Melodies in Marketing

Aluminum Association Sets 75% Recycling Rate Goal by 2015 - That is for beverage containers; the current rate is about 54%. 50 billion aluminum cans end up in landfills each year in America. The goal is to be met through partnerships, education, and additional options. See article for details.
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California Launches Green Chemistry Program - This through the passage of two laws which will give research authority to the Department of Toxic Substances Control, policy advisement to officials by scientists, and a new online Toxics Information Clearinghouse for businesses and consumers. While great, it’s a simple first step and still far short of Europe’s REACH program.
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Johnson Controls’ GreenPrint Consumer Education Portal - What else to call a website that educates the public on their environmental footprint in everyday life? See www.mygreenprint.org ; It’s interesting, but I must say that whenever I first come to a website and am asked to fill out a form before continuing, my willingness to proceed drops to the floor. What are you really doing with my data? In this case, even if the short form is meant to compare your score to others across the nation, put it at the very end dummy! You spent all this money with an agency to build your online education app, yet I’m quite curious how many really go pass that first hurdle you threw at them. Since it’s in flash, I hope the agency built some kind of measurement tool to ascertain that data. Sorry for the rant, but I hate poor information design especially when it’s for a good cause.
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USDA Revises Rules on Organic Milk and Cow Grazing Requirements - Apparently there’s been many loopholes in the organic dairy market. The revisions would require that “the cows be on pasture at least half the year and get plenty of fresh grass.”
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A Look Inside the Hazy World of Compostable Packaging - Despite the fanfare around bioplastics and a sustainable packaging industry with options galore, manufacturers and retail buyers are wary. This article goes in depth into the field. Fascintating!
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5 Big U.S. Corporations Launch Climate Change and Energy Organization - Nike, Starbucks, Sun Micro, Timberland, and Levi Strauss joined together, in association with CERES, to create the Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy. This org will aim to affect change in the industry and pursue legislation according to eight principles. See the article for details (via Environmental Leader).
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AskNature.org - Biomimicry Design Database - Sponsored by Autodesk (big design software firm), the website features design strategies inspired by nature and biology. http://asknature.org/
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Ink Choices Affect Sustainable Packaging - This article goes into some depth, but here’s the gist. “A package’s composition includes the ink, and that influences recycling options…some [package printing] inks are even formulated for more seamless removal during the later manufacturing or recycling process”. Using low VOC inks is also important, not just for the environment but also for worker safety.
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Sustainable Sourcing Guidelines for London 2012 Olympics - An official London Olympic committee published a first draft of purchasing guidelines for products and services, ensuring that they’re responsibly sourced and have a minimal environmental impact.
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Makower’s Four Steps to Green Marketing - Another white paper by our main man Joel Makower. It’s an excerpt from his book (excellent btw), and reflects the approach taken at the consultancy GreenOrder, of which he’s a partner. The steps are: Credibility, Relevance, Effective messaging, and Differentiation. See the article for details.
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Global Recycling Standard for Textiles Launched - By an organization called Control Union Certifications. No clue on their legitimacy or ability to effect change, but their certification is meant to identify by tiers the percentage of recycled fibers a material contains. This way manufacturers can back up claims they’re making, and purchasers can be more confident.
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Interview: Amory Lovins on Energy Efficiency - He says it’s the key, and I believe him. Usually economics is the determinant if people use less of something. But while I’m usually a free marketer at heart, I have absolutely no faith that marketing “efficiency” nor economics will affect purchasing behavior anytime soon - let’s push stricter regulation and goals now. Heck, Wal-Mart is pushing this field in its own areas of interest.
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Obama’s Environmental Policies Need to Address Human Behavior - A well written article by the Guardian, highlighting how regulation and legislative policies are helpful, but alone will not affect the real kind of systemic change needed. Human and business behavior needs to be influenced through psychology - a challenge indeed.
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Star Index Helps Rate Sustainable Cities - An audacious and well-strucutred approach bringing together the USGBC and the Center for American Progress. Set to launch in 2010.
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Big Drop in Recyclables Market - As reported a few weeks ago in the UK, the effects are hitting America too as the NY Times blog briefly reports.
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Unions and Environmentalists Working Together Toward Change - The recent regulations at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach were helped pass through a unique partnership between union leaders and environmentalists. This LA Times article examines how traditionally these two parties have had conflicting interests in influencing business and politics, yet here they came together quite well.
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Interview with Sustainable Designer, Nathan Shedroff - So I brought you his video presentation. But if you’re further interested in the subject, see the article for a pretty good interview.
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Pre-Registration for REACH Ends December 1 - The effect is that American chemical companies selling/exporting to Europe have to prove their products are safe. Some smaller firms will opt out. American public media has the complete story and audio podcast.

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[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 30min]

Date: June 5, 2008

Location: Sustainable Brands 08 - Monterey, California
Organizer: Sustainable Life Media, Business & Industry News for Sustainability

Speaker: Mark Lee - CEO, SustainAbility

Summary:
The history and future of future of sustainability is illustrated through waves, as Mark Lee explains in this presentation. He first looks at the last four decades highlighting the public’s concerns, business community’s reactions, and the role of governance and regulation. Then Mark addresses a few of the largest sustainability issues other than climate change, and gives us some models for systemic change.

Review:
Mark does a great job in describing how we got where we are today, and what social values and environmental concerns were the driving current in each series of waves. What I found particularly interesting was his mentioning that climate change as the dominating topic among many conferences he’d been to lately, was overshadowing other important concerns and divides (between rich and underdeveloped countries). By looking at the ten divides at the 11:50 marker in the video, you can quickly imagine all the different NGOs and individuals working across the sustainability spectrum.

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[Multimedia Link for Feedreader/Email/Other Subscribers]

What I particularly like about this company is its approach to turning the business of recyclable waste management on its head. Currently all curbside recyclables are hauled away for a fee, yet RecycleBank gives you merchandise credits for selected retailers. Nice! But while that may be a nifty business model I could ravenously chat away about, expounding on how the incentive approach is a great way for people to improve their garbage sortation habits, I prefer to talk about the multimedia below.

Never before have I seen such a sophisticated use of flash. The movie below has 8 scenes with playhead bookmarks within each, an embedding option, and scene/movie download capability for multiple devices. Now to be honest, I believe allowing people to download the presentation for iPod and PSP is just superfluous waste that RecycleBank shouldn’t have paid for. Sure there’s utility, but it’s novel and not of useful, long-term value. If this was a music video, I’d understand, which this application as a template is probably best used for. This particular use is best for education and sharing.

There’s a couple features left to be desired from a marketing perspective:

• Send to Friend / Email - The best way to allow others to promote your content without hassle. Blog and social media embedding is nice, but more technically complicated.
• Website Link - In great sales presentations, many people don’t need to listen to the rest of your pitch - they’re already sold. In person, they can interrupt and ask to be taken to the next step. But online they don’t have that option unless you give it to them. The folly of this particular multimedia is that there’s no quick link to RecycleBank’s website. It’s hidden as an in-movie link at the end of the last scene. Look at many embeddable multimedia objects however, and somewhere you’ll see a link back to the host company’s website, or the client’s homepage therein.

With that said, enjoy the show! The animation is great.

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[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 20min]

Nathan Shedroff is seen here speaking at the “Digging Deeper” Event hosted by the IDSA in SF last summer (graciously captured for us by the folks at Lunar Design). Here are some of the highlights of the presentation.

LCAs (life cycle analyses) are accurate, but they require a lot of data and are expensive. However, their results may not give us the expected answers we’re looking for to make a clear design decision. A seemingly ‘green’ product may have in many areas an equal score to a perceived ‘unsustainable’ product. So by themselves, LCAs aren’t great design tools.

An SROI (social return on investment) is important as a secondary consideration in design. ‘Green’ products made with bioplastic or recyclable materials - whatever have you - could be made irresponsibly with cheap labor in unhealthy environments. The major problem with social attributes is that the grading mechanisms and value assessments are subjective. What is fair and equitable? Secondly, how do we ethically decide between project scenarios with relatively higher/lower social and financial ROIs?

The reality is that there’s no way to satisfy all the desired criteria for a project, nor even know all the attributes and potential scenarios. Thus it’s designers’ responsibility to at least know the basics, keep them in mind, and rely on expert advice as needed.

Inspirational frameworks for these ‘basics’ may include the Hannover Principles, Cradle to Cradle, Biomimicry, Sustainable Helix, Natural Capitalism, The Natural Step, The Designers Accord, and tools like Lunar’s Designers Field Guide to Sustainability. While no framework/tool/philosophy is perfect and all encompassing, they are greatly helpful.

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[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 30min]

Date: June 3, 2008

Location: Sustainable Brands 08 - Monterey, California
Organizer: Sustainable Life Media, Business & Industry News for Sustainability

Speaker: Jeffrey Hollender - CEO & Co-founder, Seventh Generation Inc.

Summary:
Culture – the most elusive element of competitive advantage –is frequently organically grown. However, as a business grows, culture needs to be nurtured, protected, and yes, in many cases, formalized to preserve the uniqueness that defined the brand. Seventh Generation’s unique culture permeates the brand from the inside out. Hear Seventh Generation’s visionary President Jeffery Hollender discuss the challenges and opportunities of creating, and maintaining a unique culture focused on sustainability through periods of extraordinary growth.

Review:
An inspirational speaker to say the least. As he mentions in his speech, a big influence on Seventh Generation came from the teachings of Peter Senge and applied systemic thinking to organizational behavior. The one area he mentioned that struck me particularly, was the notion of two-sided companies where the left hand is doing good, and the right hand is causing harm or engaging in a contentious industry. An example could be a cause-related campaign or charitable activities (left hand), while selling dangerous chemicals or weapons (right hand). Or you could consider a conglomerate where certain subsidiaries are good/benign, and others are questionable/bad. Yes the labels are subjective and subject to personal opinion, but the point is clear: Activities not aligned with the safety or betterment of society are a hindrance on a company’s moral character, and good deeds can’t just easily balance the equation.

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If you’re seriously interested in the topic of sustainability and business, I recommend you check out Sustainable Brands International in Miami, Dec. 9-11.

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Charles R. Zimmerman is the vice-president of Prototype and New Format Development for Wal-Mart. His specialty is in energy management for retail buildings. On November 9th at UCLA, I attended a presentation by him. These are the proceedings.

Following some quick opening remarks, Charles first asked everyone to stand up, raise their hand, and pledge to make energy efficiency a priority in their home. Nowhere else do we as individuals have as much influence and control in our lives - we should take advantage of that opportunity. Then Charles mentioned having seen only two CFL bulbs in the building, and that in the speakers waiting area he saw a variety of lights on that served absolutely no purpose. He shut them off. The point was definitely not missed. Being that this was a conference about sustainability at a well-known university that like many others is trying to green itself up, incandescent bulbs are everywhere and being on with no one around, that’s a lot of wasted energy.

Among all their stores worldwide, their U.S. stores are the most energy efficient. Why? Because Wal-Mart’s philosophy is that EDLC (Everyday Low Cost) -> EDLP (Everyday Low Price). In order to be profitable and keep prices low, attacking and reducing costs is the only way to go. For WM, energy is their 2nd largest expense. But it is a controllable expense. Their goals are to consistently beat California’s standards, and a 20% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in existing stores by 2012.

White roofs and skylights are the standardized across stores, and according to Charles are the most important first steps to take before considering photovoltaics. White roofs allow for them to realize an 8-10% cooling load reduction. Imagine the difference it’d make if that was mandatory across all roofs in sunny states. Additionally, they have what’s known as a daylight harvesting system which monitors the available light on the salesfloors, and progressively dim and brighten the store throughout the day. Charles showed us a graph with a wave sequence of peaks and valleys, with energy consumption on the y-axis and the hours of the day on the x-axis for a one week period. Minute spikes appeared here and there, indicating the presence of a cloud or other occurrence. This system was piloted in 1995 and is now in roughly 2,700 stores. They cost $250k per store, save $100k per year, and have a 2.5 year payback period.

Also regarding lighting is the use of LEDs for exterior signage and parking lots. The interesting thing is that the primary savings from LEDs is not from energy, but rather the maintenance cost of replacing fluorescent bulbs every two years.

HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning) is another big area they’ve tackled, by shoving manufacturers to innovate much further than the going technical specs in the marketplace, along with implementing variable speed fans and motors. A particular innovation they’re excited about is what’s known as  CO2 Secondary Loop refrideration system. This requires 60-80% less refridgerant, reduces 60,000 tons of CO2, results in fewer spoiled products from variable cooling, and lower maintenance costs. Next, they installed heat reclamation systems from fridges and other sources to heat their water systems.

Capping this all off, is a centralized energy monitoring and management system linked directly to their Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters. This system allows them to see for example that store #626 in Pensacola, Florida has a warehouse door unnecessarily open, and they can call the store to let them know. Talk about Big Brother huh? As Charles said it best, store managers and associates should only need to mind to their job functions and keep customers happy.

Wal-Mart doesn’t just want to keep these savings for itself. They’re sharing best practices with government agencies, universities, and other retailers so they can realize the benefits too. They have enough strength and clout that competitors becoming more energy efficient and saving money couldn’t make a small difference to them. It’s simply the right thing to do.

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[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 64min]

Date: Nov. 8, 2008
Organizer: Opportunity Green

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