As a parent of two young kids and a self-proclaimed Eco-Patriot, I’m often frustrated by the un-eco-friendliness of the diaper world.  Admittedly, I don’t have the commitment, stamina, desire, or whatever else is required to use cloth diapers.  Frankly, I’m not very excited about the thought of scraping my kids’ poop off of an article of clothing and then putting it into the washing machine that my clothes go into.  I have a hard enough time when my 2-and-a-half year old, whom we’re trying to potty train, has an accident in her underwear.  I usually just throw the underwear out so I don’t have to deal with the mess even though it’s her coveted Cinderalla underwear that she will never forgive me for getting rid of.  “Cinderalla got messy,” I say.

Sure, there are services out there that can handle washing cloth diapers for us, but I just don’t have the time or desire in my busy schedule to manage another vendor in my personal time.  I manage enough vendors at work.

I know, I get a mark against my eco patriotism for this one.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not slighting people who use cloth diapers.  The world needs more people like them and less people like me.  I  just can’t get myself to convert.

And I know there are diapers that apparently dissolve in water when you flush them down the toilet, but I haven’t had success with those keeping doo-doo inside those when my kids crap.  All it takes is one massive blowout – and I’m talking excrement out the leg holes of the diaper and up the back to somehow reach the top of the head – to make me never want to try any other kind of diaper again except for what has worked well thus far for us.

Anyway, I’ll stop defending my un-eco-patriotism and get to the topic of this post.  I just read that TerraCycle is now in the business of “recycling” dirty disposable diapers and then making products out of them.  That’s right, collecting kid dookie and making a salable product out of it.  Needless to say, I live in (well, actually, my amazing wife does much more so) a dirty diaper vortex so I was blown away to read about what TerraCycle is doing (especially after having just changed a massive explosion from my 6-month old).  How could anyone want to buy a product out of ka-ka even if it is washed incredibly well?  Hopefully there’s a big FDA approval process somewhere along the line.

Apparently TerrCycle is trying to partner with Huggies to capture the baby fecal matter.  Then TerraCycle will make outdoor furniture, pallets, and composite building materials out of the kid dung.  Questionable decision in my opinion by the Huggies brand manager to buy into this program.  I’m all for extended producer responsibility, but holy Tebow, this is another level.

In all seriousness (sort of, but not really), good job to TerraCycle on thinking outside of the box and on trying to solve a big waste problem.  Don’t put me on your mailing list when your furniture comes out though.  I’ll pass on the shit-derived patio chair.

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Here’s an interesting article about vermicomposting at the Charlotte airport.  Great timing to move forward with an initiative like this with the Democratic National Conventional hosted in Charlotte in later this year.  Hopefully all the legislators and other people flying in for the event will read about the city’s efforts and try to implement them in their own cities.

“While it seems logical that many restaurants have already begun to reap the benefits of installing onsite worm composting operations, airports may not be the first place people would think of to have such systems in place. The Charlotte Douglas International Airport will change that fact when they open a $1.1 million recycling center in February 2012, to include a vermicomposting system that will use 300 pounds of worms to chow down on up to two tons of airport patron waste per day.”  Read more…

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The EPA recently released it’s annual municipal solid waste and recycling report for 2010.  Congratulations America.  We generated 2.5% more waste in 2010 than in 2009.

Does 2.5% not sound like a big number?  Think again.  Starting from 243.7 million tons (that’s 487 billion pounds) in ’09, that’s another 6.2 million tons (or 12 billion pounds) of waste in ’10.  Here’s my reaction when reading the report.

Report: Americans are now generating 4.43 pounds per person per day.  But don’t worry.  Only 54% of that is going to landfills.  34% is recycled or composted and another 12% is combusted for energy.

Reaction: What if I gained 4.43 pounds per day in body weight, but then lost 46% of it before I stepped on the scale?  Would I be happy about losing 2 of the 4.43 pounds I gained even though I was going to gain another 2.43 pounds the next day?  Umm… no.

Report: Well, at least the overall recycling/composting rate of Americans continues to climb to a U.S. record of 34%.

Reaction: So basically people don’t give a shit 66% of the time.  Actually, wait.  I can’t blame ourselves as consumers for this whole mess.  Manufacturers need to take some producer responsibility.  And trash haulers, material recovery facilities and municipalities have to take responsibility somewhere in this blame game as well.

Report: But we’re now recycling 49.6% of all aluminum beverage cans.

Reaction: Jesus.  That’s the easiest thing to recycle ever.  Yet people throw away more of them than they recycle. That’s pathetic.

Report: Well, the recycling rate of plastic bottles has improved to 21%.

Reaction: That’s the 2nd easiest thing to recycle ever.  Pathetic.

Report: Composting has actually declined.  We’re composting less now than we did even 2 years ago to the tune of 1.9 million tons less.

Reaction: Ouch.  That decline is 2x as much as the entire City of San Francisco recently announced they have composted in 15 years.  How is the country’s composting decline possible now that there are compost facilities popping up all over and several cities have mandated organics waste collection programs?

Report: The are 137 fewer community composting programs in 2010 than there were in 2002.

Reaction: Oh, I guess that’s how.

I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer, but it’s pretty pathetic how much waste we generate and how little of it we recover.  I’m as much to blame as the next person.  I’ll be throwing away well more than 4.43 pounds of waste on Christmas morning.  Excuse me while I throw up.

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Congratulations to the City of San Francisco for having just hit the 2 billion pounds (1 million tons) mark for the amount of waste they’ve composted since 1996.  The city took the optional program to mandatory in 2009 and provided residents with green bins at the time.

What’s particularly remarkable is the rate of growth the program.  It took 15 years to collect this amount, but they are on track to collect another million tons within the next 5 years.  To me, that shows that people and businesses are learning quickly and complying with the regulations.

What’s also interesting is that the amount of organic waste they’ve kept out of landfills offsets the city’s carbon emissions by 354,000 metric tons – the equivalent of offsetting emissions from all the vehicles traveling across the city’s Bay Bridge for just over two years.

From a vendor’s perspective, San Francisco has been a very easy city to do business with on this program and has been very collaborate in building the program that works for all parties.   Recology manages the composting facility.

Congrats to the City and to everyone involved.  You’ve set a great example for the rest of us.

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It was formally announced yesterday that Eco-Products is a founding member of a new industry-wide initiative to create solutions for the recovery and processing of used paper foodservice packaging.  The initiative is building off of Starbucks’ Cup Summits that need broader industry involvement.  The Foodservice Packaging Institute (FPI) has stepped up to form the Paper Recovery Alliance (PRA) to build bigger, more coordinated recovery efforts and markets for used packaging.

Specifically, the group plans to:

• Develop the necessary collection infrastructure;
• Expand the end use markets for recovered fiber;
• Educate consumers to increase recovery; and
• Collaborate with government officials

The PRA will set up pilot projects that include all parts of the value chain to understand, then overcome, the existing challenges to paper foodservice packaging recovery.  Eco-Products is excited to help drive this much needed industry-effort.

The full roster of Founding Members of the Paper Recovery Alliance include the following:

• Eco-Products, Inc.
• Georgia-Pacific Consumer Products LP
• HAVI Global Solutions
• International Paper
• MeadWestvaco Corporation
• Pactiv Foodservice/Food Packaging
• RockTenn (Recycling and Waste Solutions)
• Solo Cup Company
• Starbucks Coffee Company
• Tim Hortons
• YUM! Brands Inc.

I’ll post updates as we make progress.

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The NY Times recently had an interesting article about a new project launched by the Clinton Global Initiative to help reduce the amount of plastic waste in the world.  The project is called the Plastic Disclosure Project and is a really novel concept.

There thousands of companies around the world (Eco-Products included) that measure their greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint.  With over 300 million tons of plastic produced every year and only 10% of that getting recycled (with a staggering 7 million tons littering the oceans every year!), the Plastic Disclosure Project measures companies’ “plastic footprint” just like they would their carbon footprint.  The goal is to get companies to take more accountability for their plastic use and ultimately cut down.

If being a good corporate environmental citizen isn’t enough of a reason to reduce plastic usage, companies can save significant amounts of money by cutting out plastic waste.  Think about it – a plastic product comes from a finite resource (oil) that is constantly rising in price over the long run.

If they hitch their company’s supply chain to plastic, their costs will always increase over the long term.  Why not find a better alternative?  The alternatives are:

1. Reduce the amount of plastic used
2. Find alternative materials (could be bioplastics or could be other sustainable materials)
3. Use recycled plastics

Choose one.  It really doesn’t matter.  All roads lead to less oil-based plastic use (and more cost savings).

I attended a plastics recycling conference about a year ago in which a speaker (who ran a recycling company) got on stage and was complaining about the light-weighting of plastics now occurring.  He made a joke about how plastic water bottles should now be called water bags because they are so thin that they barely hold their shape.  His complaint was that the light-weighting of plastic bottles results in him getting less revenue per bale of recycled plastic that he sells.

Although I am a fan of water companies light-weighting bottles, I hear his complaint about diminishing returns on the same bale of plastics.  That’s totally valid.  It’s a problem that the recycled plastics market needs to pay attention to since we need recyclers like him to stay in business in order to drive more availability of recycled materials.  This leads to a key issue of why all plastics aren’t recycled.  A market has to exist to drive the demand for investment in recycling technology so all types of plastic can be recycled.

A couple companies have made investments to be leaders in recycling technology and help solve this recycling/market-existence-dilemma.  One company is called MBA Polymers.  They take plastic waste from all types of sources – landfills, developing countries, and other places where plastics are commonly disposed of – and have developed a sorting method to sort and segregate plastic.  They offer a compelling proposition with a much needed solution.  Their founder’s TED talk is definitely worth watching (10 min long) if you’re interested in how they do it.

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I recently learned that there are over 400 different green certifications out there.  That sheer number of eco labels has made it difficult for companies to choose which labels to seek certification with and for consumers to know which labels are actually legitimate.

It’s incredibly expensive to get certified by green certification organizations.  It could cost a few hundred dollars per product for the lesser known (and possibly less legitimate) labels or as much as several thousand dollars per product.  When you have several hundred products, you’re talking a massive investment that might not pay off based on a study that looked at if consumers even look at eco labels.

So how does someone know if an eco label is actually legitimate?

It’s not easy.  The FTC recently cracked down on one company called Tested Green that was bogusly certifying companies as green.  It appeared to simply be a money-making scheme with no standards are real criteria.  Companies thought they were applying to get a legitimate eco label and all they were doing was throwing their money down the toilet.

The frustrating part of this in my mind is that there really are legitimate green certification programs that exist (and are important for their respective industries) and those certification programs now have a black eye because of the illegitimate labels that are creating a bad name for the certification industry as a whole.

The best way to avoid being misled continues to be to do the research on the certifying body and the company’s claim.  Focus on their standards and criteria.  Are they rigid?  Are they unbiased and completely objective?  What companies have jumped on board?

You can also look at the product’s claims in the context of the Seven Sins of Greenwashing as defined by TerraChoice.  Those provide a good way to gut-check if the green claim is legitimate.

Email me if you have an easier or better way to distinguish between legitimate labels.  This seems like an area where the creation of a good technology solution could play a role.

FOLLOW-ON SINCE ORIGINAL POSTING: Here’s an article that outlines some other ideas for how to choose an eco label for your company.

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Every now and then I’ll see something that makes me stop in my tracks.  It’ll put everything in perspective for me.  Whenever it happens, I always wish it would happen more.  It’s those moments, those experiences that make me truly appreciate life.  It’s unfortunate it takes those moments for me to do that.

I never really followed Steve Jobs that much when he was alive, but his passing was one of those moments that made me stop and take a moment.  Think about it:  He was only 56 years old.  He had 4 kids and a wife.  He was running a hundred billion dollar company that he started 30 years ago and was totally passionate about.  He was on top of his game.  He had already fought pancreatic cancer once.  It’s a real shame. I’m truly sorry for his family and anyone who knew him.  He sounded like a really incredible person.

If you haven’t seen his commencement speech that he delivered to Stanford University back in 2005, I highly recommend you stop and take a moment for yourself.  This video and Steve’s message is powerful.  In a world of nonstop action and busyness, these 14 minutes are worth putting everything else aside for and watching.

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I periodically get asked for advice on how to setup a zero waste event or how to convert a business to zero waste.  It can be a very daunting task with so many things to consider – who hauls the waste, can you source compostable and recyclable products, how do you educate consumers, and much more.  Don’t fret, you’re not the only person who finds this type of project challenging.  Fortunately, there are some great resources on the web and here’s a few to help you out:

• Grassroots Recycling Network Zero Waste Page
• Zero Waste Alliance
• Article:  4 Steps to Get You on the Path to Zero Waste
• EcoCycle’s Zero Waste page
• Tips for Throwing a Zero Waste Event

Also, I wrote a post a while ago chronicling some of the things that we did at Eco-Products to help us move towards zero waste.  It’s a journey, so hang in there.

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The competition continues for snapping the best pic of an Eco-Products’ product. Here’s a great shot from someone who recently visited the Fairmont Orchid Hotel in Hawaii.  It’s a hell of a pic and I love it when people send me shots of our products from interesting places.  Despite the quality of this photo, I still think the most interesting pic from people who have sent them in is a picture of our cup on Necker Island, Richard Branson’s private island.

If you have a pic of our products somewhere interesting, email me!

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I’ve been having an internal debate with myself recently about the idea of “manufactured demand.”  The below video talks about how bottled water companies manufactured a demand for their products over the past couple decades through alleged scare tactics and other means.  If you have yet seen this video, it’s worth the 8 minutes.

While I don’t disagree with the environmental concerns of bottled water, I’m a little skeptical about the full extent of the video’s claims regarding how bottled water companies scare people into not drinking tap water.  I don’t doubt it has happened periodically, but it’s my general belief that bottled water companies don’t routinely scare people into not drinking from the tap.

Regardless, the place this debate has led me to is an important one to wrap my head around as a person who runs a company that makes products… and ultimately needs to create, or should I say “manufacture,” demand for those products to survive.

You see, customers wouldn’t buy an Eco-Products cup or container if it didn’t offer some feature or benefit that couldn’t be found from another product.  We have to build features and benefits into our products in order to create attributes that solve customers’ problems, essentially making them feel like they need our product over someone else’s.

So yes, I’m guilty.  I too manufacture demand.  Not for bottled water.  For cups, containers, cutlery and other foodservice products.  Does that make me bad?

Let’s hypothetically say that Eco-Products decided we were no longer going to make any more disposable products ever again.  None whatsoever.  Instead, we decided we were going to make reusable products and that was it.  Maybe we’d change our name to Reusables’R'Us.  How would we go about finding customers?  We’d be stuck in the same sales and marketing situation as before.  We’d have to “manufacture” demand for our nothing-but-reusables product offering.  We’d have to convince customers that our reusable products had some sort of feature, benefit or attributes that made them the superior choice over disposables.  We’d have to create demand.

I guess where I’m going with this internal (and now public) debate is that every innovation ever created required demand to be manufactured.  What innovation didn’t require the inventing company to not tout it as something customers needed; thus, creating demand?  I can’t think of one.  Steve Jobs did a hell of a job manufacturing demand for iPads.  And I’m perfectly fine with that because it’s an awesome device that makes my life easier and more productive.

As the country (and world) proceeds through this current era of higher unemployment, a need for increased environmental concern, and overall economic uncertainty, innovation is going to be one of the key activities that gets us back to prosperity.  Bottled water was an innovation when it first came out.  Did it create environmental issues?  Yes.  Are companies working on improving the sustainability of it?  Yes.  Did bottled water also create tons of jobs?  Yes.

As with everything, there are tradeoffs.  I’m not encouraging you to go buy a case of bottled water now.  And I’m not encouraging or arguing that there is a place for innovation that detracts from moving in a positive direction environmentally.  However, I am encouraging you to acknowledge the role of innovation in our world.  It’s the only way we’ll take steps forward in our overall global, environmental and societal health.

So that’s my mission.  Innovate.  To make sure that Eco-Products remains a truly innovative company.  It’s the only way we’re going to find more sustainable ways to operate and to push the boundaries of what’s possible in this industry.  Maybe we really will become Reusables’R'Us one day.

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My wife always gives me a hard time for getting excited about cups.  She’s given me the nickname of the “Container Man” because I’m always looking at the bottom of cups and containers to see who made them.  “Hey honey, look at that design.  That’s a sexy looking cup!” I blurt out as she’s sitting in peace at a restaurant trying to enjoy her drink.

Meanwhile, I’m running my own self-created QC tests and receiving weird looks from all of the waitresses.  I’m passionate about what I do.  What can I say.

Well, finally, I think I have some legitimacy when I say “that’s a sexy cup.”  Here’s a picture of Eco-Products brand cups from an article in a major national magazine.  Am I the only person whose eyes are immediately drawn to the Green Stripe on the cup?I don’t know what it is, but the cups are all I see.  The Green Stripe just pops.  Jennifer Aniston could be drinking out of our cup for all I care.  I wouldn’t notice.  Who is this couple anyway?

On a separate note, maybe Eco-Products should get a celebrity spokesperson.  Yeah, that’s it.  That would give me some legitimacy when I say that our cup is sexy.

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Eco-Products has spent consider time and money over the past year trying to determine our carbon footprint.  We hired one of the most experienced and reputable life cycle assessment firms out there who could help us look at our impact holistically.  Here’s a snapshot of what they/we found:

One of the surprising data points that I took from this study is the efficiency of shipping over the ocean as compared to via truck.  Despite the long distance of shipping some of our products from Asia, the carbon impact of that ocean freight is actually less than shipping via truck.  I’m not arguing that producing products overseas is a more environmental solution, but I think it is worthwhile reviewing the impacts of all of the various alternatives.

One of the things we’re working on now is looking at the impact by each specific product so we can determine what steps we want to take to improve our footprint.

You can read about the study in more detail on our brand-spanking-new website just launched yesterday.  It has in-depth training materials and other great information for your perusal.

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