3p Contributor: Scott Cooney
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2010 SuperBowl Ads: Audi Green Police Is As Green as it Gets?
Let’s face it, the Superbowl is watched by more Americans than any other single TV event. Personally, my guess is that at least half of the people who watch it only watch it for the famous Superbowl ads. They’re usually humorous (and this year, somewhat controversial, with the addition of the ad for an anti-abortion campaign starring Tim Tebow and the simultaneous censoring of an ad for a gay dating website).
This year, the familiar faces–beer companies, car makers, sellers of snack foods…the usual suspects–signed on for large sums of money to advertise their products. During the third quarter of the game, something occurred to me about this year’s commercials. None of them, up to that point, had even mentioned sustainability. I tried to search online but couldn’t really find anything relevant, but I seem to remember that in last year’s Superbowl ads, companies trumpeting their sustainability records, achievements, or product features, especially car ads featuring “best in class fuel efficiency.”
I had just finished a diatribe at the Superbowl party I was attending about whether the world had completely turned off to sustainability, when the first ‘green’ ad emerged. A customer at a checkout counter is asked, “Paper or plastic?” and when he chooses plastic, he is arrested and taken away by the “Green Police.”
I found myself quickly regretting my karmic intrusion into the Superbowl programming, as the ad quickly turned into yet another perhaps well-intentioned ad that casts environmentalists, frankly, as wack-jobs. I have to admit, I really started paying attention to see which companies had decided to advertise their product this way…
What Do C-Level Employees Take Home from a Conference like the State of Green Business Forum?
At last week’s State of Green Business Forum put on by Greener World Media, I reported live on some of the interesting developments in the world of green business presented at the conference. As a small business specialist, this kind of conference is, admittedly, somewhat foreign to me. The conferences I usually attend, such as Green America’s Green Business Conference, the Green Festival, and the like, are mostly tailored to and for small businesses, notwithstanding the occasional ‘big business in small business clothing’ such as Clif Bar and Organic Valley.
The conference included heavy hitters like Microsoft, SAP, Autodesk, UPS, and Best Buy. C-level execs sat and listened to discussion panels and powerpoint presentations from a wide variety of speakers, such as Van Jones and Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year 2009, Kevin Surace of Serious Materials. It was eight hours of listening to some amazing information.
As a former employee of Saatchi & Saatchi S, a sustainability consulting firm whose core competency was employee engagement around sustainability, I have a baseline level of understanding about what people take home from trainings, conferences, and other employer-sponsored events. If the mission of last week’s conference was to engage, empower, educate, and excite employees to go back to their companies and spread the gospel of sustainability, there were two key elements that, my experience says, could have been more effective for sending those disciples back into the world truly engaged and ready to fire up their troops.
Geoengineering as a Potential Part of the Climate Change Solution
Geoengineering has been tossed around as a potential solution for climate change.
Jamais (Ja-may) Cascio, Senior Fellow of The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, presented an informative session on Geoengineering at the 2010 State of Green Business Forum in San Francisco. Geoengineering can be described as the use of large-scale manipulation of our environment in order to counteract the climate altering effects of changes in atmospheric chemistry. Think large scale solar shields that reflect much of the sun’s energy and shade the earth below them. Think fertilization of the ocean so that it will produce huge algal blooms that will eventually die, sink to the bottom of the ocean, and act like a giant carbon sink. Think lining clouds with elements that are more reflective so that more of the sun’s energy is reflected back into space.
Terrifying? Perhaps. In small amounts, geoengineering is underway everywhere. Have you bought a carbon offset lately? Odds are, someone somewhere is using that money to reforest a cattle-degraded hillside in the tropics. It’s manipulating the environment in order to lock away carbon. As it is scaled up, however, geoengineering takes on much larger ramifications.
The potential in geoengineering is there for last-ditch efforts to save the planet when and if climate catastrophes come. But the potential for so much more…is also there. Is it that hard to imagine Halliburton getting a no-bid government contract from America’s 54th President, Dick Cheney, Jr., for trillions of dollars under the pretenses of ’saving the ski industry’ in the U.S.? Who will govern such projects? Who will decide when they are done, and how?
Van Jones’ Take on the State of Green Business
In last week’s column, I wrote about this upcoming State of Green Business Forum. As I indicated, I was perhaps most excited to hear from Van Jones, who was the victim of a Fox News-sponsored witch hunt that forced him to resign from the Obama Administration as its green job czar.
Personally, I feel Jones is one of the most charismatic leaders of the green economy, and, (forgive the nerd analogy) like Obi-Wan Kenobi, has much more potential for creating sea change now that he is free than he had while working within the constraints of the Beltway in DC. Today’s State of Green Business Forum is providing one of his first major public appearances and a forum for his reemergence into the green economy.
Best Buy Moving Forward on Alternative Transportation and Other “Clean” Electronics
Rick Rommel, Senior VP of Emerging Business at Best Buy, was a guest speaker at the State of Green Business Conference. Best Buy recently started selling alternative transportation solutions such as electric bikes and electric motorcycles made by Brammo.
The question is why. As a company that started by selling stereos, Best Buy is shifting into the green marketplace in response to, among other things, consumer demand. As Rommel pointed out, it is estimated that there are 120,000,000 electric bikes in China, representing 10 percent of the populace of the world’s most populated country. Rommel answered questions at GreenBiz.com’s 2010 State of Green Business Conference about Best Buy’s strategic focus and future goals for this entry into clean electronics.
Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Kevin Surace of Serious Materials, at the State of Green Business Conference
Serious Materials, a green building materials company focusing on energy efficiency retrofits, raised $65 million through venture investments during the down economy–an anomaly in the current economic state. The building industry in general has been in the tank for the better part of two years. However, as Joel Makower pointed out in his ‘state of the green economy‘ introduction to the State of Green Business Conference, green building has been the only bright spot in the entire building sector in the past year, and Surace’s company is a giant in the making.
Are We Moving the Needle? Joel Makower’s Take on the Overall Green Business Picture
If the greening of mainstream business is alive and well, despite the bad economy, what is the overall big picture? Joel Makower of GreenBiz.com opened the State of Green Business Forum with the question: are we moving the needle?
If someone were to tell you that one of the major food manufacturers had redesigned its packaging to reduce overall waste by 20 percent, and if a major green IT center had opened at Disney World, and if a major utility had announced major cutback goals for greenhouse gases, wouldn’t you say that things are still looking up despite the recession of ‘09? And if that person were to tell you that all of those things happened in January 2010, not in all of 2009, as you might have assumed, you’d guess that things were pretty swell in terms of the world of green business.
For a Crash Course in Sustainable Business, What Are the “Must Read” Books?
The sustainable economy is perhaps the fastest growing, fastest changing segment of the overall economy. It’s hard to keep up with all the new books, movies, and websites that cover sustainable food, clean tech, renewable energy, alternative transportation, Socially Responsible Investing, ecotourism, green building, holistic education, and all the other facets of the sustainable economy–even for those of us who live and breathe this stuff.
But what about those people who are new to the field, and feel completely overwhelmed by it all? They’re not ready for a green MBA from Presidio or Dominican, but they are curious, interested, and part of that broader populace we need to reach that has open minds and are terrific potential converts to sustainable businesspeople and consumers….if only they could get, well, a crash-course in sustainable business.
Next Week’s State of Green Business Forum: Pushing the Green Economy Forward
GreenBiz.com’s State of Green Business Forum next week (February 4th) in San Francisco comes at a time when modest leadership at the federal level and mixed reviews from Copenhagen have raised the stakes for the success of the green economy as the ultimate go-between of business, advocacy, policy, and progress. Among the many reasons I am very excited to be going, Van Jones will be speaking, and is reemerging as a leader after a politically charged witchhunt funded by Big Oil forced him from Washington as President Obama’s Environmental Adviser and Green Jobs Czar.
Permaculture Ecotourism–An Exploration of Rancho Margot in El Castillo, Costa Rica
When the area around Lake Arenal, Costa Rica, was deforested to make room for “McCattle”, little planning was done for the sustainable use of the land. It’s the same old story, and one that has played itself out for decades in central America–demand for cheap beef in the United States has driven the destruction of much of the isthmus’ rainforests, and with typically thin soils, steep topography, and slow growing forests, the land does not recover after a few years of cattle grazing, but rather more resembles desert grasslands that are bereft of the area’s historic biological diversity.
Thanks to ecotourism and perhaps to carbon credits and offsets purchased elsewhere, many efforts are underway to reforest much of this land lost to cattle ranching. Costa Rica’s Institute of Tourism (ICT–Instituto Costaricense de Torismo) provides guidelines for a Certificate of Sustainable Tourism. One of the facets of this certification is that a company or organization wishing to participate can earn points toward their certification by reforesting their land and surrounding hillsides.
6 years ago, the Sostheim family saw a piece of land, roughly 400 acres, that sat on the bank of Lake Arenal near El Castillo, and thought they could make some terrific things happen. Rancho Margot was born: a self-sufficient ranch, organic farm, and ecotourism destination. It is completely off-grid, both in terms of water and electricity, and produces about 85 percent of the food that is eaten by the workers, family, and customers served in the farm’s restaurant. It’s as close to completely self-sufficient as anything I’d heard of, so I recently paid a visit to Rancho Margot to see firsthand the nexus of ecotourism and permaculture.
More Plastic Packaging and Less Product–Are Wallaby and O Organics Simply Greenwashing?
When an organic food retailer markets a product that looks and tastes similar to its competitors, but offers a lower price, one has to wonder, how do they do that? In the organic yogurt field, where pioneers such as Stonyfield and small, local producers like Straus Family Creamery offer products side by side with lower cost competitors, such as Wallaby and O Organics, health conscious consumers are faced with a choice. Pay 30 cents extra for Stonyfield, or pay 30 cents less for Wallaby?
So what’s the catch? A cursory inspection of the Wallaby and O Organics labels shows all the right certifications. They’re organic, and each promotes commitment to sustainable agriculture, sourcing locally, and offering healthy products. Wallaby is even Kosher. And when you’re holding a Stonyfield product in your right hand and a Wallaby product in your left, you’d never notice, unless you look really, really closely, that with Wallaby and O, you’re paying MORE per ounce of actual product, and in fact, what you’re buying is more plastic packaging, and less product.
Paul Hawken on the State of the Markets
Sustainable Industries continues to impress me. Yesterday’s SI Economic Forum featured Paul Hawken, well-known author (Ecology of Commerce, Natural Capitalism, Blessed Unrest) and sustainability guru (the mind behind Wiser Earth and a variety of other startups). And while Mr. Hawken is a big draw, the discussion panel that followed also included some real movers and shakers with some fascinating insights into the green business world, including Lisa Michelle Galley, Founder of Galley Eco Capital, Matt Cheney, CEO of Renewable Ventures, Peter Rumsey, Founder of Rumsey Engineers, and Phil Michael Williams, VP of Technical Systems and Sustainability at Webcor.
The Ultimate in “Clean” Tech: Sludge?
Pop quiz: what does our municipal sewage waste that gets processed at wastewater treatment plants, and the great Pacific garbage patch, have in common?
Well, not much…yet.
A clean tech startup by the name of Micromidas may change all that, and in the process, change the game for plastic packaging.
Micromidas won the EPA’s 3P (People, Prosperity, Planet) clean tech contest earlier this year and is competing at this year’s Clean Tech Open in San Francisco. The bottom line is that it says it can convert 80-90 percent of sludge (biomass waste) to bioplastics. Typically, this sludge is either burned or allowed to decompose naturally, a process that takes 30 days or more. Either way, it contributes to climate change by producing greenhouse gasses. Instead of letting that happen, Micromidas turns that sludge into solid products that can be used in much the same way as conventional plastics.
Chance to Win $200 by Giving Your Opinion on Your Workplace’s Sustainability Initiatives!
Have you ever wanted to know how many companies give their employees the chance to recycle or compost? Ever wonder how your company stacks up to others in terms of sustainability initiatives? Ever ask, “why is my boss such a jerk?”– only because your boss said no to your suggestion for installing a programmable thermostat?
Brighter Planet, a Vermont-based company whose credit cards offer users the chance to give to community renewable energy projects with each purchase, has just launched a survey to give all of us the chance to talk about our company’s true environmental commitment. Each completed survey contestant will be entered into a raffle for a $200 prize.
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