Nestle was outraged.

They contacted Google (YouTube) and requested the film be removed as it infringed on their trademark.  Google complied, and Greenpeace had their moment.  They immediately requested that people complain on Nestle’s facebook page.

…and the complaints poured in

Nestle’s facebook page was besieged by complaints.  This got the press interested internationally (CNN, Daily Telegraph, Cnet, the Globe & Mail, Forbes, etc.) fanning the flames further.   Nestle’s facebook manager got peeved, and started to answer back.

“Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it’s our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus.

And after deleting posts:

“Oh please… it’s like we’re censoring everything to allow only positive comments.”

Which outraged the public further.  Viewings of the film soared – from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions.

The orangutan flipped Nestle’s purchasing practices

Remember Unilever?  The single largest buyer of palm oil in the world?  As soon as the campaign went live for them, they made commitments – and the story never broke.  So their reputation is intact, and their public relations strong. Nestle, which is a much smaller user of palm oil, has now “established Responsible Sourcing Guidelines and has committed to ensuring that its products do not have a deforestation footprint” – for all their products, not just palm oil and not just KitKat.
To guarantee progress, they have signed up with The Forest Trust (TFT), an independent NGO, and note that they are building further partnerships “to build a global movement to support the development, implementation and disclosure of sustainable forestry practices. We have joined a coalition calling for a moratorium on rainforest destruction for palm oil in Indonesia and have become an active member of the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).”.

The right thing to do.  But at what a cost…

..and gave the public the last laugh

Greenpeace created the conditions for a good story.  But Nestle created the story.  And shot itself neatly in each foot.
Which tells us that people are more interested in being able to see what you’re doing, than they are in the impacts of what you’re actually doing – or even the orangutans for that matter.

Try to control the subject as they might, Nestle couldn’t.  And the speed with which the internet, twitter, facebook and e-mail spread the word, meant that the situation escalated faster and with greater fury than the company could manage.

Getting it Right.

Let’s contrast that with 7th Generation – an all natural eco-groovy brand of green cleaners and hygiene products in North America.
Some years ago Jeffrey Hollander, 7th Generation’s CEO, took a gamble. He told his sales manager:

I want to put everything that is bad about our products on the internet.

The Sales Manager was aghast.  Surely you must be joking? He said.  Next time I go to a customer they’ll be all over me about this negative information.  And sure enough, competitors made sure that buyers had all the information about what was wrong about 7th Generation’s products.

And a funny thing happened.

The buyers said to the competitors, “yeah, thanks for this..  Now show us the same for your products.”  Some of the competitors scrambled to get the information, provided it, and looked worse.  And most of them didn’t, and started to lose sales.

Today, Walmart announced it would start carrying Seventh Generation products in it’s US stores.  “We’re not just putting [Seventh Generation's] products on the shelf,” says Al Dominguez, Wal-Mart’s vice president of household chemicals and paper goods. “We want their help in developing a category that’s more sustainable.”  (From the Wall Street Journal)

Trust builds sales

Transparency built trust with the buyers – and kept the bar high for competitors.

The point is that for transparency to work FOR you, you have to lead.  If you’re number two, or three, or ten, you have to do all the work anyway – but you don’t get the credit.  It’s the difference between making CSR costly, or making CSR profitable.

Your call.

Related posts:

1. Unilever delists supplier on environmental grounds
2. Your customer goes sustainable – and demands you do the same. Are you ready?
3. Does your brand have a soft underbelly?

Credibility through connection

But they knew how to connect. And they did it, as the picture shows, by playing their ecogroovy card right on their labels.

So then Unilever buys them in 2000. And stays pretty hands off in many ways. Even today, the Ben & Jerry’s website is standalone, the style has remained consistent, and the flavours have stayed largely the same. The biggest change is that my college mainstay in the US – Chunky Monkey – is now available at my small grocery store in Switzerland. So Unilever got a profitable enterprise, a nice feather in it’s sustainability cap, and a whole new audience for it’s other products.

When only some of your customers are ‘green’

But Unilever also sells Axe. Targeted to late 20-something boys on the make. And Ponds, for older women. And Omo – with it’s “dirt is good” campaign . And of course many, many more brands of products from ice cream to face cream to soup and soap. Not all of these have a social conscience, nor have many of them had to.

Until Unilever ran the “Campaign for Real Beauty” – wildly successful in boosting sales seven-fold for Dove. The campaign and it’s ads on YouTube promote ‘real beauty’ and warn parents to “get to your daughter before the beauty industry does”. And end with the statement: Talk to your daughter before it’s too late.

Which served as the perfect platform for a Greenpeace takeoff which asked the question – How can you stand for real beauty on the back of the ecological havoc wrought by your palm oil suppliers? And ends saying “Talk to Dove before it’s too late”.

Going all the way?

As it happens, Unilever is the largest single buyer of palm oil in the world. Not just because of Dove products, but because they use palm oil in food, creams, and cleaning products… So they faced the choice: provide certified palm-oil from sustainably managed plantations to the brands that ‘needed’ it (to sustain their brand values)? Or, engage as Unilever, rather than as Dove or Ben & Jerry’s, in ensuring that all the palm oil they purchased was responsibly harvested?

Well, Unilever is a smart company, with a lot to gain from engagement, and relatively little fear. Years earlier, when they were involved in fishing as the world’s largest fisherman, they understood that the world was running out of fish. Bad for business if your mainstay is fishfingers. So they founded MSC – the Marine Stewardship Council – a broad collection of stakeholders who came together to find ways to promote sustainable fisheries. Too slowly for Unilever which got out of fishing. But the learnings have stayed, and prepared them brilliantly to appeal to a public that increasingly notices and rewards the mission (per the Ben & Jerry’s label above).

Going ALL the way

So now if you go to the Unilever website, you find that sustainability and sustainable initiatives are woven throughout their brand stories – from Lipton to Dove to Becel to Knorr… But not just as anecdotes. They make commitments (e.g. “To purchase all our palm oil from certified sustainable sources by 2015.”); they tell you the process (how they engage suppliers and how they work with stakeholders); they describe the actual situation (deforestation, palm oil, and Unilever’s role and importance in palm oil purchasing); and they give you progress reports – as well as telling you who is auditing their actions. They give us all the proof to believe they are working effectively to be a sustainable business.

Does that work?

Well those of you who clicked through to the Greenpeace ad may have noticed the pop-up in the lower left-hand corner which says – You talked to Dove. Now talk to Nestle.

Which takes us to Nestle and their disastrous reaction to Greenpeace.
(But that’s for another day.)

When you don’t connect

For now cast your mind back to the early 90s. Ecover was a tiny soap company, struggling to establish demand, production and distribution for its ecogroovy products. Frans Bogaert, the founder, would give an impassioned speech which he would highlight by eating a handful of his detergent on stage. A riveting demonstration of its safety. A senior executive from Unilever was asked about whether Ecover didn’t pose a threat. “The day my customers tell me they want to eat my soap, I’ll give them soap to eat.” he said. And with that attitude, Unilever allowed Ecover to become a global company and dominate the ‘green cleaning’ market.

Getting Smart

Unilever learnt: instead of protecting their soft underbelly by fighting, they disarm their adversaries.

It worked for Ben & Jerry’s. Apparently, it scales up too.

*A Harris Poll published in that year ranked Ben & Jerry’s #5 overall, and #1 in “Social Responsibility” among leading US companies. The poll measured a company’s reputation in areas such as social responsibility, emotional appeal, and innovation.

Related posts:

1. Unilever delists supplier on environmental grounds
2. When the Kat has your tongue
3. Is your brand getting the support it needs to be trusted?

Unilever has delisted Indonesia’s largest palm oil company, Sinar Mas, after being shown evidence by Greenpeace that Sinar Mas was illegally destroying rainforests.  While they were first presented the evidence two years ago, Unilever had sought to work with Sinar Mas to improve its performance.  “Constructive engagement” having failed, Unilever took action to delist.  Unilever uses the palm oil in cleaning, food and skin care products.

“We have received very serious allegations against Sinar Mas and we had no choice but to suspend future purchases from them,” said Unilever vice-president for communications Gavin Neath.

-via thegrocer.co.uk

Related posts:

1. Does your brand have a soft underbelly?
2. When the Kat has your tongue
3. Weee! Stealing a march on your competitors*

We seem to have lost that feeling:  We have set up society to focus on efficiency above everything:  our society seeks to produce more using less- less labour, fewer materials, less energy… BUT while we are efficient about production, we are not so efficient about the byproducts – waste, pollution, effluent, emissions, green-house gasses….   And we are absolutely inefficient about how we use products.

In fact, our society rewards consumption and overconsumption with status and admiration – to the point that we don’t refer to people as people or as citizens – we refer to them as consumers.  You can argue that that is because we have made labour and materials and energy expensive – but waste and pollution and ‘growth’ cheap.  So we have set up a system that rewards bad things like unemployment and pollution, and punishes good things like reuse, full employment and clean-production.

It’s very easy to feel like a prisoner of this system.

Is this a woman’s issue?

Yes!

Why?  Because traditionally, women think in terms of “we”.  And we invest in and maintain community.   Men tend to think in terms of “I” and to set up competitive and individualistic systems.  For example, studies have shown that give aid money to men, and they spend it betting or drinking, while that same money given to women goes to children’s education, nutritious food and business development.  This isn’t a rule.  But it is statistically valid, to the point that the United Nations (through UNICEF and other branches) is actually recommending that aid be delivered to women rather than men.

Today, the world’s eyes are on Copenhagen because the fate of our societies and their communities hangs upon the commitments our political leaders make.  (Notice that I did not say the fate of the planet.  Because the planet will live with or without us.  But we cannot live without the planet and the air, water food and resources it provides us).  And we need to ensure that as representatives of more than half the world’s population, we women speak up, and reclaim our traditional values to care for and defend nature by creating a society that works with nature, not against it.

WIN’s role

Let me pause for a minute to tell you about WIN – because this is the ethos that we seek to sustain:  we exist to empower, to develop and to connect women with a global, authentic and feminine (integral) vision. In this vision and emerging paradigm, feminine values such as integrity, spirituality, compassion, resilience, community, sensuality and a win-win approach play central roles.

W.I.N.’s overall objective: evoking change to authenticity and raising feminine and global awareness to create a sustainable future, include inspiring success based individuality (not individualistic), cultivating authentic leadership and encouraging feminine ways of doing business and of being. It promotes sensitivity and courage; transforming knowledge into wisdom; pursuing goals while consciously letting life unfold.

This means developing sensibilities, listening within as well as considering the surroundings, caring for others, for future generations, for the planet and for ourselves. It requires the sharing of knowledge, experiences, results, truth, power and discoveries. It requires fearlessly standing for and defending what we commit to.

And this is why I am hopeful

When I talk to women at the personal level, they understand sustainability.  I have yet to be in a room where people didn’t very quickly identify all the major environmental and social challenges that face us.  Where things get confusing is figuring out what to address, and how to have an impact as just one person.

Which is exactly why I feel hopeful.  We now have attention on the problems – and we have seen the links between the climate crisis, the financial crisis and our social costs.  This is an important first step.

And this is helping us address the assumptions we make about the world we live in:  That the way of doing things we inherited is the way that things should be done.  That a model of production based on taking – making – and wasting is effective.   We see today hundreds of thousands of organisationsglobally addressing parts of this larger system – trying to improve equality, justice and environmental effectiveness for people, plants, society and planet.  We don’t always notice them because they’re not driven by charismatic individuals seeking power, but by groups of individuals seeking to distribute power – and opportunity.

Now we are starting to look at our own part in the system.  What is it that we need to change – individually but not alone.   The changes that will create a society built on a sustainable platform – where we reward the right  behaviours, and make the wrong behaviours costly.

It’s not always obvious

We tend to focus on what is most obvious to us:  packaging waste.  Light bulbs.  Maybe our car.

What’s more difficult is to understand where the big environmental impacts come from, and what we can do to keep those small.  Here are a couple of examples, some from companies W.I.N. has worked with:

• Fish:  it seems obvious that eating fresh fish would be more sustainable than eating frozen fish.  Actually, the reverse is true at the global level.  When fish is fresh, it needs to be transported very, very quickly.  Which means it gets flown everywhere.  Making the impact the same as your flying off on holiday every time.  But, if the fish is flash frozen, it can be transported slowly by boat and train with very low environmental impact.
• Detergent:  when Procter & Gamble looked at the impact of its various detergents throughout their life, they discovered that the biggest impact of all – over 80% of the total impact – came from heating the water to wash clothes at home.  As a result, they spent their Research and Development monies on developing cold water detergent.  The result?  youcan get clothes just as clean, at lukewarm temperatures – this saves 80% of the energy, saves you money, and minimizes the impact. And as changes go, its ten times as important as the difference between powdered or liquid detergent…
• Packaging:  When Tetra Pak looked at the impacts of its packaging from choice of materials to their customer, they discovered that the impacts were 80% due to their choice of materials, and only 10% from their operations.   By increasing the proportion of renewable resources like paper, and reducing the amount of aluminiumand oil-based plastic, they could make much more substantial reductions in environmental impact than by changing their operations. Counter-intuitive, but importantly true.

So where does that leave us?

It means we need to ensure we are getting the right information to make the right decisions – in a way we can understand it.  Ultimately, this will need to be an environmental label like the nutritional label – that tells you how the product & it’s packaging are performing environmentally across a number of criteria (climate change gasses; toxicity to humans and the environment;…).  Imagine these like a ‘pie’ – in which each of the slices not only has a value, but is also colour-coded green-amber-red so that you could scan the label, see it was mostly green and know it’s ok.  Or, conversely, see that it is mostly red and think – waaah! No!

Seem impossible?
Wal-Mart, Disney, Procter & Gamble, and other major companies are banding together in a sustainability consortium to develop just such a sustainability label.  It will ensure that our focus is not just on the visible impacts of the product & packaging in our house, but all the hidden impacts.  It should include fair trade categories also, so you know that the product was produced in a way that preserves nature, and preserves human well being.  (http://www.sustainabilityconsortium.org/)

What do we need to do?

Understand & pay attention to the hidden impacts – where does our meat come from? how were our clothes made?  How are electronics recycled? Use labels and brands to advantage by looking for the independent labels like Marine Stewardship Council, Rainforest Alliance, FSC, and Fair Trade.  These choices ensure your purchases are supporting the world you want to live in.

Hold politicians and business accountable:

• ask politicians for the world you want, support the organisations that keep a watch on them, and exercise your voice!  When they know you are watching, they become more mindful, and more respectful.  When they think you are not – they respond to those who are: particularly big businesses.

• ask businesses for the world you want, support the organisations that keep a watch on them, and exercise your voice!   When they know you are paying attention, they pay attention too.  And will align their practices with the world we want to see.

Take direct action: we have posted a guide on our site, that lays out the Big actions you can take to reduce your impacts dramatically.
Let me come back here to women’s particular role.

Efficiency, which our society and companies are predicated on, is not how nature operates.  Nature depends on resiliency – adaptation, redundancy, interconnections…  When new information arrives in a man’s brain, it very quickly gets sorted and sent to a particular part of the brain.  We can track this with electrodes, and demonstrate the arrival of the information and the brain lighting up.  And then see a different part of the brain light up as the information gets stored.

When a piece of information arrives in a woman’s brain, the brain lights up all over the place.  We tend to make connections, and see the interrelationships between everything.  Which is exactly how nature works.  Whereas an economy based on efficiency, sorting information quickly and parking it in one box, is counter to the way nature works.

Our challenge is to build a world that depends upon sustaining the interconnections – so that we don’t suffer pollution, climate change, and the other ills we suffer from today.  Women have the hardwiring to see this.

So, as I ask you all to take a deep breath and to become very present, remembering that we are wise women. We must not forget that. Because when the authentic “feminine” (integral) woman comes tolife she follows what her intuition tells her, knowledge and skills are her tools servicing her wisdom in action, not the other way around. She is committed and her integrity and resilience to defend our communities, our projects and our ways is her power. She is very, very powerful. She cares and – please do not get her wrong, care has a strong quality – it implies the quality of nurturing and the quality of fearlessly defending what she commits to. She is a lioness protecting her cubs

Now let’s seize the moment and claim our roles so that we build a society that works – for people, for society, for planet.

Thank you.

–Written with Kristin Engvig founder and CEO of WIN (Women’s International Network) for presentation at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference

Related posts:

1. Lessons from . . . Pond Scum?!
2. EDF, Wal-Mart & Sunshine
3. Is Wal-Mart saving the planet?

The basic platform

The basic platform was pretty straightforward: take – make – waste, and replicated in every part of the chain from raw materials to use and final disposal.  Much of what we know about ancient human habitations and ways of life we’ve learnt from their waste – where it is, what it’s made up of (e.g. bones, weapons, broken tools, pottery, etc.). As we manufactured we took the basic platform, and replicated it in each of multiple processes:  let’s take the example of a pretty simple sandal. Rubber sole, leather straps, and thread.  The rubber was tapped from trees, purified and dried, then formed or trimmed to make the soles.  Trim scrap was – well – scrapped.  Same with the leather.

The platform goes tippy…

But what worked well for a small population using basic materials, started to fail us as we developed more sophisticated materials more resistant to nature. And that brings risks to companies – risks that there are insufficient resources to “take”, that the processes for “making” are too costly or just threatened, and that “waste” is becoming unfeasibly expensive.  Read on to read the three steps that will ensure you are a winner in this new world.

So what happened to the waste?

The pretty neat thing was that the waste was more often than not immediately used as food by insects and molds, or dogs or pigs or… No matter what ended up consuming it, the scrap became part of another process, and so waste wasn’t effectively waste.  It was, as William McDonough is fond of saying, food.

We shall did overcome!

So the same things that made our products eco-groovy, waste = food, made them degrade fast.  After all, the same insects/molds/dogs that were getting rid of the waste, were just as interested in the product.  Our stuff was all food to them.

So we invented lye and vulcanisation and other processes that transformed humble ingredients into high tech, almost impervious-to-nature, materials.  And still our systems were based on take-make-waste.  But now, when we wasted, nature was having trouble digesting the by-products.  And instead of becoming food, they accumulated like litter, and we developed industries to “dispose” of them.  Which has largely meant sweeping them up and taking them “away”.

What’s wrong with dispose and away?

The Online Etymology Dictionary defines the origins of dispose as order:

mid-14c., from O.Fr. disposer (infl. by poser “to place”), from O.Fr. despondre, from L. disponere “put in order, arrange,” from dis- “apart” + ponere “to put, place”

And here’s a picture of a disposal site: 

In fairness, this is clearly a disposal site in a poorly regulated (or poorly enforced) area (in this case Haiti).  So let me insert a picture of a sanitary landfill in the United States (Pennsylvania) from this year:

In either case, while there may be some form of order established – there is indeed a concentration of rubbish, distinct from the non-rubbish areas – the materials and dirt are so mingled that materials are hardly salvageable.  As a consequence we have actually condemned them to being unuseful and therefore pure waste.

Is pollution just good stuff in the wrong place?

Physicists and chemists would say so.  Value comes from order.  So pure tends to have higher value than impure, and much more than contaminated.  Gold is an obvious example.  But purity can come from “designed-for-purpose” – for example metal alloys, or chemicals, or plastics.  What happens when the fine distinctions that enable a material to be used in a particularly efficient way are contaminated – is tat more of the material needs to be used, and the properties it had been chosen for are sullied.  Think of colour as a property, and consider the outcome when a black sock makes it’s way into a load of white laundry…

The shortages of “away”?

The fees for collecting and disposing of waste have been increasing at such a rate that in London, for example, they now account for 1/2 the city’s budget.  These trends are due to accelerate due to public unwillingness to support new disposal sites (including waste-to-energy plants); competition for scarce space; and increasing waste.  Population and demographics have a large role to play in this – in the past 50 years the population of the globe has more than doubled (from 3 to 6.8 billion); wealth and consumption have increased substantially, and the increase in smaller households and out-of-home consumption has further increased waste.

A different form of cost is imposed by extended producer responsibility requirements (EPR) – currently covering items as diverse as packaging materials, tires, white goods, hazardous and special wastes, and appliances in (among other countries) the EU, much of Canada, Turkey, Japan and parts of the US.  The cost of recovering and disposal is placed usually on the brand owner who in turn seeks to distribute it among suppliers until eventually it makes its way into the cost of a good.  Ultimately EPR regulation is seeking to ensure that products with least waste-impact (through highest and most economic levels of recovery and recycling) are rewarded by the market.

The even greater shortages of “take”

At the same time, we are facing pressures and even shortages of materials: not just the usual suspects (oil, water, fish…) but also many rare ones on which the industries considered particularly forward facing, are pinning their hopes: neodymium, terbium and dysprosium (key components in generators for wind turbines or electric cars); lanthanum – key to electric car batteries.  Not only are these materials in short supply, but China which has a very long term view, has secured many of the supplies, thus making it the future monopolist for materials.

Worldwide demand for rare earths, covering 15 entries on the periodic table of elements, is expected to exceed supply by some 40,000 tonnes annually in several years unless major new production sources are developed. — Reuters, 31/8/09

A worsening ratio of people to arable land will bring about greater dependence on chemical fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals and on plant breeding for higher yields. In regard to dependence on chemical pesticides, the study looks for an increase in pesticide-resistant insects, based on California’s experience where, of 25 species each causing crop losses in excess of $1 million per year, 17 are now resistant to one or more types of pesticides. — Global 2000 report

And of course localised energy shortages and associated cost increases.

3 key steps to being able to continue “make”

So the competitive products – and companies – are going to be those who:

1. Produce most efficiently:  lowest energy, mostly renewable, and locally determined.  For example, Dean dairies invested in a methane digester thus avoiding the cost of waste disposal and energy purchases, while creating enough energy that they can feed it to the utility and make money.  Dean now has income where their competitors have costs – which means they can play with pricing, invest in greater modernisation/efficiencies, market themselves as green, …  They’ve bought freedom, choice and a halo.
2. Those that can reclaim and reuse their products at the disposal stage.  For example, a battery manufacturer (or mobile phone, or iPod or…) depends on materials that are in limited supply, hazardous in their manufacture and hazardous in disposal.  Risk, risk risk.  Were they to lease, rather than sell, their electronics, they could recycle more efficiently, reclaim their precious metals, and – get the halo.  In fact, as first mover, they could not only be reducing the toxicity of their products – they could be detoxing the operation – a powerful first mover advantage.
3. Use renewable and renewed materials:  either renewed by nature (e.g. trees), or by humans (recycled content).  Coke has invested over a hundred million dollars in recycling plants that guarantee it a supply of recycled PET – PET whose life cycle impacts are as good as those of nature-based materials such as paper cartons.  And, they are launching a plant-based polymer that can be recycled along with PET – so that their product is fundamentally green:  renewable, renewed, recycled and reused by them.

Securing a profitable platform

Interface, the largest floor covering company in the world, dedicated themselves to becoming fully sustainable 15 years ago.  Today they have changed their operations dramatically – zero waste facilities, high levels of renewable energy, much greater energy efficiency.  Most interestingly, they have taken different approaches to desing and manufacturing, based on their observations of how nature works, and launched three bestselling lines of products as a consequence – products that are better for the environment, easier to lay and replace, more readily recycled, and cheaper to produce.  “We were operating on the wrong platform” says their founder and Chairman Ray Anderson.  They’ve changed that – and grown dramatically in the process.

Related posts:

1. Does Climate Change affect your business?
2. Can goats help your green initiatives succeed like this?
3. Women’s International Input for COP15 Meeting in Copenhagen

Wouldn’t you love it if your customers were so smitten with your way of doing business that they were willing to put up with the downsides of doing business with you, just to have that confidence?

How about customers so happy they were willing to speak up for you in your advertising? It may seem incredible, but take a look at this ad (in the guise of a story) from Hitachi.

What makes this work so well?

1. The story makes heroes of Fed Ex’s customer facing people – their drivers. The trucks and the drivers help transform how regular people view Fed Ex – and invite conversation and a sense of connection. Good for employee morale, good for public image, good for marketing.
2. Making the film has made heroes of the behind-the-scenes designers and sustainability folk and procurement people. So the message to employees is “we think what you do really matters”. And its done in a way that employees can show to their families – and broadcast in advertisements and on the internet.
3. The film highlights that there was a coherent thought – from development of the right parts all the way to consumer. Because sustainability is linked to every firm’s self-interest, it feels credible. And, it feels clever – you think “what a smart set of companies”. They had the right product and the right vision and the right people to get something on the market that the world needs right now. And they did it in a way that makes money. How cool is that?!

Was Hitachi’s process really so enlightened and smooth? I can’t say for sure. But after spending some time on their site looking at their supporting actions, I felt that they have an approach that is forward looking, very human, enlightened and still self-interested. And that makes me want to trust them.

And that’s really the ultimate goal: have people want to trust you. Because they see you the corporation, as you – a person. A being that is reasonable, and well-intentioned, even if you’re fallible.

Related posts:

1. Are your customers facing needlessly unpleasant tradeoffs?
2. When the Kat has your tongue
3. Bags and bottles – tapped out.

The other evening, I was in a Toronto restaurant (Cava, on Yonge street) – a hip tapas-type restaurant with an awesome wine list.  The waiter came to take our order.   He listened attentively, committed it to memory, helped us choose a suitable wine, and then said “can I suggest tap water with that?”.   Tap water?!  Of course! we said, but we probed – why tap water (free) and not mineral water (great margins for him).  “We feel its important for the environment,” he said.  “It’s one of the ways we can contribute…”.

Banning the Bottle

Cava is not alone.  There are websites (Inside the Bottle and Ban the Bottle) dedicated to banning plastic bottles:  50 Canadian municipalities, 30+ universities and colleges, and many government institutions have banned plastic bottles for sale.

Canada is not alone, municipalities and counties in the US are running “drink our water” and “please refill” advertisements (Dade County Florida was sued by Nestle Waters for statements that put bottled water in a bad light); North Carolina just passed a law banning single-use plastic bottles from landfills (they must be recycled); and environmental groups are seeing this as the first step in pushing for similar bans on soft-drink bottles too.  In Australia, the city of Bundanoon, has banned the sale of bottled water within city limits.

Even in Switzerland, home to bottled water, where I live across the narrow lake from Evian and next door to Nestle, restaurants are increasingly proposing (and accepting that one request) tap water.  5 years ago that was looked down on as cheap and possibly dangerous.  Today it’s considered an environmentally sensitive choice.

Bans go Beyond Bottles

Toronto has implemented a 5 cent/bag minimum fee for all plastic carrier bags in stores.  A move that has shocked everyone by being hugely successful for everyone (except plastic bag manufacturers, that is): consumption of plastic bags has fallen by 85%; revenues to retailers have increased since each bag that they do provide at the 5 cent minimum, only costs them a fraction of a penny to buy; the government has much less difficult-to-recycle waste; and shoppers are surprised to find that the fee, which feels a little like a fine, is sufficient to remind them to carry reusables with them at all times.

Toronto could be considered leading edge.  Except that it trails New Delhi.

and Tamil Nadu (Tamil Nadu Throwaway Plastic Articles Act – Prohibition of Sale, Storage, Distribution and Transport); even the UN has weighed in (UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner Calls for World-Wide Ban on Pointless Thin Film Plastic Bags: “There is simply zero justification for manufacturing [plastic bags] anymore, anywhere” UN Environmental Programme executive director Achim Steiner).

The biggest shift is behavioural

All these moves could be considered trivial in light of the volumes and financial significance of plastic bags and plastic bottles globally.  But the shift is a more subtle and, I believe, more important one: bottled water is going from status symbol, endorsed by celebrities (consider Madonna’s video where she. . . how shall we put it? . . . ‘pleasures’ a bottle of Evian), to brazenly wasteful.   Sarah Jessica Parker got plaudits for drinking tap water at a UN Charity event.

If Hollywood & Bollywood go green – can the public be far behind?

As Hollywood goes green (Leonardo di Caprio driving a Prius; Arnold Schwarzenegger retrofitting his Hummer to run on biofuels), and Bollywood goes green, so goes the unmistakable social norming of green decisions – and of discomfort with non-green decisions.  Increasing population, increasing wealth and increasing demand ensure that the drivers for more sustainable behaviour will continue of necessity to grow in strength and urgency.  This is an auspicious moment for companies to incorporate green principles more rigorously in their offer if they don’t want to find themselves at the wrong end of a public ban.

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This is true on the social side too. Wal-Mart found itself struggling to site new stores and prosper effectively outside the US. The changes they needed to make to their operations to re-engage their work force, and enable prosperous growth abroad, were heavily social (as well as environmental) in nature. None of this done for philanthropic reasons – but good effects nonetheless.

So while the term CSR (representing an old-fashioned somewhat philanthropic view of environmental and social engagement) may fade away, the underlying activities and responsibilities will not.

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This is as game-changing as getting a man to the moon! — Jay Golden, Assistant Professor, Arizona State University

Anything Wal-Mart does is somehow self-serving. Let the buyer beware of feel-good fuzzy ethics…–Karen, on EcoGeek

Wal-Mart to create eco-ratings for products?! Wal-Mart & eco issues/concerns? Isn’t that an oxymoron?  –G Mikulsky, on Twitter

This is both more and less than meets the eye.  – Joel Makower, Green Business

This is just Wal-Mart’s latest move to retain upscale consumers. — Daily Finance, on Twitter

So, is it as important as getting a man on the moon?  Cynical greenwash?  or something in-between?

What “reporting on Sustainability” means

When Wal-Mart requests its suppliers to answer 16 sustainability questions, to establish its “Sustainability Index v1.0″, they are establishing the engagement of the supplier as a company – not evaluating the sustainability of a supplier’s products.  So it could be imagined that a supplier could answer the Index questions successfully, while still producing products that are damaging to workers, the environment, and local communities.  In fact, more than half the questions are Yes/No questions:  e.g. “#1: Have you measured your corporate greenhouse gas emissions?” or “#12: do you know the location of 100% of the facilities that produce your products?”  There are no questions about human or ecological toxicity, emissions or effluent, or most of the measures that are used in assessing a company’s environmental management.

But things quickly get trickier. “#2: Have you opted to report your greenhouse gas emissions to the Carbon Disclosure Project?”  A visit to the Carbon Disclosure (CDP) Project quickly gets into measurement issues such as:  do you know the emissions of everything you own (scope 1), and the indirect emissions of the energy you use (scope 2);  what protocol do you follow in measuring this data?  And even trickier questions about the risk posed by climate change – on material, energy and water sources; on plant locations; and on markets.  Risks posed by potential regulations; as well as opportunities posed by regulation and by climate chanage.

And then the Wal-Mart questionnaire gets trickier still

“#4:  Have you set publicly available greenhouse gas reduction targets?  Enter % or # and target date, or leave blank.”  “#15: Do you work with your supply base to resolve issues found during social compliance evaluations and also document specific corrections and improvements?”

Massive change – by stealth

To me this has all the stealth power of the US Toxics Release Inventory (TRI).  While there was little or no legislation banning many of the chemicals in the inventory, and even less enforcement, the fact of having to measure and go public was sufficient to reduce emissions considerably:  within 14 years of the first TRI reporting, toxic emissions had been reduced by ~70% and water emissions by almost 2/3 – in absolute terms.  So during a period of tremendous economic growth, emissions were reduced.

How does that work?  There are two drivers:

1. Prevailing regulation ensured that if a company didn’t know it was polluting, it was unlikely to be prosecuted.  So there was a powerful incentive to keep in the dark: harder for your critics to get the information they would need to prosecute you and less chance of being held responsible.  By being forced to report, companies had to set in place measurement and tracking systems, which meant they knew what they were releasing – and when.
2. It made available to those who cared, information on releases by company and by plant location.  So community groups, environmental groups, researchers, and other people worried about the releases, could get access to, and then use the information: studies were made linking releases to cancer, for example, or assessing rates of illness near particular sources of emissions.

Wal-Mart has ~100.000 suppliers from whom it is requesting this information.  And they had several competitors present, who are undertaking the same requests.  Once they request this information, they cannot claim ‘not to know’ that a supplier did not have a mechanism in place for measuring emissions, or waste or social compliance.

The multitudes will start measuring.  Then managing.  And reporting.

Which means that hundreds of thousands of companies and their suppliers, are going to start measuring – first the easy things: energy use, waste, water; then the harder elements: origin of all their inputs (material, processed and energy); and finally the sophisticated certifications: CDP, but also Marine Stewardship Council or Organic certification; Energy Star; Green Seal; FSC; Rainforest Allicance; Fair Trade, etc.  All already specified in the 16 base questions Wal-Mart is asking.  And then they will have to establish plans and measures to reduce the negative impacts of energy, materials, natural resource use and on people and communities.

The BIG Game Changer

This is game changing already.  But Wal-Mart is going a step farther.  In conjunction with competitors, suppliers, universities, scientists and NGOs, it has established a Sustainability Consortium that will seek to develop a uniform protocol for measuring all impacts for all products.  They have some experience with their Packaging Scorecard.  Now they will expand this, using analysis of all the enivornmental impacts associated with the material and energy extraction; transportation, manufacture, distribution, consumption and waste/recovery.  And, they will seek to create a label that can go on pack, like a nutrition label.  So that suppliers will find themselves competing to provide the lowest impact product.  For the best price.

Aligning the forces of Greed with the planet’s Needs

So it will be suppliers competing amongst themselves that will then drive the system to be more environmentally and socially sound. I quite like the idea that transparency would help align market forces with the environment… I just wouldn’t have guessed that Wal-Mart would make it so.

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Those of you passionate about pond scum – or addicted to interest rates, or afflicted with pernicious diseases – understand that progress is described in DTs or doubling times: the time it takes the scum/money/disease to double in population. When it comes to pond scum we are largely indifferent; when it comes to money we want DT to be as short as possible, and when it comes to disease we would like to delay the day of reckoning by extending the DT as much as possible. But very few of us associate climate change with pond scum.

That, dear reader, is a mistake.

The first global experiment
We are currently embarked on a huge experiment on earth – the experiment of “how to manage a super-successful species with an impossibly short doubling rate on a quite small planet”. By which I mean, that we have quite a short doubling rate historically speaking and earth has no doubling capacity at all. So we are filling up every aspect of our planet with our presence, our waste, our demands, and the like. And the rest of the planet (meaning other mammals and fish and mushrooms and insects not to mention the water and the air and … you see where I’m going…) has no say about this at all.

So at first gradually, and now pretty quickly, we are pushing other species out of our way, which means out of existence. You may be feeling triumphant about this: A sign of superior intelligence! A sign of greater strength! A demonstration of power! …and a sign that God is on our side!

Perhaps.

Or perhaps, this is a test we need to look straight in the face, and address.

Hardwired to behave like pond scum?
When I was born, the population of the earth was 3 billion people. You can thus assess to the year when I was born, or assume that I am wise beyond my years, or just an old crank. Each is, within measure, true. But it should be noted that fewer than 50 years later, the earth is ~6.8 billion people. That is to say that we are increasing at a very rapid rate. In fact, the rate of increase when I was born was roughly 2.2% year – a doubling rate of 31 years. We met that handily I’m afraid to say.

And when we double, we more than double our appetites. When I was born (let me come clean – we’re talking 1960 here, not the dark ages…) there were no mobile phones (replaced every 2-3 years); laptops (replaced every 3-4 years); fax machines (come and largely gone), or most of the other absolutely essentials most of us live with today with hardly a thought (though plenty of complaints… and even more waste).

Thus we have increased our per capita consumption of calories, meat, processed foods, packaging, fuel, electricity, batteries, furniture… pretty much everything. Which means that the rate at which we consume our planetary resources is even more rapid. So it is no wonder that WWF tells us that we have exceeded the earth’s capacity: that rather than live off the interest, we are living of earth’s capital.

We have now affected the global climate to a point that scientists consider detrimental to our prospects for survival as a species. And, like junkies hooked on drugs, we are so hooked on oil that even though we know that oil only makes things worse, we are exploring new sources that will take only slightly less energy extract than they will provide: oil sands.

Even though we are smart enough to see that we are heading in the wrong direction, we are hard-wired by millennia of evolution, to deal very well with immediate threats like a lion about to eat us, and very poorly with incremental threats – like climate change – even if they have equally detrimental consequences.

Pond scum, and . . . scum
Which brings us back to pond scum. If the doubling rate of pond scum is one day it can take weeks and months – even years – for the scum to cover half the pond. But the day the pond is utterly covered with pond scum – and undrinkable, unswimmable and ultimately unlivable, is just one day after that. Yet when the pond is half full, everybody thinks, “well, it’s not that full, we still have some time, it’s growing bit by bit…”.

And this is where scum come in. We are already hardwired not to really feel slow incremental change, even if our brains can see what is really happening. And some companies are playing on that: sowing doubt (where scientists have basically none). And others (who find it easier to do what they are doing today than change for the better) jump on the bandwagon, and suggest that any changes will bring down the system and create havoc… They are creating the urgent monster that inspire our brains to fight or flee: in this case, fighting people who attack the status quo in the name of climate change.

Here’s why that (scummy) strategy works:
Dan Gilbert, Harvard professor of behavioural biology has studied the human brain for decades, and determined that we are brilliantly designed to respond to evil predators who suddenly threaten our immediate well being. Long term climate change doesn’t meet our brain’s warning and fear needs. But the alarmists who threaten we’ll lose our way of life due to climate change – well they are the problem. Blame the messenger!

Beyond scumminess:
What you want to do is implement small changes, that can grow incrementally until, like pond scum, they are everywhere – without breeding resistance.

• At Yahoo they ran a competition to cut CO2 for each employee by 20% for one month. They provided power-saving-tips, carpooling, meatless lunches, etc. The prize if the company made it: see the CEO & COO fight wearing sumo-suits. Not only did this work, it so invigorated that organisation, that many other changes came to the fore, and while not all the initiatives lasted continuously, many did, and new ones had a chance to be evaluated and adopted.

• At IBM they said – “we want to make a business out of being green – so anything you think you can sell, we have to do internally. That will give us credibility in the market place.” Not only did that excite people who wanted to sell ideas; it excited people who were back-office and could invent a product that company could then sell.

• At Wal-Mart they said to employees and suppliers: Here are our super-ambitious goals. We want to improve year-on-year – but we won’t micro-manage – you tell us what’s best. We’ll work with you to get there, and we need you to work with us to get there.” And while they had areas of focus (such as packaging) the benefits came from new products (such as concentrated detergents and compact fluorescents); and new processes (such as cooler lighting in freezers that reduced airconditioning).

We will survive…
With strong intentions we can rise above pond scum, use the brains we’ve built over millions of years of evolution, and grapple with the environmental problems we have actually created for ourselves.

Because the alternative is to grow like pond scum, choke our own home, and possibly choke our means for existence…

Image by Swampman on Flickr.

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