Kaiser Permanente: “60 Sustainable Seconds”
Posted by Gina-Marie Cheeseman November 19th, 2009 
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As part of a new initiative, every month Kaiser Permanente (KP) will feature an online video of an employee or physician who is doing something worthwhile in regards to healthcare and sustainability. The program is called 60 Sustainable Seconds with Kathy Gerwig, KP’s environmental stewardship officer and vice president of workplace safety. Watch the first video below:
The “Impact” of the 2009 Net Impact Conference: Suggested Improvements
Posted by Matthew Savage November 16th, 2009 1 Comment
This year’s Net Impact Conference was a big success. It was an incredible gathering of many current and future leaders in the sustainability field. That’s why the following bones that I have to pick are important to address – if we can’t get it right, who will? (I love you Cornell and Net Impact ;)
- Carbon footprint of the conference: Cornell University in upstate New York is a beautiful location. However, it’s also very remote. To get there from most locations in the U.S. requires at least one connection and driving. The carbon emissions from flights are enormous and most of this is in take-off and landing. Cornell, we love you, but could we have future conferences in hub-ier cities?
- Waste at the conference: There were some instances of easy-to-interpret bins for compost, recycling and regular trash (for me, the ones that work are those that you can easily identify without crouching down or having to decipher which one is which). Color, shape and large type are all key to being able to do the right thing whilst having a conversation with your friend or colleague. Some were the right kind, but many of them were strange over-sized paper bags that all looked the same and didn’t stand up straight (one fell over during a social event, covering a woman’s leg in melted Ben & Jerry’s!). A waste strategy can’t have inconsistencies like these, because once it gets out of hand, it’s all mixed up. Net Impact, can we get this right next time?
- Posterity: It is a crime not to record such a gathering of great minds and thinkers. There were more than 120 sessions with some great insights and it was all lost to the halls of Cornell (except the keynotes)! I say that we should be “open source” so that this knowledge gets shared as much as possible. Plus, it might have given an option to those who didn’t want to commit to the financial or environmental costs of the conference. This is easy; every iPhone has a voice recorder if video is not possible.
Business Not As Usual: Twitter Commentary On Corporate Succession Planning
Posted by John Laumer November 15th, 2009 0 Comments
- When corporate executive change gossip spills outside the pages of financial pages of record and onto thousands of cell phones, something big and new is going on. Wouldn’t you know, the first big example has something to do with maintaining a company’s green image. See Vattenfall Wakes Up to VattenFAIL Reputation: Did Twitter Help Topple CEO? for discussion. Business significance: U2/C3
Adam Werbach’s Strategies for Sustainability
Posted by Matthew Savage November 14th, 2009 2 Comments
Photo by Andrew Paytner
When Adam Werbach talks, people listen. And for good reason – his career track has been explosive, from being elected the youngest-ever President of the Sierra Club at age 23 to his more recent work with Walmart attempting to engage all 2 million or their Associates. Currently, he is the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S, the sustainability arm of Saatchi & Saatchi.
I listened to him speak today at the 2009 Net Impact Conference where he gave a fascinating set of guidelines and strategies for corporations and anyone interested in sustainability, loosely based on his new book, Strategy for Sustainability.
Adam holds the view that sustainability has not even begun yet (well, maybe just begun) and asserts that if we look back in history, we will call 2007 and 2008 perhaps the beginning of a new relationship forming between large corporations and their customers. This is surely exciting to hear for anyone feeling stuck right now in their sustainability career!
Will GM Declare “Environmental Bankruptcy”?
Posted by Nick Aster November 13th, 2009 0 Comments
One of the nice things about bankruptcy is that certain debts are forgiven and you get something of a clean slate. That may be fine in a strictly financial sense but when environmental externalities are concerned it may be playing fast and loose. General Motors, long criticized for being a laggard on many fronts, agreed some time ago to be a primary participant in a voluntary resource recovery program known as End-of-Life Vehicle Solutions (ELVS). One of the primary purposes of ELVS is to recover Mercury from automotive switches when vehicles are scrapped. A massive 39,000 pounds of the substance remains to be collected according to activist group Mercury Policy Project.
ELVS Has Not Left the Building, But He’s at the Door…
ColdWater Tide: Provoking the Ah-Ha Moment at Procter & Gamble
Posted by Nick Aster November 13th, 2009 0 Comments
Big brands move slowly. There’s a certain inevitability to that, as unfortunate as it sounds.
In the cleaning products arena we’ve often heaped well-deserved praise on our friends at Ecover, Seventh Generation, and Method. Larger companies, like Procter & Gamble get more reserved recognition but as most of our readers know, have the potential to make a much larger impact on reducing society’s overall footprint on the earth – if only they’d get moving. I had a chance to talk to Len Sauers, Vice President of Global Sustainability at P&G at last weekend’s Opportunity Green conference and the evidence of motion is stronger than I’d assumed.
Len was proud to tell me that P&G has been thinking about sustainability, at least in principal, for a long time. The company made corporate responsibility a core value as early as the 1860s and employs a staggering 700 people in its product safety department, many of whom have doctrine degrees in toxicology, as well as other impressive credentials. These folks have been focused largely on compliance, keeping the worst chemicals out of peoples’ bodies and the ecosystem, and looking at ways for the company to lower resource use and cost.
But things changed in late 2007 which led to a surge in innovation, the creation of new corporate roles focused on sustainability (Len’s job, in fact) and some big product changes resulting in substantial and measurable decreases in the corporate footprint. The prime catalyst – an energy audit leading to the introduction of Coldwater Tide.
How Target Invests In Sustainability
Posted by Gina-Marie Cheeseman November 13th, 2009 0 Comments
Target Corporation, one of the largest general merchandise store chains in the U.S., focused on making its stores more energy efficient in 1989 when it began using an energy management system (EMS) to conserve energy. The system at the company’s headquarters allows for company-wide energy policies to be implemented.
In the early 1990s, Target began selling used cardboard to recyclers. The majority of its stores now return their cardboard to distribution centers on the same trailers that deliver merchandise to stores. Target stores recycle electronics, both product returns and company equipment. Target stores also repair and refurbish damaged shopping carts. When the carts are not fit to be used anymore, the plastic and metal is recycled. As of 2007, 983 million pounds of cardboard and 47,000 broken carts were recycled.
Odd Couple, or Where Coffee Grounds and Mushroom Meet
Posted by Bill DiBenedetto November 12th, 2009 0 Comments
BTTR (as in Better) Ventures has a thing about mushrooms, while Peet’s Coffee & Tea of course has a very big thing about coffee (and tea). This unlikely duo has joined forces in a clever and delicious waste-to-food recycling venture that produces gourmet mushrooms out of coffee grounds.
Some 16 billion pounds of coffee beans are used each year, most of which eventually wind up in landfills. Cal Berkley Haas School of Business grads Alejandro Velez and Nikhil Aorara founded the company to turn one of the largest waste streams in America into sustainable local food. They do this by using coffee grounds as the substrate to grow different varieties mushrooms.
Greenhouse Gas Accountants to the Rescue!
Posted by BC Upham November 12th, 2009 0 Comments
Lost in all the talk about whether or when nations and industries will have emissions targets, is the question of who, exactly, is going to measure those targets.
Without a pool of trained and certified professional GHG managers, climate change initiatives — from the United Nations Framework down to the sustainability plan for the shop around the corner — could stall.
Worse, a lack of accountability could turn the “greenhouse gas expert” into the snake oil salesman of the 21st century, peddling a dubious product whose ingredients change from one bottle to the next.
Enter the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. The Institute provides professional training in greenhouse gas accounting and verification, primarily online, and its ultimate goal is to create a professional society for greenhouse gas accountants and verifiers, similar to the way other fields — architecture, law, medicine, accounting — have national or international certification bodies.
The Institute was launched in 2007 as a non-profit by Michael Gillenwater and Tom Baumann, two recognized experts in emissions measurement, who realized that there was an emerging need for standardization in their field.
Top Five Reasons to Like Rickshaw Bagworks
Posted by Carly Smolak November 9th, 2009 0 Comments
Mark Dwight, former CEO of Timbuk2, has taken his vision of sustainability and experience in messenger bag industry and spun it into San Francisco’s newest bag company- Rickshaw Bagworks. Rickshaw is a relatively new company, and operates out of a two year old factory situated in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. Rickshaw comes after a long line of San Francisco messenger bag companies- most notably Timbuk2 and Chrome. Although not the first bag company in the city by the bay, Rickshaw is the first to embed sustainability into the culture of the company.
If you haven’t familiarized yourself with its offerings, here are five ways Rickshaw distinguishes themselves from the proverbial messenger bag pack:
Hotels: What’s Keeping You From Going Green?
Posted by 3p Guest Author November 9th, 2009 2 Comments
By Jeff Slye, Chief Evolution Officer Business Evolution Consulting
I have two questions I’d like to pose to the hospitality industry, particularly to the hotels, hotel management companies, and investors that do not have a sustainability or green platform for their property or properties:
1) What data or additional information do you need to hear or read to illustrate to you and your stakeholders that investing in ‘green’ is critical to your revenue stream and attracting and retaining customers?
2) If there is consistent information from 3rd party survey data, direct customer feedback, and comments from your competitors that tells you that your customers and prospects are actively searching out and spending money with green hotels, would you make the investment to go ‘green?’
The above two questions are the primary ones hotel company decision-makers should be asking themselves in this economic climate, regardless of the other business benefits that come from ‘green’ programs such as operational efficiencies, cost savings, employee values connection, marketing, and improved public relations. This article will help answer these questions and will use hard data and real case studies to demonstrate the growing influence by today’s green-oriented travelers (which include corporate, individual, and group business). In my work assisting companies in developing their green and sustainability strategies we have seen first hand that there is real money currently being lost or gained in this space and it is directly connected to a hotel’s environmental commitment…or lack thereof.
SC Johnson Ahead of GHG Reduction Target
Posted by Bill DiBenedetto November 6th, 2009 0 Comments
SC Johnson, maker of a variety of household products that include Glade, Drano and Scrubbing Bubbles, says in its latest sustainability report that it has reduced greenhouse gas emissions 27 percent at its worldwide factories over the last eight years.
In the U.S., the Racine, WI, company reported a 17 percent reduction in GHG emissions since 2005. Both reduction numbers “have been met three years ahead of the company’s internal 2011 target,” it says in its 2009 Public Report, titled Responsibility=Resilience.
Those reductions are the equivalent of taking about 11,100 U.S. cars off the road for one year, the report says.
The 2009 Public Report is SC Johnson’s 18th year of reporting on sustainability objectives.
It reveals that SC Johnson is closing in on another major goal, to reduce combined air emissions, water effluents and solid waste by 50 percent by 2011. Last year it reduced waste and emissions by 40.5 percent, compared to a 2000 baseline.
Xerox Aims for Carbon Neutrality and Paper Sustainability
Posted by Kathryn Siranosian November 5th, 2009 0 Comments
Many Xerox products are returned for recycling and remanufacturing. Photo courtesy of Xerox Corporation.
Xerox wants to be carbon-neutral … and that’s not all.
The company also wants to:
Eliminate the use of hazardous chemicals to achieve a zero toxic footprint.
Develop a “zero waste to landfill” goal for its company-wide operations.
Insure that 100 percent of its paper, by volume, meets stringent requirements for a sustainable paper cycle.
Ambitious goals for the world’s leading document management, technology and services enterprise, wouldn’t you say? But, take a look through the 2009 Report on Global Citizenship that Xerox released on Tuesday, and you’ll see that the company is well on its way to making significant progress in each of these areas.
“We view environmental sustainability not as a cost of doing business, but as a way of doing business,” the report says. “For us, it’s an integral part of developing products, serving customers and posting profits.”
Here are a few specific highlights from the environmental sustainability portion of the report:
The Fourth Bottom Line of Sustainability: Perspective
Posted by 3p Guest Author November 5th, 2009 0 Comments
By Steven Kenney
Concern for the triple bottom line — it’s what pushes companies to shrink their environmental footprint and make restitution for past negative impacts. And yet, as progressive as this ideal seems, its time has already passed. It’s time to put a fourth P alongside people, planet, and profit: perspective.
Adopting a truly future-focused perspective is the next step in sustainability. The goal is more than securing present conditions or making amends for missteps — it’s working today to make businesses, communities, and the environment stronger with respect to tomorrow’s conditions. The key to future sustainability is understanding the forces causing change and taking advantage of them to equip our businesses, communities and ecosystems for the future.
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