Posts filed under ‘Business Ethics’
It’s never been easy being green
Stephen Evanoff
Conventional wisdom laments that today’s political atmosphere has become so polarized that the nation isn’t able to establish consensus-based national policy on contemporary environmental and conservation issues like we did in the good old days when both major political parties and the public saw eye-to-eye.
My recent reading of Timothy Egan’s, “The Big Burn – Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America” reminded me that it has never been easy being green.
Egan, a Seattle-based, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, outdoorsman, and columnist for the New York Times, tells the story of the August 1910 wildfire that consumed an area the size of Connecticut. The fire swept through parts of Montana, Idaho, Washington and British Columbia in a matter of days, wiping out entire towns, and killing more than a hundred people.
Woven into the narrative of the events around the fire is the story of how President Theodore Roosevelt and Forest Service Chief Gifford Pinchot were able to establish vast national forests. As they put it, these forests should be for the use and enjoyment of all the people, rather than for exploitation by wealthy individuals and corporations, which had been the case until then. Most of us take the concept of the National Forests for granted. Yet Egan explains how radical the concept was at the time, and points out that there were many powerful forces aligned against Roosevelt and Pinchot.
It makes the reader wonder, how on earth Roosevelt and Pinchot did it. But, Egan shows us that Roosevelt and Pinchot had powerful forces of their own: their vision of what was best for the long-term, well-being of the nation, their energy and personal commitment, and their trust in the American people. The battle of conservation of our National Forests versus consumption by private industry continued throughout the twentieth century. As the twenty-first century emerged, conservation had ultimately prevailed due to reasons both economic and ideological.
I found the story inspiring and relevant to today’s environmental challenges, be they global, national, or organizational. When applied wisely, the combination of a clear and unselfish vision, hard work, and belief in the decency and wisdom of others can overcome significant resistance.
We’ve all fought uphill battles, albeit not on the epic scale of Roosevelt and Pinchot. I’d like to hear your inspiring stories. How have you overcome resistance within your organization to proposed EHS policies? How have you persuaded entrenched interests to support EHS initiatives with long-term benefit to your organization?
Toward sustainability: Interface Inc.’s ‘Mission Zero’ journey
In 1994, Ray Anderson, founder of Interface, Inc., outlined an ambitious new vision for his company: to achieve sustainability by 2020. Lindsay Stoda, a Senior Business Analyst with the company, spoke at the recent EHS Management Forum about the metrics Interface uses to measure its sustainability progress. This week, we caught up with Lindsay to learn more about the company’s Mission Zero goals.
Lindsay Stoda
Q: Where did the Mission Zero goal come from?
LS: Sparked by questions from customers and the ideas he encountered in Paul Hawken’s book, “The Ecology of Commerce,” our founder Ray Anderson realized that business and industry were part of the larger system that was damaging the environment and that it was not going to be a sustainable future if business continued in that direction. And realizing that it was someone’s job to lead industry down that path, he decided to ask his company and his employees to be that leader.
Q: How do you measure success against your Mission Zero Goals?
LS: We’ve always followed the “What gets measured gets managed” philosophy, so our way of being able to track and ensure that we’re making progress is through four different measurement platforms:
- Eco Metrics: Measure environmental impact
- Socio Metrics: Measure social impacts
- Quest program: Measures waste elimination
- Ecosense: Measures the activities on a plant-level that contribute to our sustainability goals
Q: How did Mission Zero change the work of Interface’s EHS department?
LS: Prior to Ray’s epiphany, we had a more traditional manufacturing environment, health and safety (EHS) department focusing on safety and compliance. Today, it’s typically the same folks because the tracking of that kind of information all kind of overlaps with the sustainability roles, except that people’s EHS roles developed a sustainability-minded focus.
Q: Can you tell me about some of your efforts toward creating closed loop products?
LS: We have a strong push to create closed loop products using recycled and bio-based raw materials. This process basically involves returning the materials in used finished product back to raw materials.
For carpet tile, there are two main components: There’s the face fiber and the fluff — the surface that you walk on — and then there’s the backing, which is different from residential carpet in that it’s a vinyl backing and it’s heavier, to hold the tiles to the floor and give them dimensional stability.
We had previously been able to cut the fibers off the front, take the backing, crumble it up, melt it down and return it to backing. But now we’re able to take the nylon fibers from the face of the products, shave them off and return them to our fiber suppliers to create new face fiber with post consumer recycled content.
We bring back both our carpet as well as competitors’ products through ‘ReEntry’—our recycling program. We collect used product back from the marketplace, run it through our process, and return backing to backing and fiber to fiber. Since the program began, we have diverted more than 100,000 tons of material from landfills.
Q: One of the goals you’ve identified is providing Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for all of your InterfaceFLOR products by 2012. What does that entail?
LS: We have used life cycle assessment (LCA) for several years now as we’ve tried to evaluate different materials and processes for manufacturing our products. The Environmental Product Declaration is a 10-15 page summary of the life cycle assessment results, everything from global warming potential to toxicity to resource use throughout the entire life cycle of the product. There is a lot of different environmental information out there and we thought the most useful thing for our customers would just be to give them the facts they need to make the decisions about what type of products they’d like to purchase. So it’s really the good and the bad. It’s just the facts. We collect the data and have it third-party verified to ensure it is complete and accurate.
You can hear Lindsay talk more about using metrics during “Defining the Metrics that Matter,” part of NAEM’s Best of the 2010 Forum webinar series, on Tuesday, Nov. 16. To register, visit www.naem.org.
Alcoa’s Bill O’Rourke discusses EHS and sustainability policy
Bill O’Rourke
Vice President, Environment, Health, Safety and Sustainability
Alcoa Inc.
Valuing ecosystems services
Andrew Mangan
Ecological balance is one of the three pillars of sustainable development and without it, business cannot function. All companies affect ecosystems and benefit from the services they provide, such as fresh water, fiber, and food. They also rely on regulatory services, like climate regulation, flood control and waste treatment.
Over the past 50 years, human activity has altered ecosystems faster and more extensively than ever before. That finding was supported by the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment – a four-year, international, scientific appraisal that was completed in 2005. It concluded that most of the critical ecosystem services assessed are being degraded or used at unsustainable levels and that this will accelerate, diminishing sustainable development options and business opportunities.
Both the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the U.S. Business Council for Sustainable Development (US BCSD) have been working on ecosystems issues for 10 years. The overarching goal is that all stakeholders – including business – recognize the real benefits of ecosystems and that the true value of ecosystem services be accounted for. We’ve used gaming theory, collaborative projects and measuring tools to move toward this goal. The value and sustainable management of ecosystems must become a more integral part of economic planning and decision-making; otherwise nature will always play second fiddle to social and economic development.
With today’s communication tools, we have a unique opportunity to help business leaders understand the value of ecosystem services and their local opportunities. The current efforts of the WBCSD are focused on identifying risks and opportunities (using the Corporate Ecosystem Services Review) and quantifying the economic value of ecosystem services and strategies to businesses. The US BCSD was one of 16 WBCSD companies and regional councils that participated in a “road test” of the WBCSD Ecosystem Valuation Initiative in 2010. A guide based on that initiative describes the effectiveness of various ecosystem valuation models and tools. The final guide is expected to be published in 2011. Details will be laid out at the fall meeting of the US BCSD in Indianapolis on October 12 and presented at the 18th annual EHS Management Forum on October 14.
The US BCSD plans to establish working groups with volunteers from interested companies to help identify projects, set implementation plans, evaluate potential funders and reach out to relevant university programs. Using a project-based focus that builds on its ecosystem experience, including the US BCSD’s green brownfields project and its afforestation efforts in the Lower Mississippi River valley, the council plans to play a role in supporting healthy ecosystems for a long time to come. After many years, it appears that today, the business community, NGOs and academics are gradually realizing they share the same concerns, but simply approach them in different ways.
Andrew Mangan is the Executive Director of the U.S. Business Council for Sustainable Development. He will be speaking about ecosystems services at the 18th annual EHS Management Forum, October 13-15 in Indianapolis.
What are the green metrics that really matter?
Carol Singer Neuvelt
The world of environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance analytics is exploding at a breakneck speed. What once was a niche field of socially responsible investing (SRI), is transforming into a vast marketplace of financial ESG-oriented indices, ratings firms, carbon reporting and mass-market editorials like Newsweek’s Green 100 ranking. Today the trend toward broader ESG and sustainability reporting is beginning to expand into auxiliary areas such as supplier questionnaires and product labeling.
With all this activity, it seems like everyone has an opinion about which metrics determine a company’s “greenness.” What remains unclear, however, is whether these types of ratings schemes can truly illustrate competitive eco-advantage in today’s complex global marketplace, or even reliably reflect strong EHS and sustainability management within a company.
When this movement took hold a decade ago, many corporate environmental leaders were excited that the external world was finally paying attention to the value their efforts contributed to the bottom line. Indeed, the establishment of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, the growth of financial firms such as KLD and even the creation of the Carbon Disclosure Project were viewed as affirmations of their professional focus.
But recently, my conversations with corporate EHS leaders seem to reflect a frustration with the ever-growing number of requests. As environmental managers spend more and more time crunching data, they do so with little insight into who the requesting firm is, what their business interests are or how the mountains of data will eventually be used. What we do know is that some of this information is being used to make material judgments about a company’s long-term prospects. Yet does any of this data really indicate true progress?
I believe there is a need for a clear, thoughtful approach to ESG and Sustainability reporting that reflects the performance metrics that are both meaningful to a company and useful to its C-suite leadership, and relevant to external stakeholders.
To address this issue, NAEM has launched its ‘Green Metrics that Matter’ program, an audit of the field of ESG and Sustainability analytics. Our final report will identify the key players, the proprietary benefits of participating with them and the core metrics EHS leaders send to their C-suite. We believe this insight will help promote better decision-making by both corporate users and the broader ESG community.
As we continue our research, we would like to invite you to share your key metrics with us through our confidential online survey. We’d also love to hear your thoughts on this project. How are sustainability analytics changing how you manage? Are the questions you’re being asked the right ones for determining the extent of your environmental stewardship? Is this information truly helping the public better understand whether your products are sustainable? Or is it just an additional paperwork burden?
I eat sustainably because I care
Kelvin Roth
Some people have asked why I’m writing about food on a blog ostensibly dedicated to EHS and Sustainability business matters. Well here’s my short answer – because I care.
As Joe Fiksel so nicely pointed out in his recent post, there are several approaches to sustainability from a corporate perspective. But I firmly believe that sustainability is a ground-up grassroots individual-driven issue. No company is “sustainable” because of government regulations, shareholder referendums or board resolutions. Those may all eventually happen, but sparks of “sustainability” occur when someone in the organization cares and they are able to express it’s importance and get others involved.
Although people often equate sustainability with sacrifice and compromise, food is the one area where it’s relatively easy to do the right thing. A friend of mine once said that if he started on a quest to find the most sustainably-raised shrimp and I started on a quest to find the tastiest shrimp, we would end up in the same place with the same shrimp. This is true about so many items within our food chain. The Slow Food movement has summed up this experience in a common saying – “Eat it to save it!” – and I like to modify that a little bit to “Eat the best to save the best.”
Food sustainability is something that we can all participate in every day. This has never been truer than for the Gulf fishers and foragers who have survived this summer’s catastrophic spill. Shrimp season is now open and Gulf shrimp are not only some of the tastiest shrimp you can get, but also some of the most sustainably raised/harvested shrimp. Gulf shrimp fisheries have been effective in maintaining stocks, researching habitat effects, and addressing by-catch issues.
This presents us with a true “eat it to save it” opportunity: The largest potential damage to the Gulf fishing/food community may, like the oil spill itself, be man-made – a marketplace that is hollowed out by fear of contaminated food, even if it’s actually safe to eat.
Although many fishers and foragers were (are still) directly affected by the Gulf oil spill, the Gulf food community is not dead. Shrimp, shellfish, and other seafood from the Gulf that have been green-lighted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program are still making their way to market and to restaurants near you.
There are many safeguards in place, not the least of which is a community of proud artisans who care not only about the profits, but the craft of their labors. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has also been sampling seafood both in closed and open waters, and sending it off for chemical testing. There are even “seafood sniffers” – state and local inspectors who have been trained to literally sniff out traces of oil contamination on seafood.
“There’s nothing wrong with Gulf seafood, because it’s tested probably more than any seafood that’s being removed right now,” retired Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen told reporters during a press briefing last week (August 18).
So if you can find Gulf-area food at a market or restaurant near you, buy it and feel good about supporting fishers, foragers and a food community in dire straits. There may be no better time for eaters, foodies and chefs to support an important economic backbone of the Gulf and country – and you can do it all by eating something tasty… how easy is that?
Defining the S-word
Dr. Joseph Fiksel
If ever there were a word that was used loosely in the business community, it is “sustainability”. This label has been applied to almost any corporate activity that shows sensitivity to human values, from charitable donations to “green” chemistry research. Traditional environmental health and safety programs are lumped in along with energy efficiency, waste recycling, labor practices, business ethics, and diversity. For this reason, many companies have chosen to avoid the S-word, and use other terms such as “corporate responsibility” and “citizenship.”
Of course, different definitions of sustainability abound. Here’s my preferred definition: “A sustainable enterprise is a company that achieves enduring growth and superior long-term financial performance by addressing the social, economic, and environmental needs of present and future generations of stakeholders.”What’s yours?To go further, I would argue that in practice there are three levels of corporate sustainability:
Passive sustainability – This is an extension of the old compliance mentality. Companies try to respond to stakeholder expectations by adopting “best practices”such as commissioning LEED buildings and purchasing carbon credits. Essentially, this is a way to stay even with competitors and does not employ sustainability as a source of competitive advantage.
Adaptive sustainability – This is a more active approach in which companies try to be alert to changes in the business environment that could represent risks or opportunities. For example, anticipated regulations or projected shortages of critical raw materials might lead a company to redesign its products or manufacturing processes in order to remain cost-competitive. This requires frequent reexamination of sustainability goals and company practices.
Resilience - This is an emerging approach that has been adopted by a few companies such as Dow Chemical Co. and Cisco Systems Inc. Resilience can be defined as “the capacity to survive, adapt and grow in the face of turbulent change.”In a complex and tightly connected global economy, with supply chains extending around the world, it is impossible to predict future changes in technologies, markets, and political conditions. Instead, resilient companies deliberately design their products and supply chain processes to overcome unforeseen disruptions and to rapidly seize opportunities. This strengthens both short-term business continuity and long-term sustainability. Of course, corporate responsibility is an essential component of enterprise resilience.
Which business model best describes your company?
Dr. Joseph Fiksel is the Executive Director of the Center for Resilience at The Ohio State University and co-founder of the consulting firm Eco-Nomics LLC, an internationally recognized authority on sustainable business practices. His latest book, Design for Environment: A Guide to Sustainable Product Development, was published by McGraw-Hill in 2009.
