BY
Niyaz Khalish

Lead Editor

Hype Issue #69

Published on

July 18th

2025

Adam Reutens-Tan turns childhood eco-anxiety into action with one ESG tip at a time

Long before Adam Reutens-Tan became a sustainability advocate using his voice to guide SMEs and charities through Economic, Sustainability and Governance [ESG] workshops, he was a young boy who was obsessed with turning off the lights in his house. 

“I kind of had this sense of, I would say existentialism,” Mr Reutens-Tan recalls. “I already had the early stages of what we now know today as eco-anxiety, where you feel this sense of vague doom that the earth is suffering and that we are going to suffer as a result.” 

Growing up, Mr Reutens-Tan spent a lot of his time surrounded by nature in the front and back garden of his childhood home. That early connection with the environment stuck with him, and when he moved to an HDB flat, he became the unofficial ‘light switcher’ of the family.

“I would be the one to turn off lights, turn off fans, turn off electrical appliances, whatever, as soon as they were not being used,” Mr Reutens-Tan recollected. “A person would just have to leave [the room] for a minute, and … [I’d] turn it off.” 

This little quirk was only the first step in his growing care towards the environment. What further fueled his passion for sustainability was when he chose global warming as his year-long project in Secondary 1 at Raffles Institution. Furthermore, he narrowed his study to the natural environment in Secondary 2, where he studied Macaque Monkeys, which “in the early nineties were considered endangered”. 

The Communications Path That Changed Everything

Despite having an inquisitive curiosity towards the environment and sustainability, Mr Reutens-Tan’s ambitions were quite different. 

“I thought I would be in public relations, hopefully within the hospitality space, because if you’re in hospitality, you tend to live at the hotel, shiok right?” However, during his vacation training while studying at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, he was posted to the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore [CAAS] despite being dead set on advertising. 

Unbeknownst to Mr Reutens-Tan, this role landed him a step closer to his eventual career. His training supervisor, Jeannie Ong, gave him “free rein and a lot of space and freedom” to test his skills and talents. This experience allowed him to showcase his talents, and he received recognition from his training supervisor. 

Mr Adam Reutans-Tan with Jeannie Ong during his book launch. Photo courtesy of Adam Reutans-Tan

Despite having this natural affinity, his plans shifted after National Service, when he entered the advertising industry. What seemed glamorous from afar proved unsatisfying up close. “Advertising as an industry is very resource hungry, and I couldn’t take it because my eco-anxiety resurfaced,” he says. The long hours and excessive paper usage pushed him to reconsider his path.

Still, the experience was not without value. Mr Reutens-Tan credits a French-Canadian creative director for sharpening his writing. “I once spent three whole working days writing nothing but headlines. However, after the presentation, the client came up, shook my hand and praised me for  “those damn good headlines.” 

After a stint at P&N Holdings doing branding and marketing for PropNex and its affiliates, Adam began advocating internally for more sustainable practices. “That was me sort of touching my toes in the water of sustainability,” he says. Then came a turning point. He was headhunted by his previous vacation training supervisor, Jeannie Ong, to join StarHub as a sustainability advocate in August 2011. From that point onwards, his passion for sustainability skyrocketed. 

At StarHub, he accomplished many feats that he is still proud of to this day. Towards the end of 2011, Mr Reutens-Tan was tasked with writing the first sustainability report with the help of Rajesh Chhabra, his sustainability reporting consultant. The best part? He did the entire thing, from scratch, in one week. “I mean, to me, that’s a huge feat to do that kind of report,” he recalled. “It gives you the confidence to know that if I were to do something similar for another company as a consultant, I can do it easily.”

While he was completing the report, he was also looking for the next big thing to do for StarHub. “Now, I wanted to do something that was environmentally related, and yet also [connected] to StarHub’s business.”

Then came the idea of Singapore’s Recycling Nation’s Electronic Waste [RENEW] programme, one of Singapore’s biggest and most extensive initiatives focused on recycling e-waste. The idea came from asking himself what happens to electronic items after they are used. 

 “There were a few scattered e-waste recycling bins around the island, but it was few and far between.” Due to this discovery, he founded RENEW, which was the nation’s primary method of recycling e-waste until the Singaporean government introduced ALBA, an overseas waste collection programme. 

 Mr Reutens-Tan was especially proud of RENEW as the initiative “saved tons and tons of electronic waste from going to landfill” and had won awards in Singapore and abroad. His ambition in sustainability grew exponentially. He gained many insights on the industry and further expanded his knowledge on sustainability as a whole.

Mr Reutens-Tan would eventually leave StarHub at the start of 2016 to relocate with his family to Perth for two years, before joining the Community Foundation of Singapore as a Principal Consultant in 2018. He recently left in July 2025 to join Pan Pacific Conservation Foundation as their first Project Manager.

From Workshops to 137 Tips

His time at the Community Foundation of Singapore had led Mr Reutens-Tan to give free ESG workshops to SMEs and small charities. He first started out at his friend’s organisation and slowly progressed to more. As he continued carrying out more workshops, he realised that the demand was too much for him to meet each organisation one at a time. 

Mr Adam Reutans-Tan singing books at his book launch. Photo courtesy of Tristan Low

“If I count all the SMEs and charities in Singapore, that’s like over 20,000. Even if I spoke to one every working day, that’s 250 a year,” Mr Reutens-Tan calculated. “So, I figured that rather than go one by one, I would create this free resource.”

Hence, this prompted him to publish his new book that would help SMEs and charities in implementing sustainability into their business. 

Why It Still Matters

In a world of short attention spans and endless news cycles, Mr Reutens-Tan knows that keeping sustainability in focus isn’t easy. This results in many environmental problems staying unsolved. 

“There’s so many more things vying for our attention these days,” he explained. “We’ve still got the ongoing Ukrainian war, we’ve got the Gaza Strip crisis, and then the whole China and US trade tariffs.  So actually there’s a lot to take our attention away from sustainability, including the environment.” This results in the effects of climate change being harder to notice, and hence many environmental problems go unsolved.  

With this, the same problems keep resurfacing. The challenge arises when there is a need to acknowledge these unsolved environmental problems from a new point of view. “The challenge is pitching the same idea in a fresh perspective, and that’s very challenging because there’s only so many ways you can only spin the same story.” 

Hence, that is what the book is meant for. To address current issues in a fresh and digestible way to as many organisations as possible. 

“Sustainability Made Easy for Charities and SMEs” is available for free through Adam’s website, the National Library, RAISE, ASME, and other public channels.

Finding Purpose, One Step at a Time

Mr Adam Reutens-Tan’s journey to where he is today was not a straight path but a series of “fortuitous points”. From being headhunted into StarHub to the first workshop he had at his friend’s organisation, each step brought him closer to his calling. It was when his family moved to Perth in 2016 to 2017 that “allowed him the time and space to learn more about sustainability and better appreciate what it is all for [time with loved ones, quality of life]”.

It is these experiences that reminded him that change does not derive from chasing titles or getting rich, but from aligning one’s work with something that truly matters. Today, as a “sustainability advocate and lover of life”, Mr Reutens-Tan continues to inspire others to take action in sustainability through perspective and purpose.