The Matcha Initiative
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As the Senior Programme Manager for Sustainability Validation and Verification at TÜV SÜD, Mei Yee helps organisations add credibility and assurance to their greenhouse gases (GHG) emission assertations and GRI reports by providing third-party verification reports to support organizational claims.
She has six years of experience in the standards development of ISO 30500 and ISO 31800, testing, and certification for non-sewered sanitation systems. Prior to that, Mei Yee spearheaded World Toilet Organization's Rainbow School Toilet projects in China and Sanishop in Cambodia. She is passionate about driving corporate social responsibility and sustainability and has spent more than 18 years in various fields working internationally across teams and cultural boundaries before turning her focus on Singapore to helping companies with their carbon reduction journey. She holds a Masters in Community Water and Sanitation and a Science Degree in Earth Science, majoring in geology and physical geography.
She is a certified WSQ Advanced Certificate in Learning and Performance (ACLP) Train-The-Trainer (TTT). Since then, she has facilitated many companies in the training for Green Compass – An environmental assessment framework targeted at SME/ manufacturing industries.
I started recycling at home back in those days when "sustainability" was not in fashion and the Government had yet not provided the blue bins for HDB.
However, the most impactful change that I am witnessing now is the growing carbon footprint pledge from global companies. Whether a SME or MNC, most companies have set a net-zero carbon target or to be carbon neutral by 20XX. This wave of organization ambitious carbon declaration, as I had witnessed many times in my line of work, many coined it as "greenwashing".
This new role that I have recently embarked in the same company, tackles the topic of #greenwashing at heart through validation and verification of a common global standard. It adds credibility and assurance to organisation's GHG emissions assertions, with reports to support organisational claims and promote more consistent and comparable disclosures and verification of GHG projects.
I am in charge of educating customers in their carbon management accounting journey. Many organization had come to us wanting to verify their carbon footprint but honestly, most of them were not ready as they did not fully understand requirements of ISO 14064-1/2 of ISO14067 well. I realised that companies journey for Corporate Carbon Management can be mapped out in 5 simple steps. These are:
For each of these steps, I came up with Define > Track > Report > Validate > Offset
With this mapped out, we can know immediately at which stage an organisation is at with their carbon management journey.
The challenges that I am facing these days are customers (and consultants on behalf of their customers) asking for a 3rd party audit when they are not ready in terms of their carbon capture or have no clue where to start.
I am the Wellness Committee Chair in our company and have been organizing activities for our employees mostly on the Social front.
Last year, I started a Living Green @ TUV SUD committee specially for green activities within the organisation. The first event was a two months recycling challenge using the ALBA reverse vending machine which was newly installed last year.
The challenge was so well received and some teams took the challenge quite seriously to win in either the personal best category or best team of the month that they went to collect empty drink cans and bottles from coffee shops on the weekend.
We invited the CEO of ALBA to give out prizes for our winners and overall, colleagues feedbacked to me that it has been a long time since we had a company wide event where the event was the "talk of the town" for months.
It pulled a lot of people together and we had a common topic/goal for two months.
