ecofrenzy: what’s good in green

Top stories:

Brita teams up with Preserve to take back and recycle used Brita filters. (Clorox Company Press Release)

California Bay Area mayors team up with Better Place to make the area electric vehicle capital of the US by building infrastructure for electric vehicles by 2012, an estimated $1B project. (Green Tech Media)

Other noteworthy news:

James Murdoch persuasively advocates for carbon disclosure. (Financial Times)

Sun Microsystems launched OpenEco 2.0, an online resource to help companies measure and manage greenhouse gas emissions. (Environmental Leader)

One of my favorite companies, RecycleBank, which incentivizes recycling for consumers (read my interview here), is expanding its operations west into the country. (Environmental Leader)

Montreal bike sharing program, Bixi (for Bike Taxi), wins award; offers locally made, RFID equipped and rugged bikes for use in the city for a fee. (TreeHugger)

Apparently companies with longer CSR reports tend to win more awards for “sustainability.” (Environmental Leader)  Is it just me, or does this sound dreadfully off? – I think CSR reports should be more accessible, not necessarily longer.

A recent Yahoo Green study has segmented the green consumer market into four categories – deeply comitted (23%), trendy (24%), practical (13%), and passive (17%) – the remaining 23% was found not to care. (Environmental Leader)

This Thanksgiving two turkeys came to the table: one standard turkey who’d lived the typical (dare I say unhappy?) turkey life, and another who had been raised free, eating organic munchies, on a local farm.  The average turkey costs less than $0.70 per pound, while its happier cousin went for ~$4-5 per pound (coming out to $60 total).   Was it worth it?

Come dinner time I was excited for a side-by-side comparison of the two birds and indeed most guests performed their own assessments.  Everyone overwhelmingly noted the local/organic birds’ superiority.  The traditional turkey was a bit mushy, tasted like turkey always does, and turned into a sort of stringy and dry mash in my mouth.  Which is fine until you put it head to head with its competition.  The free-range bird was moist, rich with flavor, and enjoyable to bight into – where the typical turkey gives way to my teeth, this local bird provided some sort of delectable resistance to my bight.  Definitely worth the surcharge.

It is one thing to start a green by design eco-fashion company, and an entirely different thing to direct a ~$16B clothing retailer that employs 150,000 people to reduce its environmental impact and operate more sustainably. This is exactly the job of Kindley Walsh-Lawlor, Gap Inc’s Senior Director of Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs. I got the chance to discuss with Kindley how she landed where she is, what Gap Inc’s brands (Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic) are doing to “go green”, and the ins and outs of retail corporate social responsibility (CSR). Gap Inc is a social responsibility leader, having spent 12 years working on ethical sourcing and human rights. Kindley’s task involves incorporating environmental initiatives. As she puts it: “Are we leaders right now in the environment? The answer is no. I think, is it a goal? Yeah. …The key thing that’s so important to us is it’s about really making a positive impact versus just creating a great story.”

Having grown up on a farm in Vermont, Kindley is a self-described “old time hippie and long-time environmentalist.” Kindley’s background is in product design and she spent 15 years in small-scale production. Eleven years ago she started with Gap Inc, wanting to understand what it was like to have “brand names behind you.” During her first 9 years with the company, Kindley worked at Banana Republic and Gap which gave her a “great education on what the brands were up against…day-to-day especially as we dig deeper with the brands on operational sustainability opportunities to redesign product.” Kindley has been in her current CSR role just under 2 years.

In her current role, Kindley has helped organize Gap Inc’s efforts around an environmental strategy, referred to as the ECO-strategy: “E for energy, C for cotton or sustainable design, and O for output or waste… fundamentally the basics that we need to engage in as an apparel company.” This is a way to harness all the corporate initiatives and brand level grass roots efforts into one all encompassing strategy. They also put together a sustainable design toolkit, which they were able to utilize when Banana Republic first came to corporate and said “we want to go green.” Last spring, Banana came out with its green initiative under the tagline “Greener. One Step at a time.” And while that was just one step, Kindley hinted that another core Gap Inc brand has something up its sleeve. This unnamed brand has made sustainability “one of their five key pillars as to how they make all decisions in their business. So they’ve gone after it as a cultural shift to insure that’s about more than just pleasing the customer, more than just getting the right aesthetic in the store, more than just engaging employees, but also doing the right thing when they’re doing business.”

Going forward, a key component to success will be consistent brand communication. Kindley does not want Gap to fall heavily to either the social or the environmental side of things, but to tie these two fundamental pieces together and ensure Gap’s messaging is aligned. “A lot of companies [are] either about sustainability or they’re about social and ethical sourcing or social and human rights. And so what I want to do is ensure that whatever we’re doing is connected. I want to insure that whatever we’re messaging is connected, and I think that’s something that is a differentiator and hugely important for the company.”

The exciting part is that Kindley is working with the leverage of several brands and impact on a large scale – every small change has a huge impact. For example, Gap Inc switched to using post-consumer recycled paper for price tickets across all brands and “it saves so much paper as you look across how many units we buy every season, everyday, that are shipping around the world.” On the other hand, one of the difficulties of doing this sort of work is that “everyone wants to see your ROI on every initiative that you’re doing.” Kindley explained that they’ve come up with “really creative ways to be cost neutral.”

Gap Inc is in extremely capable hands with Kindley, and I look forward to seeing how she continues to drive environmental and social change in the industry. Overall, Kindley is looking for “that sea change in the industry that we can help propel” and to partner with other industry leaders like Nike and Patagonia to “help move mills to think differently, to help factories to think differently and ultimately for the product to be made differently.”
Read full transcript and listen to the audio of my interview here.

[Originally posted on TriplePundit]

Environmental blogs everywhere should be crowing at the fact that Rep. Henry Waxman (of Hollywood) beat out warhorse Rep. John Dingell (of Ann Arbor and Dearborn, Michigan) for chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. While it may sound like congressional inside baseball, it’s more like the green movement just won the lottery.

That’s because Dingell–whose wife is a GM exec–has been one of the most influential, bullheaded defenders of the automobile industry against environmental regulation for almost 30 years. He’s used his perch on the committee, which controls ‘everything that drives, flies, or uses electricity,’ to paraphrase Dingell, to push that agenda for decades. (Dingell, who will be the longest serving member of the House ever in January, used to give Harry Truman a hard time.)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but even though he’s sponsored important environmental legislation in the past, like the Endangered Species Act, Dingell is almost personally responsible for the fact that American cars have not become more efficient or better for the environment over the past thirty years.

And chairmanship of a key committee matters. Just look at the dramatic policy changes that occurred after the committed anti-regulation Rep. Dick Pombo lost his perch on the House Resources Committee in 2006:

With little fanfare, Congress has embarked on a push to protect as many as a dozen pristine areas this year in places ranging from the glacier-fed streams of the Wild Sky Wilderness here to West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest. By the end of the year, conservation experts predict, this drive could place as much as 2 million acres of unspoiled land under federal control, a total that rivals the wilderness acreage set aside by Congress over the previous five years.

…

In recent weeks the House has passed six wilderness bills, including Wild Sky, that would protect more than 500,000 acres. The Senate Energy and Resources Committee has approved another four wilderness bills and the panel could pass more, an effort that Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said was aimed at addressing “some pent-up demand for bills that had been in the works for most of the last decade.”

Although several factors have spurred the flurry of legislative activity, much of it stems from the fact that former House Resources Committee chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) –who fiercely opposed designating any new wilderness–lost his seat in 2006. As many as a dozen bills are expected to pass this year, and another seven have been introduced recently.

That’s an unreal amount of progress, enabled by turnover of a single committee chair.

What’s more, Waxman, who will now take Dingell’s place, is something of a greenhouse emissions-reduction fanatic. Couple that with news that Obama is planning a major green push in 2008, and it looks like the gap between Democrats’ global warming rhetoric and their policy record is about to get a lot smaller.

–Barron YoungSmith

A weekend visit to the San Francisco Green Festival left me with two resounding albeit unrelated thoughts: 1) Van Jones is the man (wish he could get a cabinet spot).  2) People just love free stuff.

1) Van Jones: The guy is brilliant.  Even my skeptical boyfriend came away inspired and convinced that a green collar economy is what we need.  Van’s speech is paraphrased on the SF Gate’s Thin Green Line blog here so I won’t bother repeating it.  But his ideas tackle our biggest problems, make sense on every level, are easy to comprehend, and he is a fantastic speaker.  If you ever get a chance to hear Van speak, I highly recommend it!

2) Free Stuff: I’m sure I’m not the only one who got totally overwhelmed navigating the packed hallways of the San Francisco Green Fest.  Booth after booth representing loads of intriguing companies, many I’d never heard of.  What makes for an attractive booth, I wondered.  Why are some packed with people squeezing in awkwardly to get closer, while others barely get noticed in comparison?  I think some of it has to do with the momentum of crowds – people are drawn to crowded places.

But I would contend that one of the most important factors for attracting a crowd at a Green Fest type fete, is the presence and quality of swag.   Whether it be at conferences, job fairs, expos, festivals, farmer’s markets – people just LOVE free stuff, myself included.  I’ve spent days at such events excitedly gathering flyers and free branded trinkets, only to come home with a bag full of stuff I never want to look at again.  Why was I so excited to acquire these things?  From a branding standpoint, the trick is to give away uniquely valuable and useful items, that will get used on a regular basis.  In my experience working events for Green Zebra, I noticed this from the opposite side of the table.  We had wonderful, valuable coupon guides for sale at a great price, but no free stuff so people would often walk right by.   At Green Fest I turned down a free cloth bag, citing that I already have too many, and actually felt bad, as if I were rejecting the company offering it.   In any case,  I think we, as consumers, all need to consider thoughtfully why we are taking freebies, and make sure it’s not just because it’s free.  And we, as business people and organizers, also need to consider what sort of freebies we offer and try to minimize the amount of free junk we dispense.

TreeHugger spotlights Turkish prefab houses that are 4 to 8 times more efficient than traditionally built homes.

Joel Makower writes a great column on how some companies are finding it profitable to take extra steps to reduce waste, yet there is a massive realm of industrial wastes that have yet to be addressed in a systematic fashion. (GreenBiz)

Check out this fun and informative video on recycling from RecycleBank.

The Maldives, an island nation which lies an average of 1.5 meters above sea level, seeks to buy a new homeland to prepare for rising water levels. (The Guardian)

British Study finds that green spaces, such as parks, forests and playing fields, are correlated with reduced health inequalities between rich and poor, as compared to areas with less green space. (Washington Post)

Following California’s lead, Massachusetts plans “Emissions Performance Label” for new cars, which will give cara 1-10 scores for smog and global warming. (Environmental Leader)

Two NGO’s, the Basel Action Network and the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, launched the e-Stewards partnership which sets forth a set of standards for handling toxic electronics waste. 32 recyclers have already taken the pledge. (GreenerComputing)

For amusement’s sake, check out Oxford University Press’ Word of the Year, hypermiling (altering your car for best gas mileage), as well as the shortlist which includes Carrotmob. (OUPblog)

Reflecting on Halloween, I wonder, why do American festivities involve an abundance of unnecessary and increasingly disposable stuff?

A few examples:

• Take Halloween: More and more people buy ready-made costumes, many of which have been manufactured and shipped from China.  Those who make their own costumes tend to buy materials for the occasion – cardboard, swaths of fabric, face-paint, wigs, fake blood etc – that will likely be used only once and sit in a costume basket thereafter.  God forbid you wear the same costume two years in a row.  And each household will traditionally buy several Halloween-sized bags of individually-plastic-wrapped candy to hand out to trick-or-treaters.  And then there are decorations.  I think you can imagine the scope of the waste and nearly useless junk that is purchased and then tossed into a closet or trashcan.
• Now let’s consider Christmas: Depending on a family’s traditions, the exact formulation will vary, but most households I’ve encountered adopt a form of holiday consumerism that involves each of us buying gifts for each family member and friend.  And then wrapping each gift in pretty paper.  And often mailing the whole thing in a box with a card. And all too often the gift is something the recipient didn’t want or need, so it may not get used.  Or the gift will ultimately be exchanged for something else, spurring a trip to the store which opens up the door to more shopping.  And there are also loads of decorations.
• Don’t forget Mardi Gras: Up to my ankles and even calves in a rainbow ocean of plastic beaded jewelry, throughout New Orleans’ parade routes.  Enough said.
• Even elections: I personally received at least 100 fliers in the mail enticing me to vote no on prop K, yes on prop 11, replace Pelosi with Sheehan and so much more.  Not to mention that the voter guide, an arguably essential trapping of democracy, is a tome distributed to all registered voters, and this year’s San Francisco ballot itself was comprised of 4 pieces of cardstock paper and a large envelope.  And don’t forget the myriad lawn signs and candidate collateral and paraphernalia – all seen as essential.

The roots of these celebrations and events did not involve so many things, if any.  Yet somehow most events come along with a consumerism that renders the event unrecognizable.  It’s a chicken and egg conundrum which I don’t dare unpack – have we developed to be such a consumerist society because consumers demanded more and so companies supplied it, or did companies overproduce and then push products onto consumers with heightened marketing and sales.  Likely some of both.

More importantly than answering “whose fault is this?” – what can we do about this?  I think the central problem is that our capitalist economy thrives on buying and selling more and more stuff, and we have bought into it, myself included.  While I understand our economy runs on selling holiday junk (holiday sales are vitally important in retail), I also think there is something better out there for us in the way of a shift from a product to a service-based economy.  Think bringing a repairman to your home to fix or upgrade your electronics rather than buying new and tossing the old.  And with the clean energy revolution at hand, services like sustainability consulting, home energy upgrades and renewable energy installations will be increasingly in demand.

This kind of shift will take time.  And to get there both corporate America and consumerist America will need to take action.

Corporate solutions fall in the category of cradle to cradle design.  Consumer solutions involve restraint, frugality, inventiveness and dropping the disposable habit.  One example of a step in the right direction was when my family rewrote the Christmas rules a few years back.  We used to celebrate by exchanging gifts with each family member.  Thanks to my father’s anti-consumerist sentiment, our holidays are now modest and simple.  Each person buys one $50 gift for one pre-selected person and that’s it for gifts.   Additionally, we all make a modest donation to a thoughtfully-chosen charity in the name of one family member.   So at the end of they day, we’ve each spent under $100, likely not wasted too much time and we walk away with one gift and one charitable donation in our name.  At first I despised this change, though I’ve since come to see the wisdom behind it.  In any case, this is just one step, just one example of a way to cut down on holiday consumerism.

[Originally posted to Just Means]

Decomposition machines, like the one pictured above, help hotels cut down on food waste. (GreenerBuildings)

Slow Food seems to be catching on – local food movement sprouting in urban and small-town American backyards. (TreeHugger)

Factories that have shut down in the mid-West are reopening their doors to manufacture wind and solar. (New York Times)

Organic groceries have enjoyed several years of impressive sales growth, but that growth is markedly slowing as less commited consumers choose inexpensive conventional goods over organic and local alternatives. (New York Times)

Sharp announces free e-waste recycling program, which will enable consumers to drop off any Sharp, Toshiba, or Panasonic electronics for recycling at locations throughout the US (starting with 10 states this month).  (Environmental Leader)

I volunteered at and attended the California Clean Tech Open (CTO) this week and was quite inspired and impressed with the event and the showing of thoughtful clean tech innovations.

I won’t bother to recap the event or relay details about the finalist start-ups – you can read all about that and more on the event’s press page. But I did want to bring up a few things that struck me leaving the event:

1. The first thing that hit me was the demographic.  With over 800 guests, 40+ clean tech start-ups, and a whole bunch of sponsoring organizations present I was expecting a certain demographic, and was surprised.  When I think of a clean-tech entrepreneur, I think of someone like myself, but typically male with an advanced degree – more specifically I think of someone in their mid-twenties who can afford to take a risk with their career.  But the crowd at the CTO was roughly 65% middle-aged white men, 15% other male, and 20% female.  Amongst the speakers and the award recipients who were honored for their inventiveness, I would estimate a breakdown of 80% middle-aged white men.  I guess it makes sense – these entrepreneurs have earned a bit of money in their career, generally bring considerable skills to the table, and are ready to spice things up and take a risk.
2. Second of all, a friend of mine pointed out that the California Bay Area/Silicon Valley has something special going on.  Local governments go out of their way to catalyze innovation and support small businesses.  And more than that, trying your hand at entrepreneurship and failing is encouraged, admired even.  Failure as a badge of honor.  I haven’t seen this many other places, have you?
3. The last thing on my mind leaving the CTO is just how nascent this field is.  Most of the clean-tech start-ups represented at the CTO and anywhere are bound to fail.  The market cannot handle so many solutions.  But I do think we need many inventions to find the right one.  And I think certain portions of the clean-tech arena are ready for consolitation – solar for example.

Clean-tech entrepreneurship is an exciting, intriguing field of development with high potential for saving the environment and allowing us to continue living the lifestyles we’ve grown accustomed to.  And I’m ready to see some of these start-ups scale up.

“Giving passionate, knowledgeable people a platform and a voice”

Combine people, products, and passion… mix in user-generated content, product reviews and discussions… and you have an ambitious web site called Huddler, that aims to create a “social commerce” community.

In this interview, “chief Huddler” Dan Gill shares with us how he started the business and his vision for the growth of their Green Home Huddle, which focuses on products and content connected to sustainability. Hear the inside business scoop on lessons they’ve learned along the way, how their business is funded, and how they engage their community.

• Huddler’s unique efforts to build communities to provide a more informed and social shopping experience
• How Huddler develops partnerships to get new green products in consumers’ hands and boost site activity
• How Huddler monetizes traffic to its site
• Lesson learned: The “release early, release often” approach allows users to guide web site development

Listen to podcast and read full interview transcript here.

Originally posted to Green Business Innovators.