Introducing … the Green Confidence Index

Today marks the launch of a new monthly index, the Green Confidence Index, aimed at tracking Americans' attitudes about and confidence in their leaders and institutions, nationally and locally, on the subject of environmental responsibility, as well as in their own understanding of issues and their willingness to make green purchasing choices. It is the first comprehensive monthly tracking of consumers' green attitudes and purchasing.

The Index was produced by my colleagues at GreenBiz.com in partnership with a leading market research firm, Earthsense, and a leading polling firm, Survey Sampling International. It is based on a monthly survey of more than 2,500 adults who are nationally representative of the U.S. adult online population and calculated using responses in three areas:

• Responsibility — how well various groups and institutions are addressing environmental issues: too much, enough, or too little. The groups include the U.S. government, state and local governments, major corporations, individuals' own employers, their neighbors, and themselves (weight: 40%).

• Information — whether respondents feel they have sufficient information about environmental issues and solutions to make informed decisions when purchasing consumables (groceries, personal care, apparel, household care, office supplies) and "big ticket" items (household appliances, electronics, and cars), as well as when voting and investing (20%).

• Purchasing — green purchases made over the past year as well as anticipated green purchases over the next 12 months for three broad product categories, including food, personal and household care items, and "big ticket" items, including home purchasing and renovation as well as purchases of vehicles and major appliances (40%).

Why a new index? Americans' attitudes about how they view environmental problems and solutions are complex, dynamic, and continually shifting, a reality not always acknowledged by the studies and polls that flood my in-box. For years, periodic surveys have managed to capture snapshots of those attitudes, but they're just that: occasional snapshots. By surveying monthly, we believe the Green Confidence Index will illuminate real-time shifts and nuances that the annual or occasional studies can't see.

The Index was set in July 2009 at 100.0. Today’s release includes results from the first three months of survey results, through September 2009, when the composite Index stood at 103.8. You can download the inaugural issue free (PDF). Future issues will be available to paid subscribers.

Here is some of what we found:

• Responsibility perceptions are highest among individuals' perceptions of themselves — half feel they are personally "doing enough," with their employers not far behind. Perceptions of major companies and manufacturers lag the list consistently, with only 22.7% of respondents seeing companies as doing their share; this was the one significant change since the July baseline.

• Information is seen as being more readily available for energy-guzzling products such as vehicles (58.7%) and household appliances (56.6%). For half the categories GCI tracks, a modest — but significant — upward shift was evident (apparel, household care products, household appliances, electronics, automotive). Only 3 in 10 investors (28.0%) feel enough information is available about environmental issues when they make investment decisions.

• Purchasing of green products is holding steady. In past year, half of all U.S. adults say they bought at least one green product; nearly one-quarter (22.2%) said they are maintaining the same level of purchasing; and nearly as many (19.0%) said they've increased the number of green products purchased. Premium pricing is the biggest deterrent, usually because consumers cannot justify paying more (41.0%), compounded by the impact of the economic downturn on their paycheck (19.3%).

  Moreover, we found considerable pent-up demand, particularly as green premiums diminish and paychecks regain their health. More than three in five who haven't purchased green say they are considering doing so in the coming year. Of the 52.0% who say they've never bought a green food product, more than twice as many say they plan to buy green (36.8%) in the future than don't (15.2%).

In addition to these three principal buckets of information, we will be asking other questions on a regular basis. For example, each month, GCI asks "What company, if any, do you think of as being 'green'?" It's an unaided question, meaning no list is provided. Respondents simply name companies that are top of mind.

The answer: Clorox and Walmart were named far more than all other companies, followed by (alphabetically) General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson, Toyota, and Whole Foods. Some smaller firms like Seventh Generation and Method also made the Top 20 list.

Another question asked what sources of environmental information Americans use and trust. The bad news for companies: Corporate websites and blogs ranked last in a list of 13 media types in terms of their use and trust. Word of mouth was seen to be potent: Friends, family, and colleagues ranked highest as the most used and trusted, followed by consumer ratings and reviews. Green blogs and websites had the biggest trust-use gap: they are a trusted information resource, though their usage lags.

I'm looking forward to watching the Green Confidence Index over the months and years, as we track this complex and changing landscape. I'm guessing it will provide a reality check for green optimists and pessimists alike: tracking the mood of Americans while shining a light on the faith they put in business, government, and other institutions to address our environmental challenges — and how, and how well, those institutions are perceived to be doing their jobs.

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How to Talk About [Whatever It's Called]

Do people care about the climate?

It's an open question these days, and opinion polls offer little help. Some show that climate ranks fairly low among public concerns, while others indicate a high level of concern among the populace. And in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate summit, now a mere six weeks away, those opinions count for something, particularly in the United States, where lawmakers are looking to be swayed one way or another.

Here's a sampling of the hodgepodge of public opinion.

• The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press last week reported that "There has been a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. And fewer also see global warming as a very serious problem — 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008."

• The World Wide Views on Global Warming, a global opinion poll released on the same day, reported that "90% of U.S. participants say it is urgent to reach a tough, new agreement at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December and not punt to subsequent meetings," and that "69% believe the price of fossil fuels should be increased."

It's not just Americans who seem to be schizophrenic on this topic. Polls from Canada, Australia, Japan, Egypt — you name it — all seem to have conflicting results. Much of this, of course, depends on exactly what questions were asked, and by whom: the pollsters' agendas, when they have them, can steer answers in a certain direction. I'm not suggesting that Pew and the World Wide Views folks have done this. I'm just saying.

It's in this context that I recently spoke with my friend Cara Pike. Pike heads the Social Capital Project, a project spun out of the nonprofit Earthjustice, aimed at "building the base of public support for environmental protection." Pike — whose meaty and insightful "Ecological Roadmap" of Americans' environmental attitudes is the appendix of my book, Strategies for the Green Economy — has for years been combining research tools and storytelling techniques to build some of the most important national environmental campaigns of the past decade.

Pike's latest effort is a new report, Climate Crossroads: A Research-Based Framing Guide for Global Warming Advocates to Global Warming Advocates. The report is described as

a first step towards a unified conversation on global warming. It is a summary of what is known to date about the most effective communications approaches, developed by drawing on more than 25 advocacy organizations' experiences in the field, the body of research they built over the years, and new research conducted specifically for this project. This document identifies the ideas and values that will lead to public support for global warming advocates' shared objectives over the long term, and suggests ways to bridge from specific policy concerns to the broader, shared narrative.

The idea, says Pike, is to create a "Common Message Platform" that will provide organizations with "a shared set of key points and perspectives that will lead to both more effective communications on their own particular issues, and a more engaged and constructive national conversation on the topic with sympathetic groups."

In other words, it aims to answer the question: How do you talk about climate change?

Actually, that wasn't stated quite right, based on Pike's work. Her research led her to prefer the term is "global warming" over "climate change," not to mention "climate crisis," "global weirding," and any of the several other monikers that have been inflicted on this global malady. However, Pike acknowledge, global warming "is not a perfect term for a number of reasons. Scientifically, it's not as accurate, for example, but it is the term that's most familiar with the public." Accurate or not, it's what people seem to respond to.

(You can listen to a podcast of our recent conversation here.)

Pike pointed out just how far we have to go in educating the public. "What we found even in talking to people who are members of environmental organizations or who identify themselves as environmentalists is they often thought global warming had to do with the problem with ozone holes."

It's that bad, folks.

She continued. "The other thing that you find is that most people don't really have a sense of the connection between energy, the economy, and climate. Most people wouldn't be able to tell you, for example, that their energy or great majority of their energy might come from coal, for example."

Part of the problem, she said, is that the media — both the mainstream media and the niche environmental media — "has leaped ahead into this somewhat elite conversation. But even those who are trying to follow that conversation very actively are missing some fundamental information. So what we found is that you have to go back and fill in some of those holes."

Another problem has to do with identifying solutions that are meaningful to people, and that they're actually willing to do. "I think a growing number of Americans really do want to engage and do things that will make a difference," says Pike. But she adds, "I think that it's very confusing what really will make that difference and in particular, given how busy people are, how pressed they feel financially, they really want to know 'If I only have time to do a handful of things, what are the things that are really going to have the biggest payback and biggest impact on solving the problem?' I think there's been a bit of a scale issue around solutions where many of the things that the public are being asked to do don't seem to match the scale of the challenge. How can you really solve a global complex issue by changing light bulbs?"

Short answer: You can't.

It's a good question, though, and one that seems to have flummoxed marketers, public agencies, activist groups, and pretty much everyone else aiming to educate, motivate, and activate the public on global warming/climate change. Do you scare people, inspire them, threaten them, or bribe them? Are people more motivated by fear or greed? Do they care more about the future of their children or their day-to-day quality of life? Do they see this looming crisis as an inevitable calamity or an empty, sky-is-falling warning? Is it a crisis or an opportunity?

These all remain open questions.

I'll let you wade through Pike's report to find the nuggets of her research that are of greatest value to you in your work. And I'd love to hear your thoughts about what works, what doesn't, and how best to change the conversation, and the climate for action.

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A Look Inside Good Housekeeping's Green Seal

It's long stated as near fact by observers of the confusing and confounding green marketplace that what's needed, once and for all, is something akin to a Good Housekeeping Seal for the environment. Good Housekeeping, it seems, represents a pinnacle of credibility and consumer confidence.

So, now that Good Housekeeping has introduced its own green seal, what should we make of it?

First, some background. The original Good Housekeeping Seal was introduced in 1909, when there was little regulatory oversight of consumer products. It represented an audacious marketing promise from its namesake magazine: If a product bearing the seal proved defective within two years, the magazine would replace it or refund the purchase price. Over the past century, the seal has endured in a world of fickle consumers and shifting brand alliances. And while its design has been updated to reflect modern times, the mission and purpose of the seal remains intact.

Last month, the Good Housekeeping Research Institute — the product-evaluation laboratory of the magazine, which itself is part of the media giant Hearst Communications — announced the first seven products to receive its new Green Good Housekeeping Seal, "developed to help consumers sift through the confusing clutter of 'green' claims on hundreds of products on store shelves today," according to the seal's website. The first batch of certifications include household cleaners and beauty products. Paints and appliances are expected to follow.

I sat down recently with a team from the Good Housekeeping Research Institute in its New York headquarters, including its director, Miriam Arond, to learn about the seal, what's behind it, and its promise for helping consumers make sense of the green marketplace.

I began with asking Arond to explain the process a product goes through to earn the seal. "In order to earn the Green Good Housekeeping Seal," she said, "a product first has to be reviewed for an advertisement in Good Housekeeping magazine. That means the scientists at the Good Housekeeping Research Institute evaluate the product to make sure it lives up to the advertising claims. Once a product is approved for advertising, it can apply for the Good Housekeeping Seal. We then further evaluate the product, because we want to make sure it lives up to all the claims on the website, on its packaging, to make sure that it actually performs as promised.

"Then, once a product earns the primary Good Housekeeping Seal, it can apply for the Green Good Housekeeping Seal, in which case we ask for quite a bit of data. In some cases, we are signing non-disclosure agreements, confidentiality agreements, because companies are disclosing to us a lot of data about how the product is manufactured and how it is distributed. Once we have evaluated the result, as well as verified the data, then they can earn, hopefully, the Green Good Housekeeping Seal."

I wanted to know about the criteria being used — the standard to which Good Housekeeping was holding companies. Arond explained that the questionnaire contains 56 questions that cover a wide spectrum of a product's potential environmental impacts, from upstream materials sourcing through consumer use and disposal. (A summary of the application process is here.)

"We got a lot of input from the environmental community," Arond told me. "We brought together a host of environmental experts — from academia, from industry, from trade associations, from NGOs — and we basically picked a lot of people's brains to see what they thought was important.

"We knew from the start we wanted to have an evaluation that was going to be comprehensive, not look at one or two aspects of green, because truthfully some of that already exists. We think it's a little bit problematic to only cite one or two areas of greenness, so to speak. We look at a very wide range, from everything involved in the manufacturing of the product and the water usage during manufacturing and the energy usage during manufacturing, and then, of course, during the product usage. We look at distribution, we look at packaging, its greenhouse gas emissions. We wanted to take as much into account as possible. Then we ran the application by environmental experts again and we continued to hone it, and to make sure that both small and big companies were able to answer it."

I knew that my friend Michael Brown, co-founder of Brown & Wilmanns Environmental Consulting, had consulted to Arond's project. Therefore, I assumed that the criteria had something to do with life-cycle analysis — or, more likely, a "lite" LCA, a simplified version that Brown and his partner Eric Wilmanns had deployed for other clients, including several major consumer brands.

Stacy Genovese, Technical & Engineering Director of the Good Housekeeping Institute, confirmed that her team looks at a product's full life-cycle but doesn't use a formal LCA. "We're taking certain things that you would do for an LCA into account in our criteria. But to do a full LCA analysis is quite costly, and we didn't want to make that the basis of the application, because then we're excluding people that just don't have the money to pay for a full LCA. And that wouldn't help our readers."

Arond pointed out something I would have guessed: that the information-gathering part of the certification process can be burdensome, even for big companies, requiring them to pull information from a range of different departments, suppliers, and partners. But companies need to learn how to do that, and those that do find that the more they know, the greater the opportunities to reduce energy, water, materials, toxics, and other forms of waste and inefficiency.

So, will the Good Housekeeping Green Seal help make sense of the eco-label clutter? Yes and no. On the one hand, it seems to be a well-thought-out initiative, done with rigor, responsibility, and a high sense of purpose. The bar seems to be set at a reasonable level: If a product has earned a Good Housekeeping Green Seal, it means something.

But the seal will have limited impact, if only because of its linkage to its magazine advertiser base. (Anyone can have a product evaluated by the Institute for $10,000, but such products aren't allowed to carry the seal unless they first earn the "regular" Good Housekeeping Seal, which inures only to advertisers.) That will be a barrier to all but the largest companies. Indeed, all of the seven products certified to date come from large companies — six from Clorox, Johnson & Johnson, and SC Johnson (the seventh is from Physicians Formula, a $115 million revenue, Nasdaq-traded company). The big-company limitation will hamstring the seal's ability to gain traction among many green-minded consumers, who may prefer products from any of countless smaller companies.

Perhaps what's most valuable about the whole exercise is the audience for which this is being done. Good Housekeeping magazine boasts nearly 5 million monthly subscribers, the sixth-largest magazine by circulation last year, according to the Magazine Publishers of America. Exposing green products to that sizable mainstream audience makes the Good Housekeeping's Green Seal an important contribution, even if it turns out not to be the game-changer some were waiting for.

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Sky Vegetables: Taking Green Roofs to New Heights

"Hi, I'm Keith. We take underutilized space in urban areas and grow food there, creating green jobs, providing access to fresh produce, localizing the economy, and creating a better life by building communities through growing vegetables."

I have to admit, it was one of the cooler, more compelling elevator pitches I've heard, and I've heard a lot. This one came at a cocktail reception several weeks ago, at the Food Marketing Institute's Sustainability Summit, a gathering of major retailers and consumer packaged goods brands, where I was a keynote speaker. As such conferences are, this one was a magnet for a wide range of consultancies and service providers aiming to connect with Big Food.

Keith Agoada was one of those. He attended in order to talk up his young company, Sky Vegetables. At first blush, he looked like yet-another fresh-faced recent college grad — which he is — seeking to break into the "green space," as it is often called. But when he opened his mouth to tell me his story, I realized that this was a kid with a vision.

The vision is both simple and elegant: green rooftops, not just as gardens, but as urban agriculture hubs for herbs and edible greens, utilizing off-the-shelf hydroponics and aquaponics equipment in greenhouses to grow food to sell for profit within the community.

The idea came to Agoada just before his senior year at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from which he graduated last year. "I saw the community gardens in Chicago and thought that it was fantastic that they were building community by growing food and doing it in the city," he told me recently. "So I went back my senior year at Wisconsin and received three credits for doing a feasibility study to see if rooftops could be commercial farming locations."

He quickly learned that it was possible to grow a myriad of things in the middle of a Wisconsin winter, "when it's below zero and it's covered in snow." That led to a business plan competition, which he won, garnering local press coverage and investor interest.

Amid all this, Agoada remained a reluctant businessman. "It's funny. I studied entrepreneurship in school and I learned that I didn't want to be an entrepreneur. I didn't want the gut-wrenching, the roller coaster — everything that they told me in business school what would happen if you start a company and try to make it a growth company, and that it's ruthless. I didn't want to take that path. I'd rather go to the farm or do something laid back, but the opportunity was great." He eventually took on investors and business partners, based in the Boston area, a continent away from Agoada's Berkeley, Calif., base. And Sky Vegetables was born.

Agoada walked me through the basics. "We come in on the rooftop as a tenant of the building. We rent the rooftop space. We pay for the upgrade, the insurance costs, the fixed costs for planning and development and the soft costs of architects, etc. We take all of that on. We outsource the equipment. We don't invent technologies. We're taking existing proven technologies and applying them to this rooftop. Then we make our money off the sale of the produce. The technology is controlled-environment greenhouses, year-around systems keeping constant temperatures and controlling the environment there. No pesticides, no herbicides, all integrative pest management systems and composting and trying to use paper and food waste from the building as the nutrient stream for our plants."

A typical project covers about 20,000 square feet — about half an acre — and fairly efficient, says Agoada. "Our growing techniques use somewhere between 5% and 10% of the water that they're using to grow lettuce out in Salinas Valley," in California's Central Valley, considered the nation's breadbasket. Given that around 80% of water use in the state goes toward agriculture — and about a fifth of the state's total energy use goes to move and treat water — such efforts could create significant water-efficiency and greenhouse gas benefits, should the Sky Vegetables model catch on.

That remains to be seen, of course. Agoada has done small-scale projects but is searching for his first major rooftop, most likely in my home town of Oakland, Calif., a city that marries a hunger for attracting green businesses; countless warehouses with large, flat roofs; high unemployment; and vast "food deserts," impoverished areas that lack easy access to grocery stores offering fresh produce. It's a perfect laboratory.

For now, it's merely a terrific vision, one I'm rooting for, but it doesn't necessarily stop with simply selling rosemary or romaine. "One of the projects we're looking at is a mixed-use building with a lot of residents," says Agoada. "Our pitch is to hire some of the people part-time and start to train them. Maybe one day, they become full-time there. Another idea we had was to let the building have open spaces. Maybe the building rents them out and people create their own pesto sauce or their own pressed soap business. We might contract with them. Or we'll grow mint or lavender or basil and turn these added-value products where we're creating more jobs down the line."

I love the vision, but also the unlimited potential. Says Agoada: "If you look at how many rooftop spaces are out there that can handle a 10,000 to 40,000 square-foot farm, you just keep adding zeroes to it. The economic potential of what we're doing is mind-blowing. But from a more general perspective, we'd be a catalyst in trying to localize food systems and localize vegetables, and protein perhaps as well."

Indeed. Sky Vegetables has unlimited potential to fill a hunger — not just for nutritious edibles, but for a simple but powerful model of food production that feeds all of our appetites for creative and conscious capitalism.

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