BrightFarms: Scaling salad, locally

May 20, 2013

image_11Paul Lightfoot, the CEO of BrightFarms, pitched his company during an American Idol-like panel called Great Green Ideas at Fortune Brainstorm Green. He didn’t win the audience vote, but I think BrightFarms is a great idea, so I decided to write about the company for Guardian Sustainable Business.

BrightFarms builds hydroponic greenhouses in cities to grow lettuces, tomatoes and herbs for supermarkets. Retail chains are intrigued: They can satisfy their consumer’ appetite for local food, and be assured of a predictable supply of healthy, fresh vegetables. While hydroponic farming isn’t new, BrightFarms has developed an innovative business model that should enable the company to finance its expansion.

The result is that BrightFarms is growing (pun intended) at a nice clip. This month, it announced plans to build a greenhouse in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

Here’s how my story  begins:

Most of the organic baby greens sold in Washington DC supermarkets are not “green” at all. They’re grown in the Salinas Valley in California, which has been called the most hydrologically altered landmass on the planet. Then they are shipped in refrigerated trucks roughly 2,800 miles across America.

Paul Lightfoot thinks there’s a better way to get fresh lettuce, tomatoes and herbs into the hands of supermarket shoppers. Lightfoot is chief executive of a startup called BrightFarms, which builds and operates urban, hydroponic greenhouse farms. The company operates a greenhouse farm in Philadelphia, it’s building another on a massive rooftop in Brooklyn, and it is developing farms in St Louis, Kansas City, St Paul and Oklahoma City.

You can read the rest here.

Paul Lightfoot

Paul Lightfoot

The aptly-named Paul Lightfoot, by the way, is a marathon runner, which naturally predisposed me to like him and BrightFarms. He joins a distinguished group of “green” marathon runners including Mark Tercek of The Nature Conservancy, Paul Polman of Unilever, “Speedy” Seth Goldman of Honest Tea, Tony Hansen of Fortune Brainstorm Green, Jason Graham-Nye of gDiapers, DOE solar guru Christina Nichols, ethical sourcing expert Melissa Schweisguth, Natalie Bailey of the Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group and Sheryl O’Loughlin of the Nest Collective. If I’ve forgotten anyone, by all means let me know by email or in the comments.

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Seafood is having its Portlandia moment

May 19, 2013

nonflash-1

Cooking for Solutions is a delightful annual conference, fund-raiser and celebration of seafood sustainability produced every spring by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m just back from the 2013 event, and there is reason to feel good about the progress the seafood industry is making.

Consumers, chefs and, most importantly, major retailers in the US and Europe are more aware than ever that the choices we make about what kinds of fish to eat–and not to eat–have an impact on the health and sustainability of global fisheries.

The result is that, in the last decade or so, virtually every major retailer and food service company in the US and EU has adopted a seafood sustainability policy. Some are stronger than others, but the issue is on the agenda and not going away.

“Large corporations may very well turn out to be our angels of salvation,” said Matt Elliott, an oceans expert at California Environmental Associates, which last year published a landmark report on global fishing practices.

You could say that seafood is having its Portlandia moment. I’m referring, of course, to the hilarious scene on the cable TV show in which a couple interrogate a waitress about the chicken on the menu. (“How much room did the chicken have to roam?”) Chefs who gathered last week in Monterey told me that they are asked by diners if their salmon is wild or farm-raised, and whether their shrimp is local or imported from Asia.

By themselves, consumers can’t drive changes in fishing practices. But when consumers make themselves heard, and emerge as part of a larger ecosystem that includes activist NGOs such as Greenpeace, business-friendly environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, certifying bodies like the flawed but important Marine Stewardship Council and brands like Whole Foods Market and Darden, change happens. Regulation of the oceans–a public commons if ever there was one–is important, but markets, too, can drive sustainability. [click to continue...]

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Mosaic: Solar power, people power

May 15, 2013
Solar panels on the roof of the Wildwoods Convention Center

Solar panels on the roof of the Wildwoods Convention Center

I’ve never been to Wildwood, New Jersey. Most likely, I’ll never go. But with a click or two on my laptop, I just invested $100 in a 487 kw solar project on the roof of the Wildwoods Convention Center in Wildwood, on the Jersey shore, thanks to Mosaic.

Like Kickstarter, which enables ordinary people to support a variety of projects that grab their attention, Mosaic is an Internet crowdfunding platform.  But Mosaic for now focuses exclusively on solar energy and, unlike Kickstarter, it promises its investors a return–in my case, a 4.5 percent annual yield over the next 110 months.  That’s a lot better than 10-year US Treasury bonds that currently return just 1.66 percent a year, and a whole lot better than my money market fund at Vanguard which current returns 0.01 percent. [Of course, investing in solar is also more risky than buying a money market fund--see the addendum below.]

What’s more, I get to support solar power–which won’t work on the roof of my own home in Bethesda, Md., because it is surrounded by tall trees.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Mosaic since last September when I met one of its founders, Billy Parish, in Washington, D.C.  Billy subsequently came to Fortune Brainstorm Green this month, and we caught up the other day by phone. Since Mosaic began offering solar investments to a broad public in January, the company has raised about $2.1 million from about 1,500 investors. That’s impressive.

“The idea is that people should be able to invest in, and own clean energy,” Billy told me. “We need trillions of dollars in the coming decades to invest in clean energy. We just substitute the crowd for the bank.”

Think about it–Mosaic is financing distributed energy, using distributed funders, collected over the Internet, the ultimate distributed platform. This is decentralized power at its best. [click to continue...]

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A politician who isn’t afraid to talk about overconsumption

May 13, 2013

Business Week recently ran a good story by Joel Stein headlined How Jerry Brown Scared California Straight.

Jerry Brown, being sworn in as California governor in 1975

Jerry Brown, being sworn in as California governor in 1975

Mostly it’s about how Brown cleaned up California’s fiscal mess. I was struck by the fact that, unlike most members of Congress, and our president, who generally tell people what they want to hear, Brown is a grownup who isn’t afraid to say what he thinks. Maybe that’s what happens when you turn 75 and you have been in politics forever. You get tired of pandering. Brown was first elected governor of California in 1975, for crying out loud.

Anyway, here’s my favorite passage:

Brown believes California has been led for too long by “I want.” His office at the Capitol is empty except for two photographs, some books, a couch, a coffee table, and a thick wooden table with a monastic bench. Many of his staff offices are empty, too, since he has barely any staff; the governor doesn’t employ a chief of staff or speechwriter.

This is a man who remembers World War II ration cards with fondness. “This idea you can have ice cream every night? Ice cream was for your birthday,” he says about his childhood. “It wasn’t an austere world. In fact, it was a normal world. It’s only austere juxtaposing the indulgence, the overconsumption, the profligacy—people don’t like those words because part of our economic growth is buying all this stuff.” Brown, who took a vow of poverty and chastity and lived in near-total silence while studying for the priesthood in the late 1950s, cites the Jesuit philosophy of tantum quantum: take what you need.

The best line: “Ice cream was for your birthday.” We need more leaders like Jerry Brown. The rest is here.

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Environmental Defense Fund: Why Walmart’s sustainability index matters

May 12, 2013
Alisha Staggs of EDF

Alisha Staggs of EDF

Last month, I wrote three blogposts adding up to more than 2,000 words about Walmart’s supplier sustainability index. I did so because I think it’s a big deal, but skeptics remain. Some people simply can’t accept the fact that Walmart can do anything that’s good for its people or the planet.

In a guest post, Alisha Staggs of the Environmental Defense Fund reacts to my blogposts and argues that the Walmart index will, in fact, have a meaningful impact. Alisha works for EDF in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart is based. She works on the supplier index and with The Sustainability Consortium, a broader coalition of retailers, brands and NGOs that is developing ways to identify and measure the most important environmental and social impacts of consumer products. Alisha is trained as a biologist and has an MBA from the University of Arkansas.

Here’s what Alisha has to say, and I’ll offer a concluding comment or two below.

In Marc Gunther’s recent article “Walmart’s index: a real life toy story,” he calls the Walmart supplier Sustainability Index, “the biggest environmental initiative in the company’s history,” and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) agrees. He also questions whether “Walmart is taking this too far”” and “how the world’s largest retailer is exercising its market power.”

With a 25-year track record challenging companies to make decisions that are good for the environment and the economy, we at EDF are used to asking these types of tough questions.

That’s precisely why we have an EDF office based in Bentonville dedicated solely to working together with Walmart to advance sustainability. Because we don’t take money from the company, we can push hard to achieve the kinds of transformational change of which it is capable.

When it comes to the Sustainability Index, we’re on board. And here’s why: [click to continue...]

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Free market environmentalism

May 6, 2013

AlfedPalmersmokestacksI believe in the power of markets.

I believe in environmental protection.

I believe in limited government.

Can those beliefs be reconciled?

I believe they can, even though environmental problems are often seen, correctly, as a form of market failure. We can’t allow businesses or individuals to pollute public goods such as rivers, or the air, or the earth’s atmosphere. The question is, how do we best correct those failures?

My preference is for strong and simple regulation or taxation, designed to (1) recognize the power of competitive markets to generate wealth and aggregate information to devise the best solutions to problems and (2) minimize, as much as possible, the ability of powerful interests to game the system, i.e., crony capitalism.

These are, obviously, complicated questions, perhaps best left to environmental economists. But I took a crack at the issue of clean energy policy in a column just published by Ensia, a lively, online environmental magazine published by the by the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.

The column ran under the headline A Market-Friendly Approach to Energy. Here’s how it begins:

The world needs clean energy. Clean energy subsidies? Maybe not.

Consider the Fisker Karma, an electric car with a base price of $95,900.  A friend of mine bought one. He earned $7 million last year, and took advantage of a $7,500 U.S. federal tax credit available to buyers of electric cars.

Fisker itself got government help, too, in the form of $192 million from the U.S. Department of Energy. So did A123 Systems, which sold battery packs to Fisker; it got $129 million in energy department grants and another $125 million in tax credits and grants from the state of Michigan.

None of this helped Fisher, A123 or, more importantly, the planet.

The column goes on to argue against the vast array of subsidies to clean energy and fossil fuels favored today by the federal government and many states, and instead proposes a carbon tax. (Ideally, a revenue-neutral carbon tax.) A carbon tax would discourage dirty energy and promote  clean energy, without favoring solar or wind or biofuels or nuclear or electric cars.

The column concludes:

…Contrary to popular wisdom, we don’t need a comprehensive national energy policy any more than we need a comprehensive food strategy to stock supermarket shelves or a comprehensive laptop strategy to keep Apple or Dell in business. What markets do very well is separate winners from losers. As the economist Michael Giberson put it: “When values are diverse and knowledge is dispersed, letting a thousand energy strategies bloom really is the best approach.” To do that, we have to get the government out of the way.

You can read the rest here. While you’re at it, take a look at the excellent journalism being published by Ensia.

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General Motors, Coca-Cola, NRG Energy: Sustainability leaders at Brainstorm Green

May 5, 2013
General Motors' Dan Akerson at Brainstorm Green

General Motors’ Dan Akerson at Brainstorm Green

Dan Akerson, the chief of executive of General Motors, loves the Chevy Volt. Bea Perez of Coca-Cola is backing inventor Dean Kamen, who wants to take a water-purification machine to the global south. David Crane, the chief executive of NRG Energy, would like to see solar panels on half the rooftops in America.

They all spoke at Fortune Brainstorm Green, the magazine’s conference about business and the environment conference, last week in Laguna Niguel, CA. I’ve been co-chair of Brainstorm Green since its launch in 2008, and, as I wrote the other day, I’ve felt uncomfortable at times when the tone of the event becomes too celebratory, given the scale of the environmental problems we face. Having said that, today I want to showcase a few business executives who are emerging as sustainability leaders.

One is Dan Akerson of GM, the stodgiest and most bureaucratic of the US automakers. A newcomer to Detroit–he is a Naval Academy graduate who made a fortune in private equity at Carlyle, before taking over at GM in 2010–Akerson that his predecessors had been “part of the problem, rather than the solution” when they stood in the way of  regulators who wanted to raise fuel-efficiency standards for cars, and he said the auto industry had been slow to recognize the threat of climate change. Hours after he spoke at Brainstorm Green, GM became the biggest company and the first automaker to endorse the climate declaration from CERES and its BICEP (Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy) coalition. [click to continue...]

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Fortune Brainstorm Green, and the limits of corporate sustainability

May 2, 2013
Harrison Ford at Fortune Brainstorm Green

Harrison Ford at Fortune Brainstorm Green

The 2013 edition of Fortune’s Brainstorm Green conference was, by most accounts, a hit. We had a record number of attendees, including more than 50 CEOs of companies and nonprofits, big and small; plenty of entertaining and informative conversation; and a healthy dose of fun, with celebs like Harrison Ford, will.i.am and (my favorite) ultra marathon runner Scott Jurek. As co-chair of the event since the first Brainstorm Green in 2008, I love to reconnect with colleagues and sources, meet new folks and learn from and, occasionally, by inspired by our top-notch speakers. The theme of the conference has been a constant: How can business profitably help solve the world’s most important environmental problems?

Unavoidably, the challenge of an event like Brainstorm Green (as well as a conundrum for anyone who writes about corporate sustainability) turns on the question of how much to cheer or jeer the efforts of companies that are trying to “go green.” My job, as I see it, is to do both–to applaud the leaders, to prod the laggards, and to do my best to tell one from the other. That’s difficult balance to do in a conference setting where the mood is one of bonhomie, where the speakers are our “guests,” and where the presumption is that everyone is doing the best they can. The trouble is, that’s usually not good enough.

Mark Tercek at Brainstorm Green

Mark Tercek at Brainstorm Green

As Mark Tercek, the CEO of The Nature Conservancy, who I interviewed at Brainstorm Green, put it in his excellent new book, Nature’s Fortune:

Nearly every precious bit of nature–teeming coral reefs, sweeping grasslands, lush forests, the rich diversity of life istelf–is in decline. Everything humanity should reduce–suburban sprawl, deforestation, overfishing, carbon emissions–has increased.

Sad but true.

So if corporate America is changing for the better when it comes to the environment–and no doubt, many companies are–the pace of change is too slow and the ambitions of business leaders are too modest. Incremental change is not getting us where we need to go. [click to continue...]

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What’s for breakfast? Time to get Beyond Eggs.

April 28, 2013

Next time you dig into a breakfast of fried eggs, or enjoy a cupcake from your favorite bakery, or boil some egg noodles, don’t stop and think about the chicken that laid those eggs. You may lose your appetite.

According to the Animal Welfare Institute:

More than 95% of the approximately 280 million egg-laying hens in the United States are confined to barren battery cages where they are crowded and deprived of the ability to perform natural behaviors such as exploring, nesting, perching, dust bathing, or simply stretching their wings. Birds endure painful beak trimming, stand on wire floors that cripple their legs, breathe toxic air, and live their entire lives under unnatural, dim lighting.

A chicken lives its life on a footprint no bigger than an iPad. Imagine living the rest of your life just where you are sitting right now, crowded on every side by other humans, unable to move. You’d go insane, as Bruce Friedrich of Farm Sanctuary argues in this excellent essay. He calls eggs from caged hens “the cruelest of all factory farm products.”

If you’re indifferent to the suffering of animals, consider that factory-farmed chickens have a big environmental footprint, albeit not as big as beef or pork. I couldn’t find any peer-reviewed life cycle analyses of eggs but, according to Slate, egg-laying hens are fed lots of grain, they’re pumped with antibiotics and they generate a lot of waste.

(And, if you want to get really grossed-out, read this long story that the Washington Post published just last week about the use of toxic chemicals to kill bacteria in plants that process chickens for meat.)

Josh Tetrick

Josh Tetrick

Josh Tetrick, the CEO and founder of Hampton Creek Foods, is convinced that there’s a better way. He wants to take America Beyond Eggs.

Beyond Eggs, according to Josh, is a healthier, safer, environmentally-friendly, plant-based ingredient for egg-based food products. And unlike the pricey, all natural, organic, free range eggs on sale at Whole Foods, Hampton Creek’s egg substitutes cost less than most of the eggs on the supermarket shelf. [click to continue...]

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Easy rider: Can e-bicycles take off in America?

April 22, 2013
The Faraday Porteur e-bicycle

The Faraday Porteur e-bicycle

As a way to get from here to there, bicycles have a lot to offer. Biking is good for your health. It’s good for the planet. It’s cheaper than driving or public transit. Getting people out of cars and onto bikes eases traffic congestion, too.

But, for a host of reasons, not everyone can bike for transportation. Electric bicycles will expand the number of people who can — by making cycling easier, a bit quicker and less sweaty (which matters if you are commuting to work.)

Outside of the US, electric bicycles are doing really well–much better than electric cars, it turns out. Can they make it America? That’s the topic of my story which has just been published on the excellent YaleEnviromment360 website.

Here’s how it begins:

Most Americans know about Tesla, the Chevy Volt, and the Nissan Leaf. But what about Evelo, the eZip Trailz, and the Faraday Porteur?

The first three are, of course, electric cars. They benefit from a lot of media attention and generous government subsidies, including a $7,500 tax credit for buyers in the United States. The latter are electric bicycles, and they attract neither.

Yet Americans bought as many electric bicycles as they did electric cars last year. About 53,000 electric bicycles were sold, according to Dave Hurst, an analyst with Navigant Research who tracks the industry. Electric car sales came in at 52,835.

Globally, electric bicycles outsell electric cars by a wide margin. An estimated 29.3 million e-bicycles were sold in 2012, with perhaps 90 percent of those selling in China, which has more electric bikes than cars on its roads. E-bicycles are popular in Europe, too, selling about 380,000 a year in Germany and 175,000 in the Netherlands in 2012. By comparison, about 120,000 electric caris were sold worldwide.

You can read the rest of the story here.

I hope electric bicycles find a market here. They should appeal to  young people in bike-friendly cities and to aging baby boomers (like me!) I tested an e-bike from Evelo last week (here’s my account), and I’m hoping to check out some other models soon.

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