3p Contributor: Jen Boynton
Recent Articles
Environmental Leader on the Hidden Costs of Reusable Bags
Fear the bag monster, not the bacteria
We love Environmental Leader and regularly encourage our readers to vist them as an additional source of excellent sustainable business news. But we’re not sure what they were thinking today with this item on how Plastic Bag Bans ‘Present Hidden Environmental, Economic Costs’
The article from the point of view of “conservative think tank” National Center for Policy Analysis, cites that same old study from the American Chemistry Council which found that reusable bags contain “dangerous levels of bacteria.” Of course, that bacteria is the same kind found on pretty much every surface and fabric, and it is killed with simple soap and water. No matter. Sadly, the threat of MRSA, no matter how distant, is enough to deter many from making the environmentally responsible choice.
In case the threat of dangerous microbes isn’t enough to deter your from packing your own bag, the study presents a new mystery danger: job loss!
That’s right.
Pasture-Raised vs. Industrial Organic: An Egg-cellent Stakeholder Engagement Lesson
Eggs used to simply be an affordable, easy source of protein. No longer. Selecting eggs has become among the most complicated things I do at the grocery store. My local shop has 12 different brands all of which feature advertising and imagery to make them appealing to customers who care about health and the environment. They are organic, pasture-farmed, grain-fed, humane, natural, free range or cage-free. TriplePundit readers will likely know that there’s a wide range of legal obligations associated with these terms. However few require the farmers to raise happy chickens like the ones featured on the packaging.
I’ve resorted to buying my eggs at the local farmers market. The farmers market may not be a realistic choice for many readers, but I trust the farmers and, in some cases, I’ve even been to their farms and seen firsthand the plucky little chickens pecking in the dirt.
That’s why I was surprised – and pleased – to hear that the biggest farmers market in San Francisco had revised its standards for egg sellers, limiting approved vendors to those who pasture-raise their chickens (i.e. keep them outside where they can peck and scratch and eat grass and bugs) and kicking out farmers who keep their hens in barns and feed them grain exclusively. Said CUESA in a public statement:
Sustainability in Retail: Not an Oxymoron
TriplePundit participated in the Retail Leaders in Sustainability tweet-up this morning - an inspiring chat. Not only has the retail industry (at least on paper) recognized that sustainability is here to stay, but many leaders within the industry have moved from looking at sustainability as a cost center to seeing it as an opportunity to reduce risk, improve relationships with customers and employees, and deliver better products. It’s an exciting road ahead!
The Retail Industry Leaders Association sponsored the tweet-up to promote their new report on sustainability in the retail industry. Data was collected from the most recent sustainability reports of 30 RILA retail member companies including Best Buy, Gap Inc., The Home Depot, IKEA, Petco, Safeway, Sears, Staples, Target, Walmart and Whole Foods Markets. The make-up of the organization is quite diverse:
Key Findings:
1. Retailers are working across sectors to achieve sustainability goals. Achieving social and environmental goals is a significant challenge, often requiring expertise that the organization doesn’t have. That means that employees charged with sustainability-related tasks are going outside the organization and even the sector to learn about how to improve their organizations. The research indicated a noticeable uptick in stakeholder engagement.
2. Sustainability has turned from a risk mitigation and cost center into an opportunity for business growth. Long-gone are the days of focusing on the low hanging fruit like energy efficiency (which is being tackled store-by-store as a no brainer to save money on energy costs and reduce risk associated with the fluctuating energy market). Sustainability programs are increasingly seen as a source of innovation and a key way to differentiate in a competitive market.
TweetUp on Sustainability in Retail THURSDAY
The words “retail” and “sustainability” don’t normally go hand-in-hand, but the folks at the Retail Industry Leaders Association are hoping to change that. They are leading the way, by providing a safe space for sustainability professionals in the retail industry to share best practices and discuss common operational practices, areas of concern, and pragmatic solutions to problems. Heard about solar panels on top of a Kohl’s department store or Best Buy’s new e-waste takeback program? The staff members who led these initiatives are all members of RILA.
In honor of a new report on sustainability in the retail industry, the Retail Industry Leaders Association is throwing a tweetUp (12noon Eastern, 9am Pacific) to discuss retail sustainability in general and employee engagement, industry trends, and importance of partnerships in particular. Guess who will be on deck as a designated expert participant? Our own Nick Aster. You can follow along with the TweetUp by searching for hashtag #RILAchat. You can follow Nick @nickaster and the TriplePundit team @triplepundit.
The report is embargoed until tomorrow morning, so you’ll have to attend the tweetup to get the results of the report.
Top Ten Posts of 2011
2011 was a great year for TriplePundit, with traffic up 28 percent over 2010. We’re thrilled to know that you find news about the triple bottom line as captivating as we do. As we look forward to another year of growth alongside our partners at Sustainable Industries, it’s nice to think back to the biggest stories of the year. These technologies captivated your imaginations, and these lessons gave you ideas about how to improve your companies and organizations. Without further ado:
- Nest Learning Thermostat keeps your home comfortable when you’re home
- Tata Motors car that runs on compressed air
- Sexism isn’t cool, even in the name of renewable power
- Top 10 US Climate-Ready Cities and, more broadly,
- Top 10 climate resistant cities worldwide
- Japanese wind turbine triples power output without increasing size
- Does your business pass the Waffle House test?
- Human rights: beyond CSR
- Landfill mining: a rapidly growing area of waste management
- Gibson guitars raided for illegal wood sourcing (follow-up here)
What were your favorites stories?
5 Employee Engagement Tips from PricewaterhouseCoopers
Shannon Schuyler speaking at the recent Social Innovation Summit
Surprisingly, Shannon Schuyler, Head of Corporate Responsibility at PwC, who oversees engagement for the 35,000 PwC employees, is trying to move away from “employee engagement.” That’s because engagement has to start before associates even join the firm, she told me in a phone interview yesterday, so that you know you are recruiting employees who have the appropriate mindset for your company.
Engaging prospective employees
This engagement starts with interns who participate in a service-oriented retreat to Belize along with current employees and alumni. While they conduct classes in financial literacy for local communities, current staff are able to get a feel for the working habits and styles of prospective employees. Says Schuyler, “As a member of the PwC team, you’ll be on an engagement team working within companies to educate. We want to see how well you perform on volunteer projects which require both cooperation and leadership, because the skills translate.” Of course, the interns love the opportunity to travel.
Don’t Know Where to Start? Check Out the Sustainable Energy Guide
Last week we released Sustainable Industries’ new microsite, the 2012 Sustainable Energy Guide.
The guide contains an overview of everything an Operations or Facilities Manager needs to get started on the road to sustainability. We get a lot of questions about transitioning to renewable energy and purchasing carbon offsets and you’ll find updated information about those issues here. But the guide is also ideal for anyone who is just getting started on the road to a sustainable work environment. It’ll give you a jump-start on establishing a baseline so you know how much energy your office uses, as well as tips and tricks for maximizing energy efficiency.
Reader Survey: the Results are in!
In the world of media, we get a sense of who you, our readers, are from your comments as well as from which posts get the most traffic.
November and October were both record traffic months for us in general, so we know we’re doing something right. However, we can only estimate. A couple months ago, Sustainable Industries and TriplePundit sent out a reader survey to uncover the basics about who you are and what you care about. Lots of things were as we suspected, but there were also a few surprises.
Here are the basics. You are:
Social Enterprise as a Solution to NGO Redundancy
Department of Redundancy Department
The non-profit economy is growing three times faster than the US economy, and if NGOs were an economy, it would be the seventh largest in the world. That’s according to Nancy Lublin, CEO of dosomething.organd founder of Dress for Success.
Nancy moderated a panel at the Social Innovation Summit entitled “Where to Start, Where to Aim.” The two panel participants were both from foundations: Paul Carttar from the Social Innovation Fund, and Jacquelline Fuller from Google’s philanthropy arm. All three panel members spoke freely about the problems in the NGO sector and the solutions they seek through their funding methods.
Lack of Data, Lack of Transparency
University Students’ Right to Protest Safely
The photo that will start a revolution?
Lloyd Alter at Treehugger called this the photo that will start a revolution. That image certainly struck a chord with me, and I can see why he thought it was powerful. I participated in a protest or two during my college years. The issues I chose to fight for were similar to those being tackled by the students at UC Davis. Which is to say… they weren’t life-or-death. It’s not that tuition hikes aren’t important, it’s just that once most of us get out of college it’s just hard to get enraged enough to actually get out and protest.
But, the act of protesting is an important American university tradition. University protests give students a chance to practice free speech and participate in a democratic process. In many cases faculty see these protests as teaching moments and step in to support students in their efforts.
This American tradition that has been in place since the 1969 takeover of University Hall at Harvard University, during which students took over a building to protest university engagement with the ROTC.University officials called in the Cambridge police to forcibly remove the students and many faculty were outraged at the use of force. They rose up to support students’ right to protest. That’s because, despite the fact that students are legal adults, they are entrusted to universities as in loco parentis. Universities are expected to look out for the care and wellbeing of their charges.
Arguments over the use of force of university campus continued throughout the year following the University Hall incident, until the May 4th, 1970 when Kent State officials brought in the National Guard to stop student protesting, and their use of force killed four students. Students, faculty and family members were rightfully shaken by this extreme turn of events, and universities all over the country developed plans to manage protesting students non-violently.
Student protesting has been a relatively safe pursuit for the last 30+ years. Not any more.
Top 10 Green Building Products
This short list of green building products was selected from a pool of products nominated by our readers and the readers of Sustainable Industries. A panel of expert judges sifted through the nominees to determine the top ten of the bunch.
Winners were selected based on environmental performance, scalability/market impact, innovativeness, design aesthetic, value and compatibility with the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system.
Drumroll please….
Occupy with Aloha: a Hawaiian Singer’s Subversive Serenade at APEC
This past weekend, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum took place in Hawaii. Twenty-one heads-of-state came together to discuss how economic collaboration can lead to mutual prosperity. That’s right– they discussed trade barriers and all sorts of macro-economic issues that will eventually filter down to have major implications for regular folks.
The summit was pretty big deal for a small city to host. Security was extremely tight and streets were closed for miles around the event to minimize the chances of conflict.
My immediate family lives in Hawaii, and I’ve come to love and admire the local way of doing things. It sounds cheesy, but the spirit of aloha really does embody most interactions, even mundane ones like drugstore purchases or potentially stressful ones like traffic stops. People treat each other with deference and respect.
I’m pleased to see that this attitude extends to protesting. Further, it made a real difference in terms of getting a message out to 20 of the most powerful people in the world.
We Hardly Know You… Help Us Change That
This survey is so easy a monkey could take it! But we might not get reliable answers. That's why we need you!
As you may recall, TriplePundit has a new partner-in-crime, Sustainable Industries.
The first step in merging two media platforms is to figure out who our readers are. That’s where you come in! Help us out by completing this brief survey so we can find out more about you and what you care about.
Answers are anonymous and survey participants will be entered into a drawing for a special prize pack of the latest sustainable business books, including Reinventing Fire by Amory Lovins, the Third Industrial Revolution by Jeremy Rifkin (reviewed by 3p’s own Gina-Marie Cheeseman), and a signed copy of Thomas Friedman’s That Used to Be Us. We’ll also throw in whatever we can pry from Editor-in-Chief Jen Boynton’s hands.
Take the survey here!
The Evolution of Corporate Philanthropy at Abbott
We have teamed up with Abbott to produce an article series on the future of corporate philanthropy. This is the first post in the series. Please read on here.
As a component of the sponsorship package, we agreed to review Abbott’s CSR reporting and provide some feedback, which we’ve provided in this post. While Abbott provided the funds to let us explore this area, it’s paid only for our time, not our opinions. The rest of the posts in this series will focus not on Abbott, but on the theory and examples of corporate philanthropy and will be written by staff as well as by outside contributors.
Abbott, the Abbott Fund and PIH are working together in Haiti to expand local production of Nourimanba, a ready-to-use therapeutic food used to treat severe malnutrition in children.
Abbott is a billion dollar multi-national healthcare company with products ranging from pharmaceuticals to nutritional supplements to medical devices. Though the company’s core offerings are already heavily tied to social benefit (improving human health), the company has deemed four CSR priorities to be material issues: Innovating for the Future, Enhancing Access, Protecting Patients and Consumers, and Safeguarding the Environment. The company’s citizenship page and CSR summary document makes a strong case for the choice of these four areas of focus and the way the document is organized around reporting on them is clear and effective.
Laying out material priorities in an obvious place is important – not just as a way to fulfill GRI requirements, but to frame the entire CSR document. Of equal importance is that fact that each of the four priorities is explained in a way that demonstrates relevance not only to stakeholders at large, but to the company’s core business competencies.
For example, “Innovating for the future” may refer to basic R&D but when coupled with a corporate commitment to supporting science education, the impact of that priority is magnified. It becomes stakeholder engagement of the first order – addressing the needs of the community in which the company operates while at the same time laying the groundwork for basic science literacy. That’s something that matters to a company always seeking enthusiastic scientists for the future.
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