This year marks GreenBlue’s 10th anniversary. At the end of our first decade, what will the next decade bring for the sustainability movement? We’re asking this question of visionaries, thought leaders, business innovators, scientists, and educators. Read other interviews from the Next Decade series about the future of the sustainability, products, and business.
Over the past ten years, the s
ustainability movement has evolved beyond simply raising awareness or complying with environmental standards. It has now become an essential strategy for business to maintain a competitive advantage. A leading voice for this point of view is Bob Willard, who was the keynote speaker at last month’s SPC Spring Meeting in Toronto.
After three decades in senior leadership at IBM, Bob now dedicates himself full time to building corporate commitment to sustainability, and he has spoken to hundreds of companies to sell the business value of new ways of working. Last year, Bob was one of the five inaugural members of The International Society of Sustainability Professionals Hall of Fame, along with Gil Friend of Natural Logic, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, Karl-Henrik Robert of The Natural Step, and Ray Anderson of Interface, who recently passed.
Bob’s landmark book, The Sustainability Advantage, just came out in a revised 10th anniversary edition, as The New Sustainability Advantage. A single sentence from the book sums up his whole philosophy: “The business case for sustaining the planet is stronger than the business case for trashing it.” We asked him to elaborate.
Your work provides a compelling economic case for sustainability. If it can save money and increase profits, why isn’t everyone doing it?
That question was screaming in my head when I finished the first edition of The Sustainability Advantage in 2002. So I did a doctorate at the University of Toronto to research what the inhibitors were, and I found that the biggest obstacle for companies is an entrenched mindset. Based on regulation-driven end-of-pipe efforts, business people can’t believe that anything to do with “environment” or “green” can be good for business. To overcome that mindset, we have to show the value in hard-nosed business terms: how much more revenue could they make, how much they could reduce expenses, and how could they mitigate material risks. That is, we need to meet them where they are and sell them on the competitive advantage of embracing sustainability strategies.
You identify five business models in progressive stages of sustainability: (1) Pre-Compliance, (2) Compliance, (3) Beyond Compliance, (4) Integrated Strategy, and (5) Purpose/Passion. The primary difference between stages 4 and 5, you explain, is that one does the right thing because it’s good business; the other practices good business in order to continue to do the right thing. You’ve said that currently there are no large, publicly traded companies that have achieved even stage 4. What will it take for that to change?
They have to want to get to Stage 4 and fortunately some companies do. Regulations drive laggards to Stage 2, but can’t drive them to Stage 4. The only reason they will aspire to Stage 4 is if they realize that they could be more successful at that stage than at Stage 3, where they are simply capturing the low-hanging fruit of savings on energy, water, materials, and waste expenses. That’s why the Sustainability Advantage Dashboard and Worksheet Simulators are so helpful. They help executives project how much more bottom-line profit they could reap if they were to reach Stage 4. Once they are at Stage 4, they will have the courage to officially change the purpose of their business to embrace the environmental and social dimensions of sustainability and move to Stage 5. Stage 4 is an interim stage. A few companies, like Interface, might make the leap from Stage 3 directly to Stage 5, but most companies will need to get to Stage 4 using today’s business model before changing to become more values- and purpose-driven. Ironically, this does not require any sacrifice of business success. In fact, it is where the sustainability advantage really kicks in.
Who are some of the companies you feel come closest to achieving sustainability today?
Any B Corp, such as Patagonia, Seventh Generation, any co-operative, Interface, Ben and Jerry’s, New Society Publishers (my publisher), and many other small- and medium-sized companies founded by enlightened owners have many of the right criteria. I am increasingly distrustful of sustainability rankings, out of concern that they are celebrating the best of a bad lot. We need a better “gold standard” against which to assess companies’ progress.
The 10th anniversary edition of your book shows how much business has changed in recent years. How do you think business might evolve before the 20th anniversary edition comes out?
The take-up in sustainability strategies as enablers of business success in the last five years has been very encouraging. Based on a survey of 1,251 companies referenced in the UN Global Compact Annual Review 2010, 54% of business leaders agree that we will reach the tipping point by 2020, when over 20% of influential companies embrace sustainability strategies. That would be wonderful, and may happen sooner.
You give away your work readily. For example, your website provides a free calculator for businesses to estimate the cost savings they might achieve with various strategies. Why don’t you charge for such a service?
As a certified B Corp, my business model is a bit unusual. I am purpose driven. I would hate to look back in 10-20 years and regret that we had not progressed as far and as fast as we needed to on the sustainability agenda because we had not provided sustainability champions with easy access to helpful tools to get the job done.
My mission is to provide effective resources (books, DVDS, worksheets, dashboard, slides, etc.) to ensure that sustainability champions can credibly accelerate the pace of change. This is not about making money. This is about changing the world. Fast.
Category: GreenBlue
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The Responsible Business
On May 4, at the Living Futures conference in Portland, I had the great pleasure of hearing a keynote by the uproarious Carol Sanford. Her latest book, The Responsible Business: Sustainability & Success, voted one of the best business books of last year, outlines stories of 30 companies that became more socially responsible—without ever declaring their intention to do so.
The funny thing about this book on sustainability is that the author hates the term.
“I know nothing about sustainability,” says Sanford. “I don’t even know what that is.” Her publisher encouraged use of the word to boost sales, but Sanford was hesitant. “I don’t work for corporate responsibility. I work to make great businesses.”
For Sanford, greatness in business means shifting away from conventional goals. Sustainability often is defined by the Triple Bottom Line, which expands the concept of value to include not just economic but also social and environmental value. Yet, as Sanford points out, these terms are “still within the limits of the old choices.” To unleash the full potential of business will require turning the whole idea of value on its head: “A Bottom Line is what is left after all is made and sold. Top Line is the growth of health of the stakeholders and the system that ‘makes them up’ as it works together.”
Sanford calls this new notion of value the Quintessential Top Line, which reorganizes the traditional “supply chain” as a collaborative network of value creators. It “embraces suppliers as co-creative partners, not merely links in a chain.”
This vision of supply chains as a mutually supportive community explains her aversion to the term sustainability. “People talk about sustainability as being about how the ‘parts’ come together. Nature doesn’t work like that. There aren’t any ‘parts’ in living systems.” There are no parts, there is only the whole. “You have to think of a whole within a whole, like a tree in a forest.”
With my latest book, The Shape of Green, coming out this summer, a colleague asked me to compile a list of other sustainability-related books I would recommend. Since the usual suspects—Silent Spring, The Ecology of Commerce, Biomimicry, and Cradle to Cradle, etc.—are so well known, there’s no need to repeat them here. Instead, I’ll focus on a more personal list of favorites that have influenced my thinking on sustainability. Below are ten compelling reads that, in their own ways, expand the sustainability dialogue.
The Wooing of Earth, René Dubos (1980). The man who coined the phrase, “Think globally, act locally,” explains that it is not the ethics of environmentalism but, rather, the “visceral and spiritual” power of nature that moves people to action. Ecology and humanism must unite.
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, E. O. Wilson (1999). The famed father of sociobiology declares that sustainability is impossible without breaking down the barriers between the arts and sciences: “Until that fundamental divide is closed or at least reconciled in some congenial manner, the relation between man and the living world will remain problematic.”
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, David Abram (1997). We tend to speak of “the environment” in the singular, as if it’s one homogeneous space, rather than an endless variety of peaks and plains, hills and haddocks. Abram meditates beautifully on how the values of indigenous peoples grew out of the specificity of place—how each worldview evolved from a particular view of the world.
The Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson (1965). Where Silent Spring was her call to arms, The Sense of Wonder is Carson’s reverie on the joys of immersing oneself in nature. Presaging The Last Child in the Woods by forty years, she writes that such immersion is essential for early education—and for lifelong wisdom.
The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, Fritjof Capra (1997). An eloquent introduction to “deep ecology”: “The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realize that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.”
Human Nature: A Blueprint for Managing the Earth—By People, For People, James Trefil (2005). A physicist defies conventional wisdom about the environment and celebrates new scientific breakthroughs that promise to solve the challenge of sustainability—by putting people first.
The World Without Us, Alan Weisman (2007). A powerful thought experiment in what would happen if humanity suddenly disappeared. Step by step, Weisman shows how quickly nature would fill the void, which forces us to ask what sustainability is intended to protect—all of the earth, or just us?
Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson (2010). Comparing innovation to evolution, Johnson shows how some environments—coral reefs, cities, the World Wide Web—are naturally more conducive to creativity than others are.
Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Vandana Shiva (2006). Shiva’s insightful criticism of economic globalization demonstrates how its practices could be antithetical to sustainability.
One World: The Ethics of Globalization, Peter Singer (2004). In the age of global warming, Singer argues, managing natural resources must transcend political boundaries and nation states.
I
n a new In the Loop blog series, we will be featuring interviews with members of the GreenBlue Board of Directors on why they work with GreenBlue and what they think is ahead for the organization. Eric DesRoberts kicks off the series with a recent interview of Alan Blake, Associate Director of Global Packaging Sustainability at Procter & Gamble, who is the newest member of the GreenBlue Board of Directors. Alan has been involved with the Sustainable Packaging Coalition for a number of years and currently represents Procter & Gamble on the SPC’s Executive Committee.
DesRoberts: As a child, what was your dream job?
Blake: Growing up, I wanted to be a Fireman.
DesRoberts: Can you talk about your journey from Fireman to your current position at Procter & Gamble?
Blake: I was fortunate to go through an education system that opened my mind to a number of possibilities. Having studied sciences, I knew I needed to do something that could be applied, and chemical engineering was an exciting route to pursue. I joined ExxonMobil Chemicals in the late 70’s – at the time, chemical engineering and the petroleum industry was a great place to be. After several years, I decided I needed to expand my horizons, which is when I came to Procter & Gamble.
I’ve been involved in packaging for 20 years. Early on, I don’t know that the word “sustainability” was part of our vocabulary, or necessarily included in our business plan, but I think there has always been a business case for doing the right thing.
DesRoberts: When and how did you first get involved with the SPC?
Blake: Procter & Gamble got involved around 2008. We had just started our packaging sustainability group and we were being proactive with developments like the Wal-Mart sustainability scorecard on the horizon.
I got involved with the SPC back in 2009. I have a lot of support for the SPC vision and find great value in the SPC’s work. Also, I found that meetings are great opportunities to discuss the possibilities and challenges facing the packaging industry. My interest in the organization eventually led to my Executive Committee candidacy at the Atlanta meeting. Aside from personal interest, this was an opportunity for Procter & Gamble to gauge what the industry was thinking in terms of how we were going to manage municipal solid waste streams. Certainly there was interest in cooperation among industry members to demonstrate that we can do the right thing on our own rather than having decisions imposed on us.
DesRoberts: How has the Coalition evolved during the time you’ve been involved?
Blake: It is a journey, so it is always fascinating to see companies joining and asking: “How do we get started on our sustainability initiatives?” This rejuvenation helps progress the sustainability dialogue within the members who have been involved since the beginning. By creating forums where different groups can openly talk about their needs, the SPC is connecting different points along the supply chain and helping to answer important questions. This is also helping to shape projects within the SPC.
DesRoberts: In addition to your involvement with the SPC, you are also a new GreenBlue Board member. Why were you interested in this position, and what would you most like to contribute to the organization?
Blake: I thought it was important for the SPC to have an invested voice at the GreenBlue level. I was actively engaged in board discussions last summer and felt that my thoughts were in line with many of the board members in terms of future opportunities and challenges in front of GreenBlue.
In the short term, I would like to gain a better understanding of the work and the role that GreenBlue is playing more broadly, and better understand its projects outside of the SPC (Forest Products, Advisory Services, and Chemicals). In the long term, I hope that I can help GreenBlue position itself for success over the next 5-10 years.
DesRoberts: This year marks GreenBlue’s 10th anniversary. What do you think the next 10 years will bring for GreenBlue?
Blake: I certainly believe that the next 2-5 years will see significant growth in its Forest Products, and Chemicals programs. I also think we will see considerable global growth in the SPC as we seem to have a really good start with the Essentials of Sustainable Packaging course now being offered in Mexico and China. This will open up the global opportunities and hopefully result in GreenBlue exploring many new potential projects; particularly in developing regions. GreenBlue will have opportunities to forge alliances throughout the world and become a benchmark case study of how to answer some of the biggest challenges we face – namely resource scarcity, managing waste for worth, and doing good.
DesRoberts: You’re planning on retiring this summer. What’s next on your horizon?
Blake: Spending time with family back in England, going to the Olympics, and then consulting work. I have been contacted by a number of interested groups already, so it looks as though I’m going to be as busy as I want to be from about September onward. As long as I am providing value, I will remain active. Otherwise, I’ll be working on my golf game.
Alan is looking forward to family travel and going home for his father’s 80th birthday. He is currently reading “Catching Fire” (book two of the Hunger Games Trilogy) and recommends it to anyone that has not read it.
My colleagues and I have been grappling with what seems to be a persistent conundrum in the sustainability community: that standardization is both a rallying cry of industry and a warning cry of sustainability advocates. Can standardization (via consistent metrics, reporting structures, etc.) help to drive innovation in the long run, or does it instead reinforce the status quo, thwart innovation, and result in higher orders of “sufficiency”?
This is perhaps a false dichotomy, however, as it’s not clear that standardization and innovation are truly at odds with each other. Why should we have to choose between our need to standardize processes versus the desire for continued creativity and experimentation? Ultimately we need both for greater innovation and more sustainable practices.
It is not only PR or marketing departments that want greater consensus and alignment about which sustainability issues are important to prioritize and which are more tangential or well-intentioned “eco-noise.” The ever-present challenge of limited resources (time, attention, human, financial, etc.) with which to explore emerging sustainability issues naturally leads companies to seek standardization to ensure that such exploration is profitable.
But in the eagerness to drive sustainability into something that is more predictable, manageable, and efficient, we must realize that we are just stepping onto the learning curve, not cresting the apex of it. Otherwise the impulse to standardize terminology, conceptual frameworks, what’s important to measure, how it gets measured, and progress assessments may well create another dangerous form of inertia called “sufficiency.” If we drive everything too much toward standardization, sufficiency may move us towards the lowest common denominator—and lose the unpredictable innovation that has defined the sustainability movement.
Like forms of democracy, the human energy, creativity, and experimentation necessary for us to evolve our understanding and practice of sustainability is going to be long, messy, and non-linear. To truly balance the “planet, person, prosperity” equation will require patience, humility, and different measures of progress than we are accustomed to using.
Despite the debate of consistency versus creativity, the truth is sustainability has relied on both standardization and innovation as changes to the status quo often follow the rhythm of divergence and convergence. Pragmatism, caution, predictability, and efficiency favor the forces of convergence (standardization). Creativity, disruptive thinking, risk-taking, and experimentation favor the forces of divergence (experimentation). It is this necessary form of co-dependency that leads to innovation of all sorts. So while one side laments the glacial pace of consistency and the other laments the messiness of the process, we must remember that standardization encourages experimentation, and vice versa, which leads us, unpredictably, to new forms of innovation.
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Top Five Fun Facts: April
Eric DesRoberts continues his monthly series of facts and tidbits he’s uncovered during his research to better understand products and packaging. You can also check out his past Fun Facts here.
1. According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, the liquid refreshment beverage market grew for the second consecutive year to 29.5 billion gallons in 2011. Energy drinks showed the highest growth rate from 2010 at just over 14%.
2. It is believed that nearly 200 million eggs (~17 million dozen) were purchased for Easter celebrations last year. This is dwarf by the 90 billion (~7.6 billion dozen) produced in 2010.
3. March 22 marked the 19th annual World Water Day. Nearly 900 million people currently lack access to clean water, and this number is expected to increase to 2/3 of the world’s population by 2025. Here are other fun facts around water demand:
- The average American household uses 350 gallons of water a day
- Making a pair of blue jeans requires nearly 2,900 gallons of water
- It takes three liters of water to make a one liter of water bottle (before the water is added)
4. Each second, 330 people buy something from a Wal-Mart store. At 2.1 million employees world-wide – this is roughly the cumulative population of the 50 smallest countries.
5. Data from the 2011 International Coastal Cleanup revealed that over nine million pounds of trash were collected along shorelines around the World. Cigarettes, caps and lids, and plastic bottles were the top three most commonly collected items.
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Electrolux's Vacs from the Sea
In researching options for our new office vacuum, we came across Electrolux’s Vacs from the Sea initiative. The purpose of this initiative is to raise awareness about the plastic waste that ends up in oceans and along their shore lines with the hope of increasing recycling efforts.
As the Electrolux team explains on their website: “Our intention is to bring awareness to the situation and the need for better plastic karma. So far, over 60 million people have been reached and we are continuing the initiative following the great response.”
Along with partners, and in some cases local communities, they organized collection efforts using various methods (beach/coastal cleanup, coral reef diving, and trawling) along and in our five oceans. They then took the reclaimed plastic and created vacuums with statements specific to the region from which the plastic was collected, and each one of the five is a unique work of art.
While Electrolux is not currently able to use the reclaimed ocean plastic in mass production they are thinking of auctioning off one of the vacuums to further research in this area.
“Right now, only post consumer plastic on land meets our commercial safety and quality standards. However, as part of our commitment to researching new materials, we should explore how the ocean plastic might be used in the future, and one such step is to make a single concept vac that we can auction out,” says Electrolux’s Cecilia Nord.
Check out their blog on this great initiative.
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A World Without Branding
What would the world look like without branding? What if everything in the store came in plain white packaging?
Brand Spirit can answer that. For 100 days, branding professional and Tumblr blogger Andrew Miller is exploring a world without branding. Each day, he paints a new item white, “reducing the object to its purest form.” He is restricting the project to everyday items he finds, is gifted, has laying around the house, or can buy for less than $10. Call it pop art for branding nerds.
Miller’s project reveals a great deal about how we perceive different items. Looking through the photos, I noticed that I identified some items as a product void of branding, and some items by the brand. For example, I immediately identified the Scotch tape and Heinz ketchup packet as tape and ketchup packet. Or the Conair hair dryer as “that purple folding hair dryer I once had.” They are pretty universal shapes, and show just how important branding can be.
On the contrary, I immediately identified Tabasco and Sharpie as Tabasco and Sharpie. My brain practically superimposed their labeling. Both of these items have pretty iconic shapes associated with the product, making shape and form part of brand recognition.
It’s a familiar phenomenon—similar to a generic trademark. Zipper, aspirin, cellophane, and escalator all became so identified with the product that the trademarked name became synonymous with the product.
What do you see when you look at each item?
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Go Local: Compost
Today’s post features guest contributor Eric Walter, who runs Black Bear Composting, an organics recycling company located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Black Bear Composting helps local business shrink their waste stream by recycling their food scraps via composting.
With all of the benefits of composting commonly given, I have yet to see a story on how composting is a great way to keep things local. Going local—eating local foods, or supporting local businesses—reduces environmental impact by cutting down on transportation. Composting tends to happen locally by its very nature, because the materials being collected for composting are very heavy and can’t be transported long distances economically.
Our clients are taking the densest, heaviest materials (typically food scraps) out of their waste stream and setting them aside for a direct trip to our compost windrows—less than 40 miles away from most customers. The rest of the waste takes an initial trip to a local transfer station about 18 miles away. From there the food scraps we recycled would have otherwise had an additional 70 miles to travel beyond the transfer station for final disposal.
Separating the densest, heaviest part out of the waste stream also cuts the transportation costs of remaining materials. With wet, heavy food out of the mix, dumpsters are lighter to move, thus burning less fuel. Use a compactor on the (now lighter) remaining waste, and you can even collect less often—reducing the transportation footprint even more.
By giving us their food scraps, one of our clients—a 600-student middle school—has reduced its waste by 1,300 pounds per week. That’s 1,300 pounds not traveling an extra 50 miles, for just one school. Imagine that environmental impact multiplied by all schools, business, and households.
By reducing transportation, composting is a great way to shrink your environmental footprint. It deserves to be part of the conversation about ways to go local.
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Gaming for Sustainability
I hate it when I’m wrong. Who doesn’t? But in this case, I’m happy to admit I was wrong about “gamification,” a concept I was introduced to at the Sustainable Brands ’11 conference in Monterey last June. My reaction was disbelief that gamification—using games to encourage users in certain behaviors—could really influence something as significant as sustainability. Now, I’m thinking gamification may really have a positive, even transformational role to play in promoting and achieving sustainability. What made me reverse my thinking? An initiative being championed and led by former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (aka The Gubenator).
I just got clued into a venture Mr. Schwarzenegger is heading with DONG Energy, a Denmark-based leader in renewable technologies, particularly wind energy, and some leaders from the United Nations. It’s a virtual/alternative universe game, along the lines of “Second Life.” Players, or perhaps the more accurate term is avatars, will be able to enter “SUSTAINIA,”an alternative universe where they will be able to apply and implement existing sustainability technologies and best practices to create a virtual reality of what our real world could look like if there was more widespread adoption and implementation of these technologies and practices.
What a great education tool for individual and corporate citizens of all ages and vocations! Due to launch sometime between June and October of this year, it might just be the first online game this IT Luddite actually engages in. I’m really excited. And, it’s got me wondering…is there an opportunity for a business-engaging NGO like GreenBlue to develop a parallel game targeted at Chief Sustainability Officers and other sustainability executives, leaders, and champions, through which they could create an virtual reality version of their companies, and create and demonstrate scenarios by which business and industry can actually redefine growth for a more sustainable future?
