Ideal Bite: "Keeping It Real" . . . and Fun

Whatever happened to all those green shoppers, conscientious consumers, cultural creatives, and LOHAS fellow travelers? You know, the ones that swear that they’d gladly purchase the kinder, gentler product . . . if only they knew what to do? Where’d they all go?

I’ve been tracking these so-called values-based shoppers for more than 15 years, since I wrote The Green Consumer (now long out of print), and I don’t have a decent answer to these questions.

Since the late 1980s, a succession of market researchers have told us that they’re out there -- in big numbers: millions of Americans, and millions more Europeans, Japanese, Canadians, Australians, and assorted others. Each year since 1991 (except 2004), Roper (now NOP World) has conducted a Green Gauge Report that provides market segmentations of green consumer groups based on surveys of 2,000 U.S. consumers. The percentages within each segment ("True-Blue Greens," "Greenback Greens," and all the rest) have fluctuated over the years, but not by much.

The truth is, the gap between green consciousness and green consumerism is huge. And problematic for companies that all too often rely on the Same Old Marketing Tactics when trying to reach values-based shoppers. They more often than not miss the mark, get frustrated, and give up. The result is that consumers are left with relatively few green choices, and company marketing gurus (having “proven” that there’s no market for green products) move on to whatever's next.

What’s needed is a way to build a bridge between these two parallel universes.

That’s where Ideal Bite, a venture launched this month by two sales and marketing vets, could be just what the eco-doctor ordered.

Ideal Bite is trying to connect these two worlds through dual offerings: a slick daily e-mail tip aimed at educating and aggregating an audience of conscientious shoppers, and a market research service for companies to help them “get a direct dial right into these consumers and ask their opinions,” in the words of Jennifer Boulden, one of firm’s co-founders.

It's important to know that these aren’t your usual eco-tips. What sets Ideal Bite apart is its self-styled emphasis on being entertaining and fun and “sassy.”

And realistic. One of the many things I like about Ideal Bite is that it is unapologetic about being imperfect -- that is, it acknowledges right up front that most people don’t want to be inconvenienced much in “doing the right thing,” even though they may believe deeply in the underlying values. It needs to be easy and uplifting. So, you won’t find guilt, preaching, or fear-mongering on Ideal Bite. “It was clear to us that there is a gap between what people wanted to do and their unwillingness to go out of their way or change their lifestyle,” Boulden told me recently. “Most people aren’t going to be making their own bug spray or start biking to work.”

Boulden -- with a background in business strategy and marketing at IBM, Hearst, and the World Resources Institute -- founded Ideal Bite with Heather Stephenson, who served as vice president of an online advertising sales network that went public in 1999, then started a rooftop-garden design/build firm. They head a team of writers, designers, and researchers who “get” that, to be effective, environmental education has to be as entertaining as it is enlightening. Ideal Bite’s daily tips, blog, and other offerings reflect that irreverence -- “keeping it real,” as Boulden and Stephenson put it. I have to say that it’s refreshing.

Ideal Bite hopes to marry permission-based marketing with market research to foment a rich conversation between companies and consumers about green products and services. Explains Boulden: “If a company develops a new green product and wants to run it by consumers without having to poll the entire world, we can help. In doing so, we’ve taken thousands of dollars and weeks out of the equation to let this conversation happen much more efficiently.” From there, a company could offer coupons or other incentives to the Ideal Bite audience -- a direct line into the heart of the green marketplace.

If it works, Ideal Bite could go a long way toward breaking the vicious cycle of green marketing failures and frustrated green consumers. Says Boulden: “There is a spot open now to be that cool, fun, sassy voice to consumers, and to help them align their values more closely with the options that are out there. If companies aren’t rewarded for doing the right thing, this is all going to go away.”

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Toyota's Race to the Top

First, they introduce a hybrid automobile, the Prius, that breaks sales records for alternative-fueled vehicles and -- with the help of Hollywood’s A-list -- ushers in a new era of fuel-efficient cars. Then, they open a half-dozen manufacturing plants in North America (including a hybrid factory in Kentucky), with promises of more to come.

Now, the company’s newly minted president, Katsuaki Watanabe, in his first news conference, held on Monday, hitched his company’s future growth to fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly vehicles, saying, “Our main mission as a company is to contribute to a better society” and that "We need to do much more in this field than we have been."

Doesn’t he know that automobile companies are supposed to be the evil empire for most environmentalists?

Seriously, something strange and wonderful seems to be going on here. A major automobile company -- the world’s second-largest, well on its way to besting General Motors, the ailing auto maker that currently (and temporarily) holds the number-one spot -- is embracing sustainability and environmental and safety issues as a core operating principle.

True, there’s some crafty strategy going on here. According to the June 28 Wall Street Journal, Toyota recognizes that the more hybrids it sells in the U.S. and, as a result, the higher its companywide average fuel economy, the more highly profitable trucks and SUVs it will be able to sell. And Toyota said in an annual report filed with U.S. regulators on Friday that tougher U.S. fuel economy standards could hurt its bottom line.

But it’s not all that cynical. At his news conference, Watanabe committed his company to “green technology” and promised to keep pushing Toyota engineers until they come up with a technology that one day would allow a car to “cross the U.S. continent on one full tank of gas.”

Assuming that gas tank holds 20 gallons of fuel, we’re talking about your basic 150-mile-per-gallon vehicle. Which is not, entirely, out of bounds. Since the late 1990s, Amory Lovins has been talking about a “hypercar” that gets 200 miles per gallon. And the New York Times reported in April on how hobbyists have created plug-in Priuses with tricked-up batteries that claim to get 180 mpg.

So, the cross-country tank of fuel may be within our grasp.

Toyota’s prominence as the green car company also shows the value of long-term vision -- at least by automotive standards. For years, the company has been pondering the role of environmental friendliness and fuel-efficiency as a key to its growth and success over the long haul. For example, in early 2000, speaking at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Toyota’s then president, Fujio Cho, put it bluntly: "Environmentally friendly cars will soon cease to be an option, they will become a necessity."

Today, with $60-per-barrel oil and climate change creating a two-pronged threat to Americans’ beloved mobility, and China ramping up its car buying, that sentiment seems like a no-brainer. But for a car company back then, it was nothing short of visionary.

Alcoa and the Complexities of 'Climate Neutral'

Randall M. Overbey, president of Alcoa Primary Metals Development, made a startling statement toward the end of a presentation given this past week at The Conference Board's 2005 Business and Sustainability Conference in New York:

We believe that, within the critical transportation sector, the [aluminum] industry can become “climate neutral” by 2020. In such a state, the global warming impacts of aluminum production will be fully offset by the CO2 emissions saved by its use, on a run-rate basis.

Overbey continued:

Aluminum saves fuel and recycles like few other materials do. I am aware of no other metal that can support a vision like this. We believe that it can happen, if we in the industry work together. If the vision is shared by our customers, consumers and communities, we may be able to realize it even sooner.

(The full text and Powerpoint slides of Overbey's presentation are available online.)

What, exactly, does this mean? As the accompanying chart from Overbey's presentation suggests, using more aluminum in place of steel or other metals in vehicles would make them lighter and, therefore, more fuel-efficient -- so much so, he says, that the carbon dioxide emissions reductions (the pink line) would be equal to the emissions created in manufacturing aluminum (the blue line).

And that, he seems to be saying, would render the entire aluminum industry “climate neutral.”

Now, I’ve been a student of "climate neutral" claims for more than a decade, and know just enough about that term to be dangerous. I know, for instance, that counting climate emissions is a tricky and complex business. Among other things, you have to figure out where to draw the boundaries. Example: In determining the carbon footprint for a pair of shoes, should you include the gas that went into the chainsaw that cut down the tree to produce the shoebox? Or is that chainsaw gas someone else’s “problem”?

Entire consulting businesses are built upon such conundrums.

So, Overbey’s statement made me curious: Should Alcoa get credit for all of the carbon reductions resulting from its use in cars to make them lighter, and for the resulting fuel and carbon savings?

For answers, I turned to Sue Hall, founder and executive director of the Climate Neutral Network, which administers the ClimateCool certification label for companies and products that meet its standards. Its standards resulted from a broad stakeholder process that included companies, activist groups, academics, scientists, and others -- a process funded in part by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (Disclosure: I was part of that stakeholder process in the mid 1990s.)

My conversation with Hall illuminated the complexities involved here -- and the challenges companies like Alcoa face in making, and living up to, “climate neutral” claims.

Hall began by explaining that Overbey’s optimism was well-founded, given the potential for supply-chain collaboration to achieve sizeable greenhouse gas reductions:

A lot of companies have been focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions in their own operations -- their own direct emissions. But most supply chains have some really colossal greenhouse gas reductions that can be achieved, but only if all of the companies collaborate. And aluminum and autos is one of those supply chains.

The problem, she said, is figuring out how to measure the reductions -- and who gets to claim credit for them. That is, if Ford were to use more aluminum and less steel to make a car, does Alcoa get to claim the emissions reductions, or does Ford? And what about the person who purchases the car -- the one responsible for buying and burning the gasoline? Wouldn’t she get some credit?

The answers to such questions could have significant impacts. In a world in which greenhouse gas emissions reductions are becoming a tradable commodity, ownership of a carbon credit is far more than an intellectual exercise. U.S. greenhouse gas emissions totaled more than 5.8 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2003, 95% from the burning of fossil fuels, according to U.S. EPA data. With carbon currently trading on the Chicago Climate Exchange for about $1.75 per metric ton, we’re talking about -- well, potentially a helluva lot of money.

So, figuring out who “owns” an emissions reduction is no small matter. Said Hall:

Ownership of carbon doesn’t always neatly fit into one simple box, where one decision gets made and the greenhouse gas reduction occurs inside that box. Those are the simple ones. But many of the really huge greenhouse gas reduction opportunities that we face don’t behave in that convenient, all-in-one-box style. And so, from a carbon perspective, supply chains and products and services very often exhibit a high degree of interdependence.

I asked Hall who should get credit for the carbon reductions in the hypothetical example of Alcoa selling aluminum to Ford? The answer, as I expected, was complex. For starters, it has to do with whether a company is doing something beyond “business as usual” -- a key determinant for whether a greenhouse gas reduction even exists in a voluntary carbon offset market. I suggested that in this case, ownership of the carbon reductions should go to Ford, because making an aluminum car body would be something beyond “business as usual” for Ford. Alcoa would merely be selling more aluminum -- something it does every day.

It’s not that simple, said Hall.

If you look at how aluminum gets spec’ed into automobiles, you’ve got quality issues, tolerance ratings, and other factors. Car companies for decades have been trying to lightweight their cars, and they work extremely closely with the aluminum companies and other suppliers to figure out how to do that. It’s not simply, “I decided to buy apples today rather than pears.” There’s a huge amount of collaboration taking place between the partners at that development stage. From the discussions that we’ve had with some of the leading automobile manufacturers and aluminum producers, the impression I get is that there is a fair amount of interdependence as these kinds of decisions get made.

So, how are we ever going to create a rational economic system with so many open questions? In a voluntary market for carbon, explained Hall, most of these ownership decisions get established through contracts.

"What you're saying," I offered, "is that if Alcoa sells aluminum to Ford, their contract theoretically should proscribe how any carbon reductions be allocated and owned across all three parties -- Alcoa, Ford, and Ford’s customers."

Right. Companies essentially would look to incorporate the question of carbon ownership, if there are credits to be established, into the contracts between them. What complicates matters is that if you’ve got recycled aluminum, then a lot of the carbon reductions predominantly fit towards the aluminum company end, if you substitute recycled aluminum for primary metals.

Ah, more complications. And, it turns out, recycled aluminum isn’t the end of it. For example, there are regulatory issues, like federal fuel economy standards, that raise yet more questions: Should an automaker’s use of aluminum should be considered to be beyond “business as usual” if it is required by law to find ways to improve fuel economy? And all this assumes that there is general agreement on what the carbon footprint of aluminum is in the first place. For example, in making his climate-neutral statement, was Overbey including the energy and emissions related to mining bauxite, the main source of aluminum? We don't really know.

Hall grokked my confusion -- and frustration.

There’s a lot of complexities in there. But that doesn’t mean to say that when industries recognize that there are some really significant drivers they can bring to bear to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that they should throw their hands up and say, “We can’t go there.” Because the goal is to get the reductions down. And we’ve got to use all the levers big and small, but particularly the big ones, to drive greenhouse gas reductions down as fast as we can. If that means we’ve got ownership questions we need to address, then let’s do that. We have to look at the big, hairy, audacious goals, because we’re not going to get there otherwise.

In the end, it may be the last part of Randall Overbey’s recent statement that is most telling: that climate neutrality is achievable if “we in the industry work together.” As Hall put it:

Driving down these emissions means we’ll have to collaborate up and down the supply chain. And yes, it’s more complicated. It’s about finding interdependencies. It’s not all about stovepipes, where we manage our own greenhouse gas emissions and that’s all we need to look at.

And, with more than a little understatement, she added:

Carbon isn’t nice and neat and well behaved. I wish it was; it would be so much easier.

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(Still) In for the Long Run

This month, June, marks the beginning of the 15th year of publication of The Green Business Letter, of which I am founder and editor. In honor of the occasion, I went back to our very first issue and read the back-page essay that is has been a hallmark of every monthly issue published since.

I was surprised by how relevant that first essay still seems -- a perception that has been echoed by several subscribers who sent notes underscoring the poignancy of that essay. A few of them expressed disappointment -- not in me, but in the fact that, in many ways, the "movement" -- that is, the movement companies seeking to be more environmentally responsible -- hasn't come all that far.

Wrote one:

It demonstrates how little real progress has been made, yet there is information out -- like the Millennium report a few weeks back -- that says that our ecosystems are going down the tubes. Put it in the contest of say, homeland security, global trade, electronics, nanotechnology, biotechnology, the economy, the rise of China, the war on terrorism, etc. Stuff written 15 years ago on these subjects would seem amusing and antiquated if re-published today. There have been major shifts all around, but the corporate EHS [environment, health & safety] stuff is still the same old stuff and "organizational paralysis," as you call it, is getting worse, not better. The only real progress is that companies have gotten better at the spin and a few are starting to wake up to some marketing opportunities, ironically because the planet’s ecosystems are in decline.

That's not exactly a fair assessment -- a tad too cynical for my taste -- but telling, given that it was written by a veteran of more than 25 years in this field.

There's more to this story than mere spin. The leading edge of the movement -- companies that have truly integrated environmental thinking into their operations in a way that aligns with their business goals as well as the betterment of the planet -- has come a long way, quickly. That's what I've been covering -- in my newsletter, in this blog, on GreenBiz.com, and in the many speeches I give each year. And that's what gives me hope.

But there remains a large corps of companies for whom this rudimentary essay, sadly, remains the state of the art. Which is to say, we've come a long way since 1991 -- but have a long, long way to go.

You can read the reprinted essay here.

First, Do No Harm

For much of the history of corporate environmentalism, the idea of reducing toxics has been largely a compliance conversation, the result of various national and local laws limiting or prohibiting the emissions of poisons into the air, land, or soil. Ever since the publication of Rachel Carson’s landmark book Silent Spring in 1962 there has been high awareness for more than four decades that even low doses toxics in the environment can be a significant threat to public health and the environment.

Increasingly, toxics seem well on their way to be becoming a threat to business, too.

A new body of research and activity suggests that toxics reduction and elimination may be a growing arena of regulatory, activist, customer, and shareholder interest. And as awareness increases of the business risks of toxics, whether real risks or perceived ones, companies lacking established policies and processes may find themselves subject to competitive pressures and new, more intensive levels of stakeholder scrutiny.

That's the gist of the lead story this month in The Green Business Letter, my monthly newsletter. An excerpt:

At the same time, a small corps of companies are working in various ways to clean up their products, processes, and policies, according to Dr. Richard A. Liroff, a senior fellow at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C., focusing on corporate management of toxics. And the opportunities to gain business value from such endeavors is considerable. “Innovative, entrepreneurial companies can gain competitive advantage, increase profits, and grow shareholder value by systematically reviewing chemicals in their products, working with their suppliers to reduce or eliminate product toxicity, and responding creatively to the growing demand for environmentally preferable goods,” he wrote in a paper on the topic published earlier this year by the Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment.

Liroff cites the saga of Sony as a cautionary tale about companies and toxics. In the fall of 2001, the Netherlands banned the sale of Sony’s hot PlayStation consoles because the cadmium in accessory cables exceeded regulatory limits. Sony’s lost sales and the costs to rework their product totaled about $150 million and the experience led Sony to carry out a systematic supply-chain and internal management review to prevent similar problems from happening in the future.

Liroff says the Sony episode underscores why companies, especially consumer products companies, need to have full knowledge of the toxic chemicals in their products. “Companies that do not understand toxic hazards in their products and who do not take steps to reduce or eliminate them face the risk of disruption to their supply chains, exclusion from markets, damage to their reputation, foregone profits, and toxic tort litigation,” he writes.

Also this month: A new study shows that retailers who switch to LED lighting for their store displays can save a bundle while still providing the attention-grabbing aesthetics they need. A group of U.K. companies ask their country’s government to be more proactive on climate change. And new standards emerge for sustainably grown flowers, and for “cradle-to-cradle” products and materials.

And finally: This month marks the beginning of the 15th year of publication of The Green Business Letter. In honor of this, I’ve run the “E-Factor” essay that appeared in our inaugural issue. Funny to say, but things haven’t changed all that much: the piece still seems pretty relevant.

Europe's Ecological Footprint

How many Earths does it take to feed a continent?

A new report shows that Europe uses 20% of the biosphere's services to serve 7% of the world's population -- a resource demand that has risen nearly 70% since 1961.

Bad as that may sound, it's nothing compared to Americans' footprint on the planet.

Europe 2005: The Ecological Footprint is based on the Global Footprint Network's National Footprint Accounts and presents case study and time trend data for France, Germany, Greece, Poland, and the United Kingdom as well as a comparison of the footprint of 25 European nations.

The ecological footprint measures people’s demand on nature. A country’s footprint is the total area required to produce the food and fiber that it consumers, absorb its waste, and provide space for its infrastructure. Because people consume resources and “nature’s services” -- crop pollination, photosynthesis, the hydrologic cycle, and all the rest -- from all over their world, their footprint is the sum of these areas, wherever they are on the planet.

Ecological footprints often are expressed in terms of the "number of Earths" it would take to provide the capacity needed to support a given population. The figure to the right, from the Global Footprint Network, shows the ratio between the world's demand and its capacity in each year, and how this ratio has changed over time. The horizontal blue line represents the one Earth that actually exists; the red line shows humanity's rising appetite in terms of the "number of Earths" needed to support humanity at current demands. This graph shows how we have moved from using, in net terms, about half the planet's biocapacity in 1961 to 1.2 times the biocapacity of the Earth in 2001. This represents a global "ecological deficit" of 0.2 "Earths."

That's the story on a global basis. You can measure your own personal footprint by taking the Ecological Footprint Quiz or the Ecological Footprint Lifestyle Calculator.

This latest footprint report marks the first time Europe has ever tracked and studied its ecological spending in relation to planetary limits The result: Europe's consumption levels can continue to grow only by importing more natural resources -- such as wood, metals, or fish -- from other countries and dumping more of its greenhouse gas waste into the global atmosphere.

Among the key findings:

• Europeans now require 4.9 globally average hectares per person to provide for their lifestyle. As the continent can only supply 2.2 global hectares per person, Europeans rely on the rest of the world to make up this increasing deficit. Europe's Ecological Footprint represents an area more than twice the size of Europe. (By contrast, Americans’ needs are nearly twice Europeans: 9.5 average hectares per person.)

• Globally, humanity requires 2.2 global hectares of productive area per person to sustain current lifestyles, 1.3 times more than in 1961. But the Earth currently has just 1.8 global hectares available per person. This "overshoot" of 21% depletes the Earth's natural capital, and is thus possible only for a limited period.

• From a low of 3.5 global hectares per Hungarian to a high of just over 7 global hectares per Swede, all of the EU members have footprints above the world's sustainable average, and all but three -- Sweden, Latvia, and Finland -- are in local ecological deficit.

The challenge isn't just environmental, but also economic. "While it is still cheap to run an ecological deficit, if humanity's current levels of resource consumption continue, such a deficit will become an increasing liability for countries," says Mathis Wackernagel, executive director of the Global Footprint Network and lead author of the report, "This deficit spending will jeopardize Europe's long-term prosperity if it is not seriously addressed."

The longer this deficit is left unchecked, says Wackernagel, the more expensive the investment required and the greater the risk that critical ecosystems will be eroded beyond the point at which they can easily recover. As Europe's and the world's ecological debt accumulates, choices narrow and present resource use becomes ever more dependent on liquidating ecological assets.

As any economist knows, you can only liquidate your assets to a point. Then you become bankrupt.

PBDEs: "The New PCBs" (Don't Forget to Mop!)

Add the acronym PBDE to the list of toxic substances about which activists are expressing concern.

A family of flame retardants known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers -- PBDEs for short -- widely used in polyurethane furniture foam and plastic TV and computer monitors, have been found to be collecting in the bodies and breast milk of human beings over the past 30 years. They also have been found in wildlife, house dust, and our food. Kids can get elevated PBDE levels simply from dust encountered while playing on the floor. Some scientists believe PBDEs can result in children’s delayed development, including learning and behavioral problems.

A report released this week by The Green Guide, which reports on green consumer products and behaviors, spells out the dangers and points to safer alternative fire-retardants, along with some shopping and housekeeping tips to help us reduce our exposure. (Full disclosure: I sit on Green Guide Institute’s board of directors.)

The report comes on the heels of other recent findings about PBDEs, including one last month cited in Environmental Science & Technology magazine that showed the highest concentrations of PBDEs yet reported in humans. Another report, from the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, examined the presence of PBDEs in breast milk. It found “unexpectedly high levels of these little-known neurotoxic chemicals in every participant tested.”

Like PCBs, dioxins, and pesticides such as DDT, PBDEs are persistent organic pollutants -- POPs, in the argot of environmental science. Stored in fat, PBDEs and other POPs can stay in the body for years before being even partially eliminated. This has resulted in their rising levels in recent decades in the bodies of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans.

The Europeans already are on the case. A law known as the Restriction of Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment (RoHS) directive requires that PBDEs be removed from all new electrical and electronic equipment by July 1, 2006. Some companies are already there, or are getting close. According to Green Guide, Sony, Motorola, and Intel use no PBDEs; HP monitors are PBDE-free; and Apple, Canon, Hitachi, Panasonic, NEC, and Toshiba have reduced their use of PBDEs.

But it’s not just electronics we need to watch. According to Green Guide’s research:

PBDEs are in catfish, salmon, hot dogs, and the cheese we put on those dogs. In fact, excluding skim milk, every animal-derived product tested . . . was contaminated with PBDEs, though these levels varied greatly from salmon to evaporated milk . . . A 2002 Japanese study in Chemosphere found, “There was a strong positive relationship between PBDE concentrations in human milk and dietary intake of fish and shellfish, which was established in the women from responses to a questionnaire on food consumption habits.”

Green Guide is quick to add: “But there’s no reason to panic. The good news is that simple daily lifestyle choices can have a comprehensive healthy effect, counteracting potential risks from the wide range of chemicals we are exposed to, including those that threaten children’s development.”

Among the precautionary steps it recommends:

• Eat less farmed fish (no more than once per month), especially European and U.S. salmon, which have been shown to have high levels of PBDE. Choose wild Alaskan, fresh, or canned salmon instead.

• Clean floors with a HEPA filter vacuum cleaner that traps fine particles of dust, soot, and pollen, and wet mop regularly. It’s also important to keep your home well-ventilated. This will help reduce concentrations of other forms of indoor air pollution.

• Cover and seal rips in upholstery that expose polyurethane foam, especially if the foam is loose and crumbling, a condition that may encourage the release of PBDEs into house dust and air

• Contact your mattress manufacturer to see whether your mattress contains PBDEs. If it does, but you aren’t ready to replace your mattress, consider purchasing a tightly woven, allergen-barrier mattress casing to reduce PBDEs leaching into your air and a HEPA air filter to capture any that do.

To help make informed purchases, Green Guide offers a free, downloadable wallet card with tips for buying everything from furniture to fish. The full report can be purchased from the Green Guide site.