from the heart, and companies who are most committed to doing the work will know that along with creating a strategy and a blueprint, you will be most successful if you genuinely care.