GreenBiz and GreenYour: Something Old, Something New
Something old is new again. GreenBiz.com, of which I am executive editor, has just relaunched with a new, improved format. The new site — the result of a revamping of the somewhat antiquated technology platform on which the site was originally built in 1999 — now reflects the topics you deal with daily: energy and climate; the various aspects of daily operations, from purchasing to cleaning to fleets; the design of products and packaging; the more efficient use of energy, water, and materials; and the way you communicate all of this through marketing, PR, and reporting. There are also sections for smaller businesses and on green careers.
Kudos to the team, headed by Matt Wheeland and Carlie Peterson, for making it all happen.
The new look represents the beginning of a forthcoming wave of new products and other enhancements we'll be making in coming months. Look for new newsletters and sites, and a few surprises.
And while we're on the topic of GreenBiz, please check out Greener by Design, our forthcoming conference on the mainstreaming of green product design at both big companies (Clorox, Dupont, GE, GM, IBM, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart, Xerox, and others) and smaller ones (Method cleaning products, TerraCycle garden products), as well as insight into how green innovation happens inside big organizations. There will also be some features that are not your usual conference fare — such as Green Gurus @ Play, during which conference participants will engage in small consulting sessions with select speakers and panelists (on a first-come, first-served basis); Innovative Flashes; and other experiential opportunities that get past conventional talking heads.
(Also, per my style: almost no speeches or presentations — rather, conversations facilitated by pro's, such as Marc Gunther of Fortune.)
Registrations are rolling in nicely, and the event — June 12 and 13 — is likely to sell out. Don't say you weren't warned.
Meanwhile, my colleagues at GreenOrder have launched a new site that offers a world of green possibilities. GreenYour.com is a smart and information-packed site offering tips and products on the greening of just about everything.
The site features more than a dozen categories of topics — appliances, personal care, energy use, lawn and garden, clothing, car, food and drink, travel, etc. Each category drills down further into subcategories and sub-subcategories — for example, under "Office and School" there are business operations (building, business travel, career, company values, lighting, mail, staff commuting) and office supplies and equipment (batteries, cell phone, computer, copier, copy paper, mobile device, printer).
Under each are clearly written tips, fact, and products. If you register (free), you can register your own tips, products, and resources — the wisdom of crowds.
It's a work in progress, but off to a promising start. For all of the hundreds (thousands?) of consumer-facing websites out there, no one offers such clear, no-nonsense, and accessible information on life's basics. The fact that experts can add their own two cents will no doubt make the site richer and richer over time.
As they say, none of us knows as much as all of us.
April 28, 2008 in Green Marketing, State of the Art, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (2)
A Deeper Dive into the Business of Water
Water hasn't yet risen to the level of energy and climate as a pressing issue for most companies, but the conversation seems to be flowing lately. And that conversation includes two concepts likely to enter the green lexicon.
One of those, "virtual water," received currency last month when its foremost proponent, Professor John Anthony Allan from King's College London and the School of Oriental and African Studies, was given the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize. Allen coined the term back in 1993 to refer to the amount of water embedded in the production and trade of food and consumer products. A cup of coffee, for instance has 140 liters (about 37 gallons) of virtual water, when you consider the amount of water used to grow, produce, package, and ship the beans. Similarly, a hamburger contains 2,400 liters (634 gallons) of virtual water.
The concept of virtual water (also known as embedded or embodied water) is of more than academic interest. As water concerns flood a greater number of regions, the embedded water of common products provides a useful understanding of how water resources are impacted by global trade. For example, it explains how and why nations such as the U.S., Argentina, and Brazil "export" billions of gallons of water each year — in the form, say, of water-intensive grain or meat — while others like Japan, Egypt, and Italy "import" billions.
The concept also could be useful in national agriculture policy, much as "embedded energy" has aided policy makers' understanding that growing and processing corn to produce biofuels can require significantly more energy than the process yields. (Not that this knowledge has dissuaded policymakers from supporting energy-intensive biofuels, of course.) And it may become a factor in the price of many raw materials, should carbon taxes or trading systems illuminate the energy and carbon intensity of things like aluminum, glass, and plastic.
There are other implications. Virtual water calculations will, no doubt, lead companies, individuals, and others to calculate their "water footprint," the full measure of the water embedded in the products they buy and the activities in which they engage. And it may accelerate interest in what Peter Gleick, co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute, calls the "soft path," a much more integrated, sophisticated approach to water in which different types of water — potable water, gray water, brown water, etc. — are used for their highest and best use, rather than using potable water — the highest quality, for flushing toilets, watering lawns, etc.
Last year, in an interview, Gleick expressed to me how little companies understand the water embedded in their systems.
There are very poorly understood or appreciated connections between business and water. Every business uses water in one form or another. Some use a lot of water, some not so much, but for many businesses, water is a surprisingly large component of production, either directly or indirectly, in the supply chain. So, for example, the beverage industry may use three or four gallons of water to produce a gallon of soft drink or beer or milk, but often a thousand times as much water is used in the upstream part of the process, perhaps to grow the sugar that goes into a soft drink. Similarly, in the textile industry, it takes water to make clothing but it takes a lot of water to grow fiber.
Businesses are often unpleasantly surprised where a local community objects to their use of water or there's a drought that affects their supply chain or there's a water contamination problem that results in their license to operate being removed. We're seeing more and more examples where businesses that don't pay attention to the water required to run their business run into unpleasant surprises.
Gleick went on: "I actually think the risk to companies is larger in some ways for water than it is for energy. There are substitutes for energy. You can replace oil or electricity with biofuels or with renewables. Water has no substitutes."
Coca-Cola recognizes that. And over the years, it has bumped up against activists, communities, and others for its water use — which is, of course, the fundamental ingredient of all of its beverages. In recent years, a series of developments pressed the need for a more comprehensive global water strategy. In the late 1990s, it began acquiring water brands (its principal U.S. offering is Dasani). In 2002, the company faced protests in India about the company's drawing down of groundwater resources. A year later, it began reporting water quality and quantity as a material risk to its business in its U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Form 10-K for investors.
In response to this Coca-Cola "developed and continues to evolve one of the more sophisticated water stewardship programs in the private sector," according to a new report from Business for Social Responsibility (Download — PDF). "As of March 2008, no other organization in the world has publicly pledged to achieve "water neutrality" across global operations that span more than 100 basins and sub-basins around the world."
Water neutrality. It's a compelling idea in the age of carbon-neutral and zero-waste commitments. But water is a bit different from carbon and waste: unlike the other two, there's a finite amount of water. And as Gleick points out, there's no known substitute for it. Moreover, as BSR points out:
True sustainability as it relates to water will involve more than "neutralizing" the volume of water that [Coca-Cola] uses. This is because fluctuations in the amount and quality of water available to a given community or ecosystem play an important role in sustaining the diversity and proper functioning of river ecosystems and watersheds.
Coke announced its water-neutral goal last summer. The company committed to "set specific water efficiency targets for global operations by 2008 to be the most efficient user of water among peer companies" and that by 2010 it would "return all the water that we use for manufacturing processes to the environment at a level that supports aquatic life and agriculture."
Coke will need to work hard to keep its goal afloat. The BSR report notes that last year, six organizations — Twente University, WWF, Coca-Cola, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Water Neutral/Emvelo Group, and UNESCO-IHE — came together to investigate the benefits of water neutrality as a meaningful milestone. The groups developed three criteria for legitimate use of the term:
- Defining, measuring, and reporting one's "water footprint";
- Taking all action that is "reasonably possible" to reduce the existing operational water footprint;
- Reconciling the residual water footprint (amount remaining after a company does as much as possible to reduce footprint) by making a "reasonable investment" in establishing or supporting projects that focus on the sustainable and equitable use of water.
There are more than a few squishy issues here — the definitions of "reasonable investment" and "reasonably possible," for starters. But we've got to start somewhere. Over time, I hope, the bar will rise.
Can it work? Will "water neutral" become the Next Big Thing in the field of corporate resource efficiency? Can it actually make a difference? It's a nascent idea, so it remains to be seen. But the high likelihood of continued water crises suggests that more and more companies will be learning about "virtual water" and "water neutrality."
For now I'm guessing that only a handful of companies — those whose products and reputation are most linked to the precious resource — will be willing to take the plunge.
April 3, 2008 in Business Practices, State of the Art, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (10)
The State of Green Business, 2008
My colleagues and I at GreenBiz.com have just published State of Green Business 2008, an accounting for how, and how much, the greening of business is moving the needle on environmental issues.
The simple answer: not much — and certainly not enough.
I'd been thinking about this report for a good five years, but it was only last year that my team and I got to it. Probably a good thing: The state of data on business and the environment likely wouldn't have been sufficient in previous years to accomplish this.
The free, 64-page report includes the top green business stories of the year just passed — a lengthy piece I'd previously debuted in this blog (see here, for example). But the heart of the report is the GreenBiz Index, a set of 20 indicators of progress on the greening of business.
It began with a simple question: With all that's been going on in this arena — all of the things I write about here, and the 1,000 or so news stories we reported last year on GreenBiz.com, ClimateBiz.com, GreenerBuildings.com, and GreenerComputing.com — what was the actual impact? Was all this activity actually moving the needle on climate change? Was it reducing our use of energy, water, and materials? Was it making any difference?
We set out to find out.
It was extraordinarily difficult, one of the more challenging exercises I've been through. The quantity and quality of available data were wanting, to say the least. Some of the things we set out to measure weren't possible — for example, it turns out there's no current data on the use of water by business and industry in the United States, the focus of our inquiry. In other cases, we had to cobble together our own indices, such as piecing together the quantity of materials - cardboard, aluminum, steel, and glass - used for packaging.
But the effort was worth it. We believe that the GreenBiz Index represents the best accounting of business progress on the environment.
Of course, I'll look forward to your comments. We'll be updating this annually.
The report is free, downloadable here.
January 30, 2008 in Business Practices, State of the Art, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (6)
The Hottest Tickets for 2008
A new year, a new calendar of green and clean events. Mine is looking awfully busy, with new conferences and events joining old reliable ones.
This spring, three new events will be hot (and pricey) tickets. In chronological order:
- ECO:nomics — the Wall Street Journal's first-ever environmental event, March 12-14, in Santa Barbara, Calif. This is about as high-level as it gets, featuring CEOs Jeff Immelt of GE, Andrew Liveris of Dow, James Rogers of Duke, Lee Scott of Wal-Mart, and Patricia Woertz of ADM. Plus: John Doerr, Vinod Kholsa, Robert Lutz, Robert Reich, and Arnold Schwarznegger. Oh, and Ed Begley, Jr. Being the Journal, there will be a healthy representation from the neocon crowd, such as Fred Singer of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, no doubt talking about how all this corporate do-good stuff is a distraction from the business of making money; Junk Science author and Fox News columnist Steven Milloy; and Red Cavaney of the American Petroleum Institute. Clearly, the Journal doesn't want any riff-raff: There's a $3,495 registration fee — if you can score an invitation.
- Aspen Environment Forum — the premiere of the Aspen Institute's foray into the environmental world, March 26-30, in Aspen, Colo. The conference is an outgrowth of the Aspen Ideas Festival I've written about in the past. The emphasis here is on conversation over cachet, with four dozen or so thought leaders: NGO leaders like NRDC's Frances Beinecke, Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown, Pew Center's Eileen Claussen, and the Rocky Mountain Institute's Amory Lovins; entrepreneurs like Energy Innovation's Andrew Beebe and New Resource Bank's Peter Liu; environmental justice advocates Majora Carter of Sustainable South Bronx and Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center; and an assortment of corporate types, journalists, scientists, and others. I'll be leading a session on corporate environmental strategies. Registration is $1,700, though discounts are available to "government and non-profit employees, international guests, and university faculty and students."
- Brainstorm: GREEN — Fortune magazine's entry, April 21-22, in Pasadena, Calif. Another invitation-only event, this one will focus, as its name implies, on interactive brainstorming. Organizer (and GreenBiz blogger) Marc Gunther, senior writer at Fortune covering corporate environmental and social responsibility, has brought together a diverse group of speakers, including CEOs (Dell's Michael Dell, Sam's Club's Doug McMillon, Dupont's Chad Holiday), NGO leaders (NRDC's Beinecke, US Green Building Council's Rick Fedrizzi, Ceres' Mindy Lubber), and assorted others from Autodesk, Conservation International, Goldman Sachs, GreenOrder, Herman Miller, Marriott, McDonald's, McKinsey, Union of Concerned Scientists, and more. As Gunther told me recently: "I'm hoping to get beyond the discussion of companies 'going green' to ask what impact they are having, and whether they are changing fast enough, given the scale of the problems." I'll on a panel titled "The Green Consumer: Myth or Reality," with Sam's Club's McMillon and Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm, moderated by Arianna Huffington. Admission is $2,000, but, like the Journal event, you've got to apply.
There are others. This year, being even-numbered, brings back the biennial GLOBE conference (March 12-14, in Vancouver), which brings together a vast audience of corporate and NGO types from Canada, Europe, and the U.S. This year's GLOBE features a piggy-back conference Auto FutureTech Summit 2008, another premiere event, co-produced by HyrbidCars.com impresario Brad Berman.
And finally, the fourth annual Clean-Tech Investor Summit, co-produced by my colleagues and I at Clean Edge (February 6-7, in Palm Springs, Calif.). As in past years, we'll assemble 500 or so clean-tech entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and investment professionals for presentations and conversation in a solar-drenched locale. Should be good.
Keep in mind, those are just the highlights. There are many more opportunities to learn and schmooze this year. Check the calendars on GreenBiz.com and Clean Edge for more.
Just remember to offset those travel emissions.
January 1, 2008 in State of the Art, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (9)
Leadership Mindset and Sustainability Success
What is the stuff from which sustainability leaders are made?
It's a question that applies to individuals and organizations alike, and can be vexing for both. When one scans the landscape of companies seen to be sustainability leaders, questions quickly emerge: What do they have in common? How did they get there? What was the role of their leadership team, and of everyone below them, in achieving sustainability success?
And, perhaps most important: How successful, sustainability-wise, are these leadership companies? Do they stand a chance of "moving the needle" toward a more sustainable world, or are they simply tinkering at the margins?
A fascinating new study seeks to address such questions, and its findings underscore the challenges that face most companies seeking to demonstrate leadership in the sustainability arena.
The study (download here — PDF), by Atlanta-based Avastone Consulting, an international consultancy focusing on leadership and organizational effectiveness, resulted from one-on-one interviews with a diverse group of ten global corporations, representing metals and mining, high technology, foods, pharmaceuticals, industrial and consumer products, textiles, and chemicals. The companies had a mix of organizational histories, with legacies ranging from 25 to more than 200 years. All had a clear orientation toward sustainability. Six of the ten companies are listed on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index World and Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations. The research was conducted with company officers, vice presidents, or directors of sustainability/corporate responsibility from each company.
Avastone first looked at the direction and the progress of these companies in the sustainability arena. Beyond that, "What we were interested in was what are the mindsets of the business leaders, and how do those mindsets influence where a business is heading, and how do those leader's mindsets help or hinder their progress," study co-author Cynthia McEwen, who runs the firm's sustainability and leadership practice, told me recently. "And so we started to explore the nature of mindsets in a way that's never been done in the sustainability field." (You can listen to an interview I did with McEwen on GreenBiz Radio.)
This isn't the first study to examine sustainability and leadership, but it is one of the more comprehensive and intriguing, as it delves deeper into both organizational behavior and individual "mindsets" than any other I can recall. And while the findings of this study trend a bit toward the abstract — McEwen acknowledges that the intended audience for the study is not your average worker bee — there are some good nuggets here for anyone interested in this topic.
Their study found that it isn't a lack of systems and activities that limit a company's success, but rather the scarcity of what it calls "higher capacity leaders" and the direct relationship between leader mindset development and the realization of complex sustainability outcomes. "Mindsets," explains Avastone, refers to "interior patterns of mind, or frames of reference, from which individuals see sustainability and its importance."
Examining mindsets fills a critical gap in understanding what makes some individuals and corporations sustainability leaders. As an increasing number of companies engage in an increasing number of environmental and socially responsible practices, we're beginning to see progress, however incremental, and the complexity of sustainability issues is becoming clearer. But, notes Avastone:
Missing, however, is a key dimension of the conversation that exists below the radar for most organizations. Few are focusing on the influence of patterns of the mind, which shape our capacity to understand the world and allow us to take effective action in support of it. Mindsets, the nature of their development, and the headway gained through the expansion of consciousness, are often overlooked in the larger sustainability discussion. While the myriad of shapes and forms of sustainability activity are under study, the acknowledgement of interior mindset development and its significance deserves a closer look.
The report offers several frameworks for examining corporate sustainability and discerning what is being done sustainability-wise by some of the best-known companies worldwide, and what can be learned from them. It also contextualizes their progress by connecting it to "the bigger picture of planetary limits and ecological overshoot."
Along the way, Avastone details the success factors critical to the ten surveyed companies' sustainability progress. Its findings demonstrate that, while technical and business systems may be necessary, they are not sufficient by themselves as drivers of sustainability success; subjective aspects like culture, shared values, and guiding principles are equally important.
The framework used in the study to assess company progress on their sustainability journeys is based upon the "Corporate Responsibility Gearbox" created by the U.K. consultancy SustainAbility, which describes the different approaches or "gears" that companies can take to corporate responsibility. Higher gears are associated with more substantive and systematic progress. Avastone describes the gears thusly:
- 1.0 Comply — The business case for sustainability is perceived with limited — if any — acknowledgment of wider societal issues.
- 2.0 Volunteer — The business acknowledges the sustainability agenda as legitimate and one requiring constructive responses.
- 3.0 Partner — It views "sustainability done well" as possible only with other players.
- 4.0 Integrate — Sustainability becomes increasingly strategic and integrated as the business links its competitive advantage and value creation to wider societal expectations.
- 5.0 Redesign — The business contributes to shifts in systems that root out underlying causes of non-sustainability. New opportunities are envisioned and realized through new paradigms.
"The 21st-century global landscape calls for leaders with mindsets that view all five gears of sustainability as relevant to the business, not simply the gears that are obviously required to move the business forward," says McEwen.
As I said, it can be a bit abstract, and some of this may be harder to access for those not steeped in organizational development and systems thinking. But that helps to underscore the point: We need more leaders to be steeped in such disciplines in order to move our organizations in the directions they need to go to adapt and thrive in the coming years.
Concludes Avastone:
We believe that as human beings, organizationally and individually, we are at a juncture that offers tremendous opportunity despite the complexity and challenges we face. Yet new manifestations of leadership are required. The fundamental nature of who we are as human beings offers opportunity for expanding our realities, our identities, and our worldviews.
This report seems to provide a good first step to help companies and their leaders get in gear.
December 9, 2007 in Business Practices, State of the Art | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (5)
Wal-Mart and the Greening of Fayetteville
One of the pleasures of my recent visit to Bentonville, Arkansas, was meeting Dan Coody, mayor of Fayetteville, the "big city" (population: 67,000) about twenty-eight miles down I-540 from Wal-Mart's headquarters. Fayetteville, it seems, is becoming a hub of green business activity. As the Washington Post put it several weeks ago: "A wave of start-ups developing the technology to help suppliers prove their green credentials has swept into this sleepy college town, half an hour from the company's headquarters in Bentonville."
I sat down with Mayor Coody to find out why.
"Well, it wasn't by accident," Coody began. "It's a combination of factors. The chief driving force here is, of course, Wal-Mart and their big push for sustainability, coupled with the University of Arkansas." Wal-Mart and the university's Sam M. Walton College of Business teamed up to create a Center for Applied Sustainability, to which the retailer donated $1.5 million in August. According to the announcement, the center:
will work with a wide range of partners for the rapid development of sustainable business practices and to promote their application across the retail and consumer goods industries.
Over the next year, the center plans to study ways to reduce carbon in products and identify key sustainability issues in agriculture. The center will also hold a speakers series, help train buyers for Wal-Mart, and fund student research.
But that's not the entire reason for the green business surge, explains Coody. "Fayetteville has always been an environmentally conscious town, but we've been elevating the dialogue and attracting a lot of businesses that want to do their start-ups in Fayetteville because of our quality of life, the four seasons, and the location."
Coody calls Fayetteville the "Berkeley of Arkansas," though he also refers to it as "Green Valley" and "Silicon Holler." By whatever name, he says, "We have a lot of creative folks. A lot of folks wanting to take advantage of the Wal-Mart sustainability initiative but who want to live in a town like Fayetteville. So we have the best of both worlds."
The 55-year-old Coody, a carpenter by trade, became mayor six years ago, sweeping out an entrenched and, from the sound of it, pretty corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy that had ruled for years. "I saw what the good old boys were squandering," he told me. "It was the opposite of what I thought we should be."
Once on solid footing, Coody set out to make Fayetteville "the center of the sustainability movement," as he so modestly puts it. The green agenda came naturally. "I've been an environmentalist since I was a kid and I think that one of the reasons I ran for mayor is so I could push the environmental envelope in Fayetteville." Along the way, he's hoping to give cities like Portland, Seattle, Austin, and -- well, Berkeley -- a run for their money, banking on Fayetteville's lower cost of living, mid-continental locus, and small-town charm.
Fayetteville does seem to be on a roll of late. It was ranked eighth on Forbes Best Places in America for Business and Careers. Inc. magazine's annual survey of the nation's boomtowns, which focuses on job growth as an indicator of economic vitality, ranked Fayetteville 13th. Expansion Management, a magazine focusing on company relocation activity, named Fayetteville third among "top mid-size metros for recruitment and attraction." And U.S. News recently named Fayetteville among the "best places to retire."
Meanwhile, on the green front, the university is constructing its first green-built dorms. Coody has signed the U.S. Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement, one of only three Arkansas cities to do so. His city government has begun using biodiesel in its fleet. Fayetteville boasts the first public sustainability coordinator in Arkansas. The city is taking food waste from Sam's Club and composting everything from apples to zucchinis.
All of which is attracting green business. "We have several companies, maybe 32 small start-ups, that are reaching the point of commercialization," says Coody. "And a lot of them are focused on the sustainability movement. We've had a lot of people coming into Fayetteville from East Coast and the West Coast, from New York, that want to be in an environment like what we have in Fayetteville." For example, he says, there's BioBased Technologies, which makes agro-based polyols for the polyurethane industry, intended for use in a wide range of applications including insulating foams, rigid foams, flexible foams and CASE — coatings, adhesives, sealants, and elastomers.
Fayetteville is hardly the first town to build an industry around a dominant local employer. But Wal-Mart isn't just another local employer. It's the largest company in the U.S., with 60,000 suppliers, aiming to transform its operations, products, and services in a greener direction. "It has changed my world," says Coody. "You don't get more business-oriented and more bottom line than Wal-Mart, and when they got behind the environmental push, the sustainability push, that gave my position more credibility."
After listening to Coody talk about his town's transformation, I told him, "I get a sense that of all the things that this has changed most, it's you."
He agreed. "I have never been so excited in my life about the environmental movement. There's such attraction going on with trying to save the planet. It is an exciting, exciting time in history and to be right here in the middle of it. I couldn't have been a luckier person in the world than to be mayor of Fayetteville right now."
And I'm pretty sure Fayetteville is lucky to have him, too.
October 29, 2007 in Business Practices, State of the Art | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (5)
Green Business, in the Land of the Prius
If you had asked me even a week ago whether Japan or the United States was further along in the greening of mainstream business, I'd likely have answered Japan. That country is, after all, the birthplace of the Prius and other eco-efficient vehicles and advanced technologies. It's the homeland of Sharp, the world's largest manufacturer of solar panels. It is a society known for longer-term thinking -- quarters of a century, not quarters of a year -- and for imbuing its citizenry with a sense of national purpose and commitment.
But after my visit to Tokyo over the past few days, meeting with companies and thought leaders in the green business sphere, I'm not so sure. Japanese companies, like their counterparts in the U.S., are engaged and involved in environmental issues like never before. But the conversations I had were strikingly similar to those I have regularly with American firms. Japanese companies are struggling to make the business case for integrating sustainability into core business activities, often working ardently to make what appear to be only incremental improvements. They're frustrated at the lack of government leadership on the topic and trying with only moderate success to turn green commitments into competitive advantage in the marketplace, encountering consumers who say overwhelmingly that they are deeply concerned about the environment, but who seem less than willing to channel that concern into purchases of greener products and services.
Sound vaguely familiar, Americanos?
During my brief visit to Tokyo (en route to Bangkok for a speaking engagement), I had the opportunity to sit down with representatives of Panasonic, the electronics manufacturer, and Sekisui Chemical Co., which makes among other things makes eco-friendly pre-fab modular housing. Both companies are engaged in some form of green marketing campaigns. I spoke at a meeting of the Frontier Network, a consortium of some of Japan's leading corporations working jointly on sustainable supply-chain management and other "frontier" issues, operated by the consultancy E-Square, my Tokyo host.
And I met with two of Japan's green business thought leaders: Tachi Kiuchi, formerly CEO of Mitsubishi Electric America and now chairman of Future 500 and CEO of E-Square; and Kazunori Kobayashi, co-founder of Japan for Sustainability, an NGO promoting Japanese companies' green initiatives, as well as a consultant to many of these companies.
As in America, interest in the greening of business in Japan has accelerated over the past year or so. Al Gore's movie seems to have played a leading role: Just about everyone I spoke with brought it up. "The movie changed the whole atmosphere," Kobayashi told me. One global food company based in Tokyo made it required viewing for all company executives, he said. "They said that those ninety minutes were more important than all of the lectures they'd be hearing for years."
I was six thousand miles from home, but I could have been anywhere in the U.S., given the stories I was hearing. The company efforts and struggles sounded very familiar. One technology company (the Frontier Network event was off the record, so I can't name some names) had developed an e-learning module on environmental issues that it was rolling out to its employees worldwide to make the issues personal and relevant, but the company hadn't done any studies to determine whether the program was having an effect. A financial services firm had launched a socially responsible investment fund, but was struggling to define what stocks should qualify. Panasonic described an "Eco Ideas" label it was applying to its green products, claiming that more than ninety percent of its products qualified. (Katsumi Tomita, from Panasonic's Environmental Planning Group, told me that the company will be rolling out the label in the U.S. in the coming weeks.)
Japanese consumers, for their part, sound just as confounding as Americans. A survey released last week by Accenture -- based on responses from more than 7,500 consumers in seventeen countries in North America, Europe, and Asia -- showed the Japanese even more concerned with environmental issues than the carbon crazy Brits. Accenture asked, "Are you concerned by climate change?" Ninety-five percent of Japanese said they were "extremely" or "somewhat" concerned, compared to 81 percent of Brits (and 73 percent of Americans). Panasonic told me their research found 77 percent of Japanese saying they'd like to buy from environmentally responsible companies, comparable to U.S. numbers. But, Tomita said, while Panasonic's research showed that Japanese consumers are more aware of environmental issues than those in most other countries, his company was uncertain about whether and how much environmental concerns weigh on Japanese purchase decisions.
And so it goes. The mainstreaming of green in Japan, as in America and elsewhere, is far from simple or easy.
Tachi Kiuchi told me how clean technology is on the march in Japan. It's no longer simply a matter of taking others' technologies -- such as American-invented solar panels -- and making them cheaper and better. Now, Japan is creating its own innovations. "From that standpoint, I'm pretty optimistic," he said. "In two or three years time, we'll have things other countries will want."
But Kiuchi isn't as optimistic about the greening of Japanese business. He said change inside companies is coming "gradually, very gradually. Our biggest obstacle is indifference. It's a gradual process and we have to wake them up."
He might as well have been speaking about companies in my country, and in many others.
October 21, 2007 in Business Practices, Green Marketing, State of the Art | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (12)
The Greening of the CIO
The notion of a corporate chief information officer is fairly new -- less than thirty years old -- but the CIO's role has grown in lockstep with the strategic importance of information and knowledge management inside companies. Their ability to think strategically about information technology can help a company innovate, grow markets, streamline operations, cut costs, and generally improve competitiveness.
Now, the CIO is poised to help companies be greener, too.
That's my takeaway from a two-day CIO Summit convened last week by Cisco, the $35 billion purveyor of Internet networking hardware, software, and solutions. The event brought together CIOs from about 120 large companies -- mostly Cisco's customers and partners. I was invited to moderate a panel of CIOs to talk about their role in the greening of business.
It wasn't a topic to which I had previously given much thought. What could a CIO do that would significantly reduce a company's environmental footprint? The one obvious connection had to do with the rising energy use of information technology equipment, as we've been covering daily on GreenerComputing.com and as I've written about in the past. For some companies, the energy costs of IT are becoming burdensome.
I'm not the first person to come to understand the potent power of CIOs. Simon Mingay, research vice-president at Gartner, recently told an audience in Cannes that "Defining the environmental value of IT will become a 'crucial business skill' for CIOs, as green concerns will increasingly weigh in on decisions about IT investments." Mingay defined "three degrees" of IT's environmental impact.
The energy use of computers and such is just the beginning. It seems there are other potentially powerful ways in which chief information officers can play a role in the greening of companies. Here are two brief examples:
As the electricity grid gets smarter and more Web-enabled, CIOs will be in a position to more closely monitor every aspect of their energy use across a vast campus or even a global chain of facilities. That, in turn, will enable companies to ratchet back energy-draining appliances (refrigeration units and HVACs, for example), or switch to alternative or back-up power, in order to avoid peak-power costs. The long-touted energy web will be a boon to the IT crowd, creating new opportunities for them to cut costs and streamline operations with an eye to save energy and reduce a company's carbon footprint. And such monitoring isn't limited to energy. It can be applied to water use and other resource flows.
Of course, all this can be done externally, too. For example, Southern California Edison, the large energy utility, plans to monitor five million customer meters every 15 seconds, yielding huge amounts of real-time data. Transforming that data to provide feedback to customers on how to optimize their energy use can provide valuable benefits to both parties -- saving money for customers and educing Edison's need to build costly new generating capacity.
That could change, thanks to expanding broadband networks and advancing technology. At the CIO Summit, I had the opportunity to demo Cisco's TelePresence technology, a videoconference service that's the next best thing to being there. TelePresence features a half-oval conference table that's mirrored life-size by one or more duplicate settings at various locations, giving the feeling of being at the same table (see photo). In my demo, there were people from four locations in the U.S. and U.K. "meeting." It's still not the same as being there, but it provided a pretty realistic approximation.
TelePresence isn't the only videoconferencing technology, but it's one of the smarter ones, and if it catches on it stands to make a dent in travel. Cisco says that since the start of the year, it has held 30,000 TelePresence meetings -- about 1,000 a week -- and that the utilization rate for its facilities is sixty percent, compared to six percent for its older teleconferencing facilities.
Teleconferencing won't replace all meetings, but if improved technologies like TelePresence can eliminate employee travel by just ten percent, that could provide a meaningful reduction in some companies' footprint. (As an aside, one CIO told me that his company's sales team's performance rose when they started utilizing videoconferencing, thus reducing travel. It turns out that salespeople are happier when they get to stay at home with their families, and happier salespeople tend to be more productive.)
I'm guessing that very few companies are thinking of their CIOs as strategic players on the green scene -- that most companies assume, as I did, that aside from the energy consumption of IT equipment, there aren't many other CIO linkages with their company's environmental performance. That's simply wrong -- and a lost opportunity. As environmental challenges and opportunities continue to spread across company functions -- well beyond traditional environmental departments to include every nook and cranny of business operations -- the information needs and capabilities will loom large. Along the way, CIOs will stand to become key players in the growing world of green business.
And maybe make their companies' sales team a little happier along the way.
October 8, 2007 in Business Practices, State of the Art, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (2)
Burning Questions at Burning Man
I'm just back from the Burning Man festival, an artistic extravaganza and human experiment in the Nevada desert that happens every year about this time. Burning Man, for the uninitiated, lures tens of thousands of spirited souls to a hot, dusty dry lakebed for what amounts to a weeklong, hedonistic party with just a smidgen of content thrown in. I was smidgen of that smidgen; more about which in a moment.
This year's festival theme -- "The Green Man" -- was part of what lured me. The green theme could be found amid the countless fantastical sculptures and exhibits created for display on the desert floor. As the Burning Man official website explains it:
Pretending that environmental problems don't exist, or just running away from them, won't solve them, but we think turning potential solutions into mind-blowing art has a chance to make an impact. . . . This theme also provides us the opportunity to bring these issues into the limelight, making them a part of our community's ongoing dialog, and fostering environmental awareness in our day-to-day thinking, decisions and actions.
As I said, I was there in part to speak at a lecture series given by one of the camps. My "lecture" came in the form of a conversation between myself and Charles Shaw, editor-in-chief of Conscious Choice, a Chicago-based lifestyle magazine focusing on "social, green, health, food, and spiritual consciousness."
Nearly a year ago, Shaw called to interview me for a story he was writing. It had to do with GE, Wal-mart, BP, and other companies that, in Shaw's opinion, were greenwashing -- promoting a few good, green deeds to cover up an otherwise abysmal environmental record. I happened to be going to Chicago a few days later, so we agreed to meet.
In the course of the hour-long interview in Shaw's office, I made a case that while none of the companies in question was perfect -- far from it -- their intentions were honorable and there was far more to the greening of big companies than meets the eye. Journalistically, I suggested, Shaw's story called for more than a knee-jerk response -- "It's a big company, so it can't possibly be green" -- but rather demanded a far more nuanced approach to thinking about what the companies in question were doing, and how much each deserved both credit and scorn.
It was a fruitful hour. The resulting story that Shaw wrote transcended the knee-jerk to reflect some of the nuances. Shaw later told me that he appreciated the opportunity to rethink some of his assumptions about business and the environment.
Shaw, as it turned out, was co-organizing the Burning Man lecture series and we agreed to continue the conversation we started, but in front of -- and with the participation of -- the Burning Man crowd. And so it began.
I'll admit to having more than a little trepidation about speaking on this topic at this event. It wasn't my typical audience or venue, to say the least. Moreover, the Burning Man ethos is militantly anti-commercial. Once you buy an admission ticket, there's absolutely nothing for sale at Burning Man except ice and coffee. No advertisements, promotions, or other forms of commercialism are allowed or tolerated. Trading and gifting are the currencies of choice. Hard-core Burners even cover up the corporate logos on their vehicles and other possessions. (Rumor has it that several of the solar companies approached to do demonstration installations at the festival turned down the opportunity when they learned they couldn't display their company's logo.) You couldn't find a more anti-business crowd.
Given all this, how would Burners cotton to my observations about big, mainstream companies' earnest efforts to integrate green thinking into their operations in ways that create business value, not just PR points? Could they see any merit in the current wave of big business pronouncements about their green commitments and performance? I was warned that the audience wouldn't be passive -- they would speak their minds without hesitation -- which added to my trepidation.
The small crowd that showed up at the geodesic dome that served as a lecture space on the very hot Saturday afternoon turned out to be thoughtful, vocal, and anything but close-minded. The conversation that unfolded between Shaw and me -- and, very quickly, with the assembled group -- was gratifyingly constructive.
(Incidentally, speaking at Burning Man turns on its head that hackneyed bit of advice to nervous speakers that they should try to imagine the audience being naked. At Burning Man, there's little need for such imagination, given that some of the audience members actually weren't wearing clothes.)
It wasn't all agreement. There was more than a little skepticism about companies' motivations in "going green," but more than that I was struck by the audience's failure of imagination. I asked the group, which seemed overwhelmingly to dislike Wal-mart, what it would take for that company to be seen as green. No one had a clue. I threw out a few ideas -- "What if every Wal-mart store had a 'small-mart' inside with outlets featuring local merchants and products?" "What if every store was solar-powered, with excess energy fed back to the local community?" -- but there were no takers. Even this relatively creative bunch couldn't envision how a behemoth retailer could ever be an environmental role model. That's a concern -- not just for Wal-mart, or retailers in general, but for any big brand seeking to be seen as a model green citizen.
Time ran out before our conversation did -- always better than the alternative -- and the private discussions that followed suggested that, much as had happened with Shaw, the conversation may have enlightened a few of these souls. That was my goal, of course. I never set out trying to convince anyone about any particular company, focusing instead on the potential of business in general to be agents of change.
And along the way, if the conversation helps even one person understand that the road to a greener economy is neither straight nor smooth, that there will be many roadblocks and detours along the route of even the best-intentioned companies, and that it will require a robust conversation between consumers and companies about each party's expectations of the other as we travel this road together, then I feel it was time well spent.
Score one for "The Green Man."
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September 3, 2007 in State of the Art | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (12)
Climate Change: A Mixed Report on Reporting
Corporate sustainability reporting has come a long way in a relatively short time. It wasn't that many years ago that most reports were essentially glossy, happy-talk brochures detailing a company's good, green deeds. Over time, as those reports became more detailed -- and more forthcoming -- the bar rose higher and higher. Today's leading-edge reports cover a wide range of information, including comprehensive details on what a company is doing right, what it's not, and how it plans to do better.
For companies, corporate sustainability reporting can be one of those no-win situations: the more they know about their operations and performance, the more they realize how little they really know -- and how many changes need to happen, including the need to produce better, ever more comprehensive reports. Suffice to say, this doesn't always win points for the good folks who spend countless hours compiling, writing, and rewriting the reports in the first place.
All of this is compounded when it comes to reporting on climate change, which large companies are increasingly expected to do. For both leadership and laggard companies, the pressure is growing to provide detailed breakdowns of their climate emissions -- by facility or business unit and type of gas emitted (there are six major greenhouse gases) and, for some companies, to report emissions produced by upstream suppliers and downstream customers. There are protocols for reporting these things, and the data need to be verified by independent third parties for reports to be considered credible.
So, how are companies doing? Good, but not good enough. That's my interpretation of the findings from two recent reports.
One of those reports, from the Global Reporting Initiative and KPMG's Global Sustainability Services unit (download - PDF), surveys the types of climate change reporting being done by companies. It found that while almost all companies are reporting on climate change, "on closer examination companies reported far more on potential opportunities rather than financial risks for their companies from climate change." In other words, companies are representing the financial impacts of climate change in a much rosier scenario than is likely the case.
To understand the folly of that, consider last fall's Stern Report, which noted that the costs of extreme weather alone could reach 1% of world GDP by the middle of the century, and that the economic disruption could approach those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century. Hardly a rosy scenario.
The GRI/KPMG authors seemed rightfully surprised at companies' optimistic outlook. "A surprising two-thirds of companies reported new business opportunities from climate change, and nearly half of the companies surveyed reported involvement in emissions trading," it noted. A wide range of other business opportunities related to climate change ranged from manufacturing components for low-emission hybrid electric vehicles to selling energy-efficient laundry detergent.
But not much on risks. The GRI/KMPG folks tried to be charitable.
The low rate of reporting on risks from climate change may be because companies see climate change not only as a threat but also as an opportunity for new products, services and trading. Risks could be perceived to be beyond current business planning horizons, or companies may not have identified, explored or quantified risks associated with climate change and may therefore not be in a position to report on risks.
Such rationalization aside, companies seeking to remain competitive will need to view their world through a broader, more realistic lens. Many companies in the GRI/KPMG survey acknowledge that climate concerns could raise energy prices, but that's hardly the only risk. As a spate of earlier reports on the topic have made clear, risks to business from climate change include:
the potential for physical damage due to changing weather patterns, fines and business constraints due to regulatory requirements, legal costs from possible litigation, investment risk from shareholder demands, changes in the competitive landscape as companies adapt to climate change, and possible brand damage if a company develops a reputation as a "climate change villain."
Clearly, companies can do better.
The other report (Download - PDF) comes from the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants and the FTSE Group, the U.K.'s equivalent of Dow Jones. It assesses the performances of 42 U.K. companies seen as leading environmental reporters. It, too, found mixed results, with most companies' reports failing to live up to these evaluators' expectations. Company reports variously had too little quantitative information, provided insufficient context to explain their impacts and trends in their climate emissions, and had inadequate management goals for reducing emissions. Most companies didn't reveal their public policy positions -- whether they were lobbying against climate regulation at the same time they were making public pronouncements about their climate leadership.
Some of this may seem picayune, criticizing companies for being less than perfect rather than commending them for their efforts. But the time for celebrating mediocrity is behind us. Companies need to step up -- to comprehensively report their climate policies, practices, commitments, goals, opportunities, and risks, and do it clearly. The stakes -- for companies and the rest of us -- are too high to accept anything less.
And the benefits to companies of doing so are considerable. Climate emissions, for all intents and purposes, represent inefficiencies, opportunities to improve operations, reduce risks, and save money, not to mention being seen as a leader in the eyes of employees, recruits, customers, and others. In that light, well-done climate reports are hardly an end unto themselves, but the beginning of a continuous improvement cycle -- an opportunity to discover ways not just to be a better corporate citizen, but to be a better business.
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August 19, 2007 in Business Practices, Climate Change, State of the Art | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (2)
Have We Reached a Green Business Tipping Point?
Where are we, exactly, in the trajectory of green business? Things seem to have changed decidedly in the past six to twelve months, as more and more companies do more and more things. But what should we make of it?
I've done close to 100 media interviews since New Year's, a wide assortment of publications, websites, broadcasts, and podcasts. And two questions keep popping up from reporters: Is there a green business bubble? And have we achieved a tipping point?
I've already largely addressed the bubble question. In short, the greening of business isn't a bubble simply because it's a bell that can't be unrung. Once companies wring out the resource waste, toxic ingredients, embedded energy, and carbon intensity of their products and services, there's no turning back. Even if energy prices were to take a sharp dive, the old inefficiencies won't return. (Indeed, cheap energy would exacerbate the problem, by increasing energy use and, hence, carbon emissions.)
The quality movement of yore represents a good analogy. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, "total quality management," popularized by American statistician W. Edwards Deming, was the rage. There were books, magazines, conferences, and untold experts making the rounds, preaching the gospel of kaizen, quality circles, and other business practices. Inevitably, it ran its course.
But when TQM faded from the limelight and the business media turned its collective gaze elsewhere, quality didn't go away; companies didn't revert to their old, inefficient ways. Quality became part of the fabric, eventually showing up in the form of six sigma, lean manufacturing, just-in-time inventory, and other business processes and strategies.
So, too, with the greening of business. Yes, some green products and companies will, inevitably, fail or lose favor. But the hardcore (and largely unsexy) stuff -- energy efficiency, waste reduction, pollution prevention, supply-chain management, environmental reporting, etc. -- will be around in one form or another for decades. So will the innovations, which are increasingly coming into the marketplace: green chemistry, biobased materials, nature-inspired design, cradle-to-cradle products, and all the rest. They're not going away once the green fever cools down.
The "bubble," to the extent there is one, is in media reporting. (And there are many days lately that I wish it would finally burst.)
So, what about the "tipping point"? It's become a hot topic at many of the business gatherings I've attended in recent weeks. With good reason: Those in the field are riding a surging wave of activity. Consultants who had not very long ago had trouble getting calls returned are turning away clients. Those that already were busy are now oversubscribed. Corporate environmental managers, once marginalized in their organizations, are becoming valued players. New headlines appear almost daily trumpeting companies' green initiatives, and it's no longer just the usual suspects of corporate names.
Many of my colleagues seem downright tipsy. "We've finally reached a tipping point!" they proclaim.
Have we? Not even close.
First, a refresher: Malcolm Gladwell popularized "tipping point" in his 2000 bestselling book of that title. "Ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease," explained Gladwell. "They are social epidemics."
As human beings, we always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily, and for there to be some relationship between cause and effect. And when there isn't -- when crime drops dramatically in New York for no apparent reason, or when a movie made on a shoestring budget ends up making hundreds of millions of dollars -- we're surprised. I'm saying, don't be surprised. This is the way social epidemics work.
The "tipping point," Gladwell told us, is "the name given to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass."
The virus called "green business" has not hit critical mass. The number of large companies that have embraced sustainability as a core business strategy remains small -- no more than a dozen of the Fortune 500, if that. True, more companies are paying attention. From where I sit, it seems as if nearly every company is asking some form of the question, "What's our green strategy?" They don't necessarily understand what that means, but they know they need one. And that's a sea change.
But for the most part, the answers they're coming up with are more programmatic than strategic -- a few noteworthy changes here and there, but mostly business as usual.
And small and midsized companies -- 98 percent of all firms in the U.S. (and probably most other countries) have fewer than 100 employees -- remain largely uninvolved. Look around your community and you'll find that most local business haven't changed much: dry cleaners, auto mechanics, small parts manufacturers, metal finishers, printers, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers have largely been AWOL from this conversation, except in rare instances. They represent a large chunk of the economy that hasn't yet discovered "green."
Of course, there's little reason for most companies, large or small, to make such a discovery. The incentives simply don't exist -- whether from government, customers, suppliers, employees, job seekers, bankers, or most other business partners and stakeholders -- to spur companies to adopt cleaner and more efficient practices. For most firms, going green remains an investment with questionable or underwhelming payoffs.
None of this is to say that the conversation about green business hasn't changed. As I've said, the amount of activity has grown steadily and immeasurably in recent months. But a high level of interest and inquiry does not a tipping point make.
What would a green business tipping point look like? How would things change? I can't honestly say. Can you?
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July 29, 2007 in State of the Art, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (19)
Law Firms and the Greening of the Brief
I've long maintained that "legal brief" was an oxymoron, given the blizzard of paper most law firms consume. Despite the digitization of just about everything, the legal world still revolves pretty much around dead trees. Sure, those walls full of law books have given way to CD-ROMs, and e-mail is part of the picture, but legal pads are still very much in vogue, as are copiers, fax machines, and high-speed printers. All of these machines, it seems, crank 24/7.
Consider a study done a few years ago by my colleagues at GreenOrder. It set out to help a well-known technology company understand how it could help customers better manage paper -- everything from document creation to production, distribution, archiving, and retrieval. GreenOrder evaluated the potential for such services at a large New York law firm, which in the previous year had consumed 12,500 cases of paper -- about 312.5 tons -- for its copying and printing needs. More pointedly, each of the firm's 300 lawyers was responsible for, on average, 800 sheets of paper each workday during the year, nearly all of it from 100% virgin pulp.
"Legal brief," indeed.
It's not just paper, of course. Law firms, like most professional operations, have buildings, furnishings, employee commuting, business travel, vehicles, foodservice, and other operations and activities that comprise their environmental impact. As environmental awareness has grown overall, law firms increasingly are positioning themselves as environmental leaders as a means of attracting both clients and job applicants.
Given all this, I was pleased, though not surprised, to see the recent launch of the ABA-EPA Law Office Climate Challenge, a seemingly well-thought-out effort to encourage law firms to more efficiently use paper, energy, and other resources.
This is not the first time a group of lawyers has tried to do justice to their environmental impacts. More than a decade ago, for example, a group of firms in the Seattle area founded the Law Firm Waste Reduction Network, which published a booklet and computer disk package called "The Case for Waste Prevention: A How-to Guidebook By and For Legal Professionals" to help educate their legal brethren about source reduction, recycling, and recycled-content purchasing. (Neither the group nor the guidebook seems to be around anymore -- at least not online.) Since then, several individual firms have staked their green claims. In my home town of Oakland, Calif., for example, Wendel, Rosen, Black & Dean in 2003 became the first law firm in the U.S. to gain third-party certification as a "green business." With good reason: The nearly 100-year-old firm has a growing number of clients in the sustainability arena, from solar power providers to organic food companies.
But the collaboration between the American Bar Association and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency takes all of this to the next level. Law firms participating in the Climate Challenge are being asked to sign on to any of three EPA programs: WasteWise, which helps companies better manage and reduce solid waste; Green Power Partnership, which promotes company purchases of renewable energy; and Energy Star, which helps companies invest in more energy-efficient products and technologies. According to the Climate Challenge website:
Law offices may meet the Climate Challenge by participating in one or more of three EPA partnership (i.e., voluntary) programs, or by simply undertaking certain office management "best practices:"1) Adopt "best practices" for office paper management by reducing paper usage, increasing recycled content, or increasing recycling. Alternatively, implement these actions by participating in EPA's WasteWise program, which encourages organizations to save energy by reducing waste.
2) Participate in EPA's Green Power Partnership (Green Power) program by purchasing energy from renewable sources to cover at least a portion of electricity usage.
3) Participate in EPA's ENERGY STAR program, which encourages law offices to reduce energy use by at least 10% through, among other things, the purchase of ENERGY STAR-designated equipment and implementation of better energy management practices. This program has features that recognize the issues associated with tenant law offices.
One of the innovative and refreshing things about this program is that it rolls up several different activities -- saving energy, buying renewable power, and reducing waste -- instead of showcasing them individually, as is typically the case with green business initiatives. Even better, it connects all three to climate change. Typically, solid waste isn't associated with climate, though the greenhouse gas emissions associated with waste disposal can be significant. Moreover, all three EPA programs stress the bottom-line improvements that can come from engaging in these activities (though the case for buying green power remains elusive at times).
The bottom-line impacts are real. Consider the GreenOrder law firm study. It found that by establishing a companywide policy mandating double-sided printing of all documents unless single-sided printing is requested, the New York firm in question could reduce paper use by 15% to 20%, saving up to 570 trees per year. Increasing the percentage of copies made double-sided to just 10% in "convenience copiers" (smaller, networked printers) and 15% in its copy center (larger, high-volume machines) would save the firm $23,754 in paper costs alone. Because double-sided copies are lighter to mail, the potential savings in postage could amount to $8,741 per year. The greenhouse gas reductions from double-sided copying would be nearly 130,000 pounds a year, assuming only virgin paper was used.
Beyond the value to law firms, the ABA-EPA initiative also appears to represent a watershed for the EPA itself: a well-designed effort to bundle several of its voluntary programs. EPA has about 200 of these programs -- no one in the agency seems to know the exact number -- and nearly all of them have different, often overlapping, marketing and outreach efforts, with very little coordination among them. (You can view 59 of the more prominent programs here.) I've had conversations with my friends at EPA for nearly a decade about the need to coordinate and co-market these programs. A few years ago, the agency finally hired someone to research best practices among the programs with the aim of harmonizing their operations, but that initiative seems to be slow-going. EPA's partnership with ABA to court law firms may be the agency's breakthrough moment in this regard.
All told, the ABA-EPA Law Office Climate Challenge represents a pretty good template for other sectors and professionals. If lawyers -- with all their protocols, traditions, and professional requirements -- can put environmental responsibility on the docket, there's a case to be made that pretty much anyone else can, too.
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July 7, 2007 in Business Practices, State of the Art | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (2)
London Goes Carbon Crazy
To paraphrase Kermit: It isn't easy being red, white, and blue.
Arriving in London this past week was something of a shock to the system, a jolt of reality that was both delightful and disarming. The town seems to have gone carbon crazy, offering up a display of initiatives from both the public and private sectors that highlighted how far behind the U.S. has fallen. The consciousness about carbon here seems to be sky-high.
Within minutes of deplaning at Heathrow on Wednesday, I was greeted by this intriguing headline: "GREEN LABELS FOR SHOPPERS." Suffice to say, as someone who's been tracking green consumer and labeling issues for nearly two decades, it caught my eye.
The story, in the Evening Standard, turned out to be more than typical British tabloid hyperbole:
Everything we buy could have "carbon footprint" labels to tell us how green the product is under a government plan unveiled today.Just as food carries warnings on salt, sugar, and fat, the new labels would carry a sign or figure to alert shoppers to the CO2 emissions used.
The label could be based on a "traffic light" system that would show red for highly wasteful products and green for those with lowest impact on the planet. The scheme, which will be the first in the world, was unveiled by climate change minister Ian Pearson.
Note the use of the words "would" and "could." The program, created jointly by Britain's Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs and the Carbon Trust, a government advisory body, is far from ready to go. The announcement, in fact, kicked off an 18-month research project to determine which stages of the manufacturing process should be included in the calculation.
Still, it's an ambitious, even audacious, plan, and some players already are moving things along. Walkers Snacks Ltd., a maker of crisps (potato chips, to us Yanks), already has added carbon labeling to its products. (Walker is a unit of Pepsico.) And Tesco, the U.K.'s largest supermarket chain, announced in January that it would be the first supermarket chain in the world to assign a carbon label to every product on its shelves. It said the label would record the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during the production, transport, and consumption of the 70,000 products it sells.
Tesco is the largest U.K. supermarket, but hardly the only one that has found its green gene. Britain's four top chains -- Tesco, Asda (owned by Wal-Mart), Sainsbury, and Morrisons -- are vying to out-green one another in the public's eyes, variously improving their products and practices. "An out-and-out arms race," as one of my London friends put it. And none of them is even considered the "greenest" supermarket. Those bragging rights belong to the Waitrose chain, according to one report.
Meanwhile, Marks & Spencer, which sells both groceries and apparel, announced plans earlier this year to go carbon neutral by 2012 and has a 100-point action plan to get there. The program is called Plan A ("Because there is no Plan B") and is aggressively touted in its stores.
London itself is greening up its act, with Mayor Ken Livingstone -- Britain's counterpart to Arnold Schwarzenegger, at least from an environmental perspective -- vowing to reduce the city's carbon emissions by 60% within 20 years. Overall, nearly 200 British cities have a signed a pledge to take action, known as the Nottingham Declaration.
In the midst of all this, of course, was President Bush's seemingly sudden change of heart on Kyoto -- or, at least, his pronouncement that the climate crisis is, after all, real and that the U.S. "takes this issue seriously." His words were widely derided by the British and other Europeans. ("Leading from the rear on emissions," opined the Financial Times). I found myself having to do a bit of explaining of and apologizing for my country's laggard ways.
On my first full day in London, I met with Julia Hailes, arguably the birth mother of the green consumer movement. Hailes co-authored the 1987 bestseller "The Green Consumer Guide" and co-founded, with John Elkington, the think tank SustainAbility. (I wrote the U.S. edition of the book, published as "The Green Consumer" in 1990, as well as the U.S. edition of two other books Hailes co-authored.) She recently authored a new edition.
I asked Hailes about the government's proposed carbon labeling program, expecting her to be enthusiastically supportive. To my surprise, her enthusiasm was tepid. "I'm interested as opposed to excited. I'm not convinced it in itself is going to go far enough," she told me. "I think that the process of doing it is, at the moment, more significant than the end result, because I'm not sure that the end result will be all that speedy or effective."
Hailes said that another idea being discussed in government circles and elsewhere is "personal carbon trading," in which individuals are allocated carbon credits -- say, for travel and home energy use. Individuals who needed more credits could buy them from others who didn't need them -- a personal cap-and-trade system that could help to put a value on carbon for everyday consumers.
Said Hailes: "If you start having carbon quotas for people, one of the real benefits of that is people are going to start evaluating the value of what they're buying versus the carbon credits they're expending, in the same way that somebody on a diet is asking, 'Is that chocolate cake good enough for me to break my diet?' Or someone on a budget asks, 'Do I really want to spend my money on that?'"
It was clear that carbon labeling and personal carbon trading are part of a larger effort to foment a carbon mentality among British consumers.
You could see signs of it everywhere -- in stores, in media, in billboards and broadsides. ("Lower carbon footprint, lower price," read one bus shelter ad for the Renault Eco2 automobile.) This is not entirely surprising for a place where gas sells for the equivalent of $6.50 a gallon, thanks to taxes designed to discourage consumption. (Gas sells for about that price in Norway, too, where this is being written, despite the fact that Norway is the third-largest crude oil exporter in the world.)
In another sharp contrast with the U.S., carbon and climate are now part of a broad political consensus in Britain. "No one from any of the political parties would come out in opposition to environmental regulations these days," said one business reporter I met with. Even the Confederation of British Industry, the trade group for mainstream business (the equivalent of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), has an effort underway to "analyse the barriers, beyond carbon price, to realization of the opportunities, especially in residential and corporate energy efficiency and low carbon power generation."
Granted, sometimes the Brits can go a bit overboard. Example: A radio station is urging Londoners to stage a one-hour blackout during the summer solstice as "one huge message to the world." On June 21, from 9-10 p.m., citizens are being asked to switch off their lights and appliances. It's called Lights Out London.
Call it symbolic, a midsummer night's dream, or whatever. But it's yet another sign of how climate fever has caught on here -- a vivid contrast to the American approach, which seems to favor living in the dark all year long.