In a previous post, I announced a contest – “ReTHINK Your Impact” - in which any business can win an eco makeover. We’re choosing one lucky company (a coffee shop or restaurant or other foodservice establishment) who will win free products from Eco-Products for an entire year. That’s a lot of cups! We’ll also assess all of their operations and suggest eco improvements, essentially giving them free sustainability consulting. Not bad!
The other part of the contest involves us giving away three different $4,000 sustainability grants for a total of $12,000. The grants will be applied to a cause or initiative in the selected company’s community to educate people about composting, environmental conservation, recycling, or another sustainability-related activity.
I love reading about entrepreneurs who creatively solve problems with sustainable business ideas. The latest example I read about is a Minneapolis company called Eureka Recycling. This non-profit company partnered with their city government to pilot a 1,100 residential curbside composting pickup program… using their bikes.
Eureka employees ride around with custom-built trailers attached to their bikes and pick up compostables. Impressive! Talk about zero emission waste hauling. What I’m wondering, though, is how long it takes to pickup the waste from all 1,100 households. They must make a lot of trips. Sounds like a great job to ride your bike all day. But what happens in winter?
A few months ago, Clorox’s lawyers sent a friendly note to Method telling them that they were infringing on Clorox’s trademark of a daisy that they use in the graphics design of their Green Works cleaning products line. Essentially, Clorox argues that they own the rights to using a daisy when it’s used to promote green cleaners. Method has also used the daisy for quite a while, and wasn’t intentionally trying to leverage Green Works’ brand equity… because apparently Clorox has so much of it considering they just entered the category.
This is a classic example of a major corporation being threatened by a new entrant and then throwing money at lawyers to try to drive the smaller guy out, or at least make them spend some money. And I take that back about Method being the new entrant. They’ve been selling green cleaning products longer than Clorox. They created the category alongside of Seventh Generation, Biokleen, and ECOS. They are the reason why Clorox launched their Green Works line. Method was stealing their market share from Clorox’s conventional, toxic products.
What is silly about Clorox’s approach to me is that they are trying to promote themselves as a green company, even greener than Method. What they fail to state in their “friendly note” or in their marketing materials is that 99% of the products they sell are made from toxic chemicals and have nothing natural about them. So, it’s really up for consumers to decide. Do you fall for Clorox’s marketing tricks? Do you support a company who does nothing but green (Method), or a company who does nothing but 1% green (Clorox)?
Method took this battle to the street to encourage consumers to speak up about who owns the daisy. They launched a viral campaign (see www.votedaisy.com) in which people can vote for who should own the daisy… and they aren’t saying that Method should own it. They think Mother Nature should own the daisy. Now that’s brilliant marketing. Checkout the video…
I spent last week in Taiwan which explains my lack of posting any eco ramblings recently. It was a very quick trip for a long flight, but it was an important one to talk with some suppliers and learn more about the Taiwan PLA market. Taiwan produces a huge amount of PLA products and was one of the first countries to begin working with NatureWork’s resin. Taiwan has very flexible manufacturing processes which are prime for testing small runs of products to build market demand. Manufacturing processes in the U.S. typically require 10x the investment and typically don’t allow for small production runs. I’m not saying that one is better than the other, it’s just the state of the situation.
One thing I couldn’t get a good answer on during my trip was regarding their progressive movement to recycle PLA. That’s right, I said recycle, not compost. The Taiwan government is going as far as mandating the recycling of PLA containers. The main reason for this is that they don’t have a very well built out composting structure so they need to find other alternatives to divert their waste from landfills. They mandated the use of PLA containers, to a large degree in take-out restaurants, and now they have to figure out how to help consumers properly dispose of them. Recycling is their answer. Apparently they are going to invest in the recycling infrastructure so PLA can be optically sorted from PET. But I still am wondering under what timeline they are operating, and if they are going to invest enough to outfit every single material recover facility (MRF).
I definitely wish the U.S. government had the funds to upgrade the hundreds, maybe thousands, of MRFs across America to optical sorting technology. I just don’t see that happening in my lifetime which means we’ll be fighting the recycling and composting battle for decades to come. The best things we can do are to educate consumers about how to properly recycle, continue investing in the composting infrastructure, and demand manufacturers to use products with recycled content (this will build the market demand for recycled materials and make them more cost competitive).
On a different note, if you’ve never visited Taiwan, it’s a beautiful country with great people. Here are a couple pictures…
A view of Taipei 101, the largest building in the world, from my hotel room
This is a restaurant / art gallery we ate lunch at that was built by a famous artist. It sort of looked like a Taiwan version of a Rainforest Cafe, but with expensive art for sale.
In my previous post, I talked about the role of transparency in sustainability. One of the best examples of a company who does this is Patagonia. Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles allows people track the environmental impact of their products (good or bad) from product design all the way to delivery. It’s a pretty slick interface and I encourage you to check it out. You can see exactly where your clothes are made and what the conditions are at each of the factories.
Have you asked other clothing companies what the footprints of their items are? I bet they don’t know the answer like Patagonia. Being transparent helps Patagonia continue to strive for improved environmental performance while also setting a standard in the industry.
My down jacket was designed in Ventura, CA of which I can watch a video of. The down fibers come from Hungary and I can see pictures of the origin location and conditions. The fibers are then cleaned and processed in California before being sent to China in combination with recycled polyester for the shell. Pictures of the factory can be viewed to witness the working conditions. The finished product is shipped to Patagonia’s distribution center in Reno, NV. The total process emits 7 lbs of CO2, creates 5 oz of waste, and uses 9.4 kwh of energy.
I’ve written a lot about how everyone defines sustainability differently. Jeffrey Hollender, the Chief Inspired Protagonist of Seventh Generation, addressed this topic at the World Innovation Forum in June. “You can’t judge your own level of sustainability or responsibility, you can only be judged by others,” Hollender said. To demonstrate this, Seventh Generation published a list on their website of everything that was bad about their products. They felt that being completely transparent was the best way to make improvements over the long run. They saw this transparency pay off because it caused their customers to ask Seventh Generation’s competitors for their respective lists, of which they didn’t have.
Although at Eco-Products we haven’t yet published a list of what is bad about our products, it’s probably in our near future. We have attempted to take a similar approach to Seventh Generation in being transparent, and we are investing more than we ever have in understanding the entire environmental impact of our products from cradle to grave. We acknowledge that we aren’t perfect. After all, “perfect” sustainability is subjective and is a never-ending journey. However, we are diligent about lessening our impact and being transparent with our customers along the way. In fact, we created a new position at our company called a Sustainability Maven to continuously assess how our decisions impact the environment. And we are investing in many other ways to better communicate our impact to our customers. The key question that every business person has to ask, “Do customers care and will they put their money behind it?” Based on my experience in the natural products industry, my response is an absolute “Yes.”
It’s surprising that the hotel industry doesn’t put forth more effort to be sustainable. There are very few hotels that have sustainability as part of their core philosophy. The Boulder Outlook Hotel is an exception. They compost or recycle over 80% of their waste. I only wish Boulder Outlook’s existed across the country.
Today I’m in Indiana staying in a major national hotel chain. I walked into the lobby to check in and had an empty water bottle in my hand from the flight. It’s 90+ degrees and humid in Indy. I asked the front desk employee if he could recycle the bottle for me. He looked at me as if I had two heads and said, “No, but I can throw it away for you.” Here I am, in the heartland of middle-America, and they don’t recycle.
I get to my room and walk into the bathroom. There I find a typical water conservation sign.
Is this sign really necessary? Hotels like this aren’t trying to be green by conserving water. They’re trying to save money and reduce labor expenses. Let’s call it what it is and stop green washing guests.
I look around and see they have plastic-wrapped polystyrene cups. On one side of the sink they are asking me to save the planet by conserving water. On the other side they are offering non-recyclable polystyrene cups and refusing to recycle something as simple as a water bottle.
How hard would it be to put a blue bin in the room next to the trash can? It should be illegal to not offer recycling as I mentioned in a previous post. I’ve only found two hotels in my entire life that offer in-room recycling – the Boulder Outlook Hotel and the Sheraton Resort in Steamboat Springs, CO.
Sheraton Resort in Steamboat Springs
If anyone knows of a resource to locate green hotels and review them on their green efforts, please let me know.
Today on TriplePundit.com, a site dedicated to news on the Triple Bottom Line of business, Dinesh Thirupuvanamwrote a great article on why we need curbside composting programs. He outlined two steps that need to occur which include (1) a uniform labeling standard for compostable products, and (2) improving acceptance of compostable packaging at composting facilities (ensuring each facility doesn’t have their own standards or certification program). I am in complete agreement with Dinesh’s approach. It makes perfect sense. And I appreciate Dinesh referencing my post about the debate over how to label compostable products.
I also think it’s important for municipalities who are considering curbside composting to take the plunge and just do it. The benefits of such programs are immense. In Boulder we have a bi-weekly residential curbside composting pickup and I now send very little trash to the landfill. It feels great taking out the trash because I have so little to take out. Not to mention that composting has an enormous impact on reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions. 34% of all human generated methane emissions are from landfills, and food waste comprises approximately 13% of total landfill mass.
My belief is that we shouldn’t wait for the silver bullet of a labeling standard. It will take years, if not decades, for a common standard to be developed. I’m on the Board of Directors for the Biodegradable Products Institute and I’m involved in this industry debate on several different levels. We’re not going to find a solution overnight. There are just too many stakeholders to have this occur as quickly as we’d all like.
The best way to learn is to just give it a shot. We’ll have more people educated on the subject and more people working on finding the best possible solution.
A startup called Bolder just launched a Groupon-like site that encourages people to do something positive. Every few days there’s a new challenge that offers rewards for doing things like buying local, riding your bike instead of driving, or picking up a piece of litter. Sponsoring businesses offer discounts on products for people who participate in the Bolder challenge. Checkout this article for more info, or the company’s website at www.actbolder.com.
I love reading about ambitious entrepreneurs with a passion to make a positive difference in the world. When they see an opportunity, they build a business. The “same old” doesn’t suffice for them. They solve problems. They put their careers on the line. They put their money where their mouth is. And they often do so without looking for a big financial payout.
The kind of entrepreneur I’m referring to isn’t all about taking their company public or hitting a big pay-day through an acquisition. They are all about making a lasting difference. They create jobs. There’s a big place for them in the economy. They deserve appreciation and thanks for taking a risk. Here’s the latest eco entrepreneur I just came across…
29-year old John-Paul Maxfield started a compost hauling service in Denver. He bought an old box truck and slowly convinced restaurant by restaurant to pay him to take away their food waste. He’s competing against the uber-cheap trash hauling giants like Waste Management. John-Paul recognizes that he’s starting out small, but he has a plan and a vision on how to expand his services. His goal is to create regionally-located urban farms that process food waste and other compostables, and then to sell the fresh compost as value-added fertilizer in those local markets. Read more here…
