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The Reports of Summer: Five Easy Pieces
The normally dry days of August have been fertile when it comes to research and reports on green business topics. Recent weeks have seen a flurry of publications from corporate, nongovernmental, and other organizations. Whatever happened to slow summer days?
I've pored through much of what's been served up this summer. Herewith are summaries of what I learned from five of them:
The report provides insight into the learnings of two water footprint pioneers, WWF and SABMiller, who collaborated with consultancy URS Corp. to undertake water footprints of the beer value chain in South Africa and the Czech Republic. The report discusses what the water footprint results in South Africa and the Czech Republic mean for SABMiller's businesses and their action plans in response to the findings.
Why would a company open itself up to such scrutiny? Perhaps because of the findings:
In comparison with other beverages, beer's water footprint is relatively small; for example an independent report has estimated that coffee, wine, and apple juice all have water footprints more than three times that of beer.
However, the water footprint figure itself does not give the whole picture, as WWF and SABMiller point out. More important is the context — where water is used, what proportion of the area's total water resource it represents, and whether water scarcity creates risks to the environment, communities and businesses now or in the future.
Fully a third of the companies studied have unmitigated climate change risk, about the same as a year earlier. Just over half (55%) have short-term targets on climate change (compared to 48% in 2008), while 91% of "high" and "very high" impact companies (such as those in industrial metals, food producing, and oil and gas production) disclose absolute CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions data (73% in 2008).
Even where there's good news, it's still rather sobering. EIRIS found that about one in five (19%) companies deemed to have a "high" and "very high" risk still have "no or a limited response to climate change." This is an improvement from 34% of companies in 2008, but hardly anything to cheer about.
If a market price of $28.241 were applied to each ton of CO2-e emitted by companies in the S&P 500 and their first-tier suppliers, carbon costs would total over $92.8 billion. This equates to over 1% of revenue from the companies in 2007, and over 5.5% of combined EBITDA.
At the company level, carbon costs would vary, from less than 1% of EBITDA for 203 companies, "while 71 companies could see earnings fall by 10% or more."
Trucost and IRRC point out that some large investors are beginning to view their portfolios through the lens of carbon risk and mitigation, a hopeful sign that could push companies to become more proactive even in advance of legislation.
One recent development within the institutional investing arena is that some asset owners and managers have begun to invest in companies that are on a clear path to reducing their emissions, or that provide "solutions" such as energy efficiency and clean technologies and renewable energy supplies. For instance, the Norwegian Government Pension Fund – Global announced plans in April 2009 to allocate approximately $2.8 billion to an environmental program, including investments in "climate-friendly energy" and improving energy efficiency.
The report identifies four major obstacles "blocking environmentally sustainable neighborhoods," including aging utilities and scarce transit lines, the high cost of building multi-level structures, regulatory barriers from planning and zoning laws, and tax incentives that favor suburban sprawl. The report recommends long- and short-term action steps that policy makers and industry professionals can take to remove these obstacles.
Among the recommendations for "industry leaders":
Invest in sustainable development and utilize the experience and expertise of sustainable developers. Create a group of industry leaders to lobby government decision-makers to end the barriers to better land use policies. Conduct a public education and outreach campaign "to inform voters about the benefits to them of sustainable development and the need for infrastructure support like transit and utility upgrades."
The quest for sustainability "is already starting to transform the competitive landscape," say the authors.
By treating sustainability as a goal today, early movers will develop competencies that rivals will be hard-pressed to match. That competitive advantage will stand them in good stead, because sustainability will always be an integral part of development.
But it's not easy, they point out. Companies that have started the journey go through five distinct stages of change, with innovation opportunities at each stage:
- Stage 1: Viewing compliance as opportunity
Stage 2: Making value chains sustainable
Stage 3: Designing sustainable products and services
Stage 4: Developing new business models
Stage 5: Creating next-practice platforms
That model may not be quite as catchy as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages. On the other hand, the HBR issue is one of the few uplifting reads for summer's end.
August 31, 2009 in Business Practices, Climate Change, State of the Art | Permalink | Comments (2)
Inside Walmart's Sustainability Consortium
When Walmart made its much-ballyhooed announcement last month that it would launch a Sustainability Index, one key part of that announcement got short shrift. The retail giant also announced the creation of a Sustainability Consortium, a group of academics and others with the ambitious agenda of "establishing the scientific standards to measure the sustainability of consumer products."
With Walmart and the Index at least temporarily out of the spotlight, I decided to look into the Consortium to understand what it was all about. My interest in doing so was piqued by inquiries from sustainability executives at several large companies who wanted my take on the Consortium and whether they should join.
An initial look at the Consortium raised a number of questions. For starters, I was intrigued that major consumer product companies were paying to join a consortium whose principal purpose was to set the standards by which these companies' products would be judged. Was this some kind of fox-and-henhouse charade? Moreover, membership isn't cheap. The Consortium is asking "founding members" to pay between $50,000 and $250,000 a year for three years, with lower membership levels at $25,000 for smaller firms with fewer than 500 employees and $10,000 for government and nongovernmental organizations — each with a three-year commitment. Each membership category offers its own combination of benefits, all contained the group's a membership application (Download - PDF).
So, what's really going on here? What do companies get for their money?
To find out, I interviewed the Consortium's co-directors, Dr. Jay S. Golden, from School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, and Dr. Jon Johnson, from the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. Their two schools are co-conveners of the Consortium.
Johnson and Golden started with a little history. The Consortium idea emerged about a year ago as Walmart gathered groups of experts to help further its own sustainability goals. "The idea of quantifying sustainability of products arose," explained Golden. "We were thinking about what kind of body could make that come to life. It became very clear to us that no one researcher, no one institution, could do that because you're dealing with geographies around the world and with various sciences — physical, life, and engineering — and that required a multidisciplinary approach. So we outlined a proposal to Walmart to develop a consortium of academic researchers from institutions to think through the process and try to bring it to life based on the best available sound science and engineering principles available."
It's important to note that the 15-question supplier assessment that Walmart recently introduced to evaluate companies is not part of the Consortium's work. Rather, the Consortium's mandate is to focus on how to evaluate products, which Walmart hopes will become the basis for standards, ratings, or other product-level evaluations that it would use in its stores. (The company has suggested the product ratings might hit store shelves in about five years, but it's become clear to me that no one really has a firm grip on a reliable timeline.) Walmart has stated that it is hoping other retailers will adopt the standards, and that the eventual standards be "owned" independently, at an appropriate nonprofit, university, or other entity.
To create the product standards, the Consortium is relying on lifecycle modeling, a complex and heretofore costly methodology that, as I recently wrote, seems to be undergoing a renaissance. Creating the full complement of lifecycle-based standards that address the mind-boggling array of products that Walmart and other retailers carry — apparel, baby products, electronics, groceries, jewelry, pharmaceuticals, toys, and much more — is the Herculean task the Consortium is undertaking. Accomplishing this will require a vast number of people ... and vast sums of money.
Which is where membership comes in. Already, more than a dozen companies have ponied up, including Cargill, Clorox, Dial, Earth Friendly Products, General Mills, Henkel, Monsanto, Pepsico, Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson, Seventh Generation, TetraPak, Tyson, Unilever, Walmart, and Waste Management.
Jay Golden explained the core of the group's activities. First, there's the foundational research. "We're trying to put the right science, the right data, and the right metrics in there," and then place the data into an open-source system for all to use. "Think of it almost as Linux," he said. The group is developing a tool called Earthster, a sophisticated open platform for making lifecycle assessment easier, faster, and cheaper, in part by pooling existing databases and models, then tapping the larger community to share data, research, and results.Another facet of the Consortium's work involves understanding consumers and how to effectively communicate to them information about the sustainability attributes of a wide range of products and sectors. "How do you bring coherence and harmonization to these different efforts?" asks Golden.
So, will Consortium members get special access to the lifecycle databases and consumer research? No, the Consortium's work will be open to all. Johnson and Golden repeatedly emphasized that the Consortium will be fully transparent about its activities. (You already can find every presentation, white paper, and meeting summary to date on the group's website.) Says Johnson: "Transparent is a word that Jay and I use probably fifty times a day these days."
What, then, does membership in the Sustainability Consortium offer?
The best case Johnson and Golden could make was that participating companies will gain a great deal of knowledge by being at the table where the hard work of developing standards is being done. "I think it is safe to say that a company that is engaged in the process and is sponsoring research that explores lifecycles that are relevant to that company — they are probably in a better position to learn from the process," explained Johnson. "There's a lot of benefit to being in the room and being involved in the research that goes beyond the published results." As such, he explained, participating companies will be better able to put the information and systems to use, "whereas companies that are waiting on the sidelines to see what happens are going to be on their heels."
What about some of the other membership benefits being offered, such as seats on advisory councils and sector working committees, invitations to various workshops and meetings, updates via newsletters and publications? Will nonmembers be deprived of such things?
Not really. Everything will be public, though Golden and Johnson suggested that paying members will get guaranteed slots or preferential seating at meetings, while nonmembers will have to queue up on a space-available basis.
Having delved into all this, I'm still not entirely sure I understand the real value proposition of membership in the Sustainability Consortium. The part about the learnings one might derive from being at the table is certainly valid, and that could well be worth the membership fees for some companies. Beyond that, membership seems to be primarily about supporting the Consortium's important work — in a word: philanthropy.
And that brings us back to the question of propriety. While I don't doubt for a second the sincerity or integrity of Johnson, Golden, and their colleagues, and their stated intention of avoiding conflicts and pursuing transparency, I'm concerned about the optics of it all: the perception that major manufacturers are helping to create the methodologies or otherwise set the rules of rating products, presumably to their advantage. And I worry that this perception could undermine the reputation of the work the group will undertake.
The one thing I learned for certain about the Consortium — and, for that matter, about all of the sustainability rating initiatives Walmart has put into play — is that they are as amorphous as they are ambitious. That is, their design and execution, not to mention their timetables, remain very fluid. One hopes that as these initiatives take shape and gain traction, their leaders will take exceptional care to ensure that their work will be unassailable. Anything less, I'm afraid, will be seen by the public as unacceptable, or worse.
August 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (8)
When the Music's Over: Woodstock's Aftermath
[The last in a short series of departures from my usual fare, on the occasion of the re-release of my Woodstock book and audiobook and the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival.]
The 40th anniversary weekend of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Festival has now passed. Forty years ago at this time, hundreds of thousands of muddy, mostly happy souls were making their way back home, finding their cars, hitching rides, or otherwise traversing their way out of the jam-packed festival site.
While much has been written about the festival, not much has been said about the aftermath. That story, as I chronicled as part of my 1989 oral history book and audiobook, just republished, is almost as tangled and intriguing as the story of the festival itself: How the four young co-producers untangled themselves from lawsuits among themselves and with scores of others. How Warner Bros. made off with the film and music rights, with barely nothing going to the musicians or producers. How the local townspeople around the festival site never got over the experience, in both good and bad ways.
One of the stories that most intrigued me was that of Max and Miriam Yasgur, the dairy farmers who rented their land for the event. Max, a 50-year-old Republican who let his land be used in part because he thought the producers - who seven weeks before the festival had their permit summarily revoked by the county where they originally had planned the event - had gotten a raw deal. (Of course, he also got a pretty penny for his troubles.) Woodstock altered their lives in some fundamental ways.
Max died in 1973. In 1988, I interviewed Miriam, since remarried and relocated to Florida, for my book. I was struck not just by her willingness to share her story, but by the story itself, in particular what happened after the music ended and the throngs departed.
What follows is an excerpt from her story:
Miriam Yasgur:Once the people started to leave, they left very quickly. The place emptied out within two days. And when they were all gone, the worst of it was the anger that we felt from people that didn't like the trash. We were unhappy about it too but there was nothing we could do about it at the time. Other people in the community hailed us like movie stars because we had been involved in this thing.
Some of my neighbors were very nasty. Many of them were not. After the festival they said, "You know, these people were very nice. We were inundated and we didn't like the garbage and so on, but we had very good experiences with these people. It went better than we thought, and most of them were very nice." As a matter of fact, they gave a testimonial dinner for Max a year later in Bethel. [Woodstock co-producer] John Roberts came up and somebody had brought Life magazines with the pictures of the festival and everybody signed it for Max.
The community made the dinner. A committee decided that they wanted to express their appreciation to Max in order to show him that the entire community was not against him, because he felt very badly when people that he knew and had had good relationships with would either be nasty to him or would not talk to him after the festival. And he felt very strongly that he hadn't harmed his neighbors-hadn't meant to harm his neighbors certainly-and he had a strong sense of neighborliness and he felt very badly about this. It really affected him. And so some of his friends in the community, realizing this, spoke to other people in the community and they said, "Why don't we show Max that we appreciate the fact that we all did a lot of business, that nobody was really hurt by this, and that he intended to do a good thing. And let's thank him for it." So they did have this dinner and they were very nice.
Occasionally, a parent would call and say, "I'm having problems with my youngster, who doesn't want to go to school"-or "He's getting into drugs," or whatever-"and I feel that since he looks at Max as a hero, perhaps if Max would talk to him it would help." Max would say, "Send him over." So we would end up with little groups of kids sitting on the chairs, on the floor, whatever, and they would sort of rap, they would express themselves. Max spoke slowly, stopped to think before he answered, and he would express his point of view and he would always offer to help if they needed help. And they would confide in him. Or they would say that, "I'm having this problem because my parents don't understand," and he would take the trouble to call the parent and discuss it with the parent if it was warranted.
And he did this for the few years that he lived after the festival because he felt it was a worthwhile thing that he could do, that maybe the festival gave him this opportunity. I don't know that he had a sense of trying to atone for any damage the festival did, but he was always interested in young people. He just liked working with young people, and he felt this was an opportunity. And he enjoyed having them come over. He enjoyed listening to them.
August 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
My Search for the Woodstock Baby
[Another in a short series of departures from my usual fare, on the occasion of the re-release of my 1989 book and audiobook and the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival.]
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair of August 1969 gave birth to an Oscar-winning movie, dozens of songs and CDs, and a half-million or so stories of the ebullient children of the Sixties who attended the three-day rock fest.
What the festival did not give birth to were any babies.
That's right: There were no babies born at Woodstock.
In the late 1980s, during the research for my book, Woodstock: The Oral History, recently re-released, I searched everywhere, and talked to everyone else who searched. I checked hospital records, birth certificates, and news accounts. I interviewed the festival's producers, stagehands, and the head of Woodstock security. I button-holed members of local police departments where the festival was held, as well as the National Guard and the United States Army, both of which were called into service to help deliver food, evacuate the sick, and provide political cover to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
I talked to doctors and nurses who were pressed into service at the festival and who worked at nearby hospitals, as well as leaders of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, a group that operated first-aid stations to treat everything from blisters to bum trips.
Before he died, Abbie Hoffman, whose group of radical Yippies helped deliver medical supplies, told me he knew of no festival newborns. Neither does Wavy Gravy, co-founder and life spirit of the Hog Farm, the commune whose meals of museli (breakfast) and bulgur wheat (lunch and dinner) fed thousands of hungry hippies, and whose innovative "trip tents" helped lure hallucinating hippies back down to Planet Earth.
No babies. Nada. Zippo.
I'm not alone. Over the years, I've received countless calls from nearly every major new organization in the U.S., and some from abroad: ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC; the Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters; the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today. National Public Radio checked in, as did producers from Oprah and Nightline. Interview magazine, Cosmopolitan, and Rolling Stone are among the inquiring minds seeking the furtive flower child.
And then there's the small brigade of Woodstock buffs who've managed to track me down.
They all wanted to know the same thing: Where is the Woodstock baby?
Why is everyone looking for a child born in a muddy alfalfa field during a three-day rock concert in upstate New York? Why are they still searching after all these years?
No one knows for sure, but I have a theory. For many of a certain age, Woodstock represents a magic moment in time, an unprecedented -- and unequaled -- gathering of bodies, minds, spirits, and talent. The half-million or so festivalgoers were buffeted by rain, mud, drugs, radical politicos, and a severe lack of food, medicine, and Port-O-Sans. But they endured the event with high levels of ingenuity and integrity.
By all measures, Woodstock should have been a disaster. Instead, there was much joy and humanity, and heroics galore. As a result, Woodstock has become symbolic of a can-do spirit of the times.
So, a child born on the premises could well be the embodiment of that spirit, a touchstone to a time long past.
But he or she does not exist.
As I said, it's not for lack of looking. And when all the rolling stones have been turned in search of this hair apparent, consider: During the past 40 years, no one has ever come forth and said, "I gave birth at Woodstock" or "I was born at Woodstock." Or even, "I know someone who was born/gave birth at Woodstock."
Why does anyone even think this kid is out there? Probably because at Woodstock, rumors ran rampant and on-stage announcers broadcast whatever someone scrawled on a scrap of paper and handed to them. Maybe one mentioned the "B" word. Maybe not. Problem is, no one can remember. (If you do, you weren't really there.) But once the story got started, everyone's assumed it's true.
In the 1970 Academy Award-winning documentary, Woodstock, singer-songwriter John Sebastian is seen announcing from stage that, "Some cat's old lady just had a baby." But I'm told by people who were on stage with Sebastian that he was tripping during his performance. He might actually have been talking about a cat.
Okay, it's possible such a blessed event occurred. (From an actuarial perspective, it's likely, given the number of women of childbearing age who attended.) Indulge me in another theory: A woman delivers a child, naturally and without complications, in the privacy of a tent or a car, in the presence of one or two trusted friends. So healthy were mother and child that neither required medical care until they were at least a couple counties away from the festival site.
Over the years, this mystery mom has reached a place in society where it would not serve her well to be known as the Mother of All Rock Concerts. So, she has told no one, including her child. Neither has anyone else.
It's possible. But don't bet your love beads on it.
In my search for the Woodstock baby, I've had some near misses. One involved a child born during the festival, but in a nearby hospital. Turns out the mother decided at the last minute not to attend Woodstock. Probably a good thing: The roads were blocked for 50 miles around the concert site.
And then there's Eliot Tiber, who wrote the self-centric book that became the new Ang Lee movie Taking Woodstock. He claims he helped deliver a baby at his family's motel a few miles from the festival site. But no one besides Tiber has ever verified that, and his book is full of tales that put him at the center of the action in a way that few others recall.
Finally, there's a young woman outside Chicago I'll call Rebecca, since I never got her real name. We met, sort of, during my 1989 Woodstock book tour. She phoned in during the call-in portion of a live TV interview on a local station to tell me that her parents had met at Woodstock and she was born nine months later. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to ask Rebecca to stay on the line so I could get more of her story. Alas, I let her slip away.
She may be the closest we have to the real deal.
August 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4)
