April 2011

Where’s the beef? Sodexo’s Meatless Mondays

April 29, 2011

Have it your way, said Burger King, in a long-running ad campaign and paean to individualism.

No, have it our way, says Sodexo, the food service giant that is rolling out a program called—gasp!—Meatless Mondays to about 3,000 corporate cafeterias and hospitals across America.

“We make it very attractive, compelling and much easier than anything else to eat vegetarian,” says Arlin Wasserman, Sodexo’s vice president for sustainability.

The goal is simple: To promote healthy food choices that are also good for the planet. Raising beef, in particular, requires lots of land and water and produces more global warming pollution than growing the equivalent amount of calories from vegetables. [See my blogpost: How to "green" a hamburger] Eating less meat is one of the simplest things any of us can do for the environment.

The American Meat Institute won’t like this idea, and unkind critics may note that Sodexo, a $8-billion-a-year global company, is based in France. But Meatless Monday is an American idea. It was developed in 2003 by a nonprofit group called The Monday Campaigns (“the day all health breaks loose!) with help from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. More recently, a government report called Healthy People 2010 called upon Americans to reduce their saturated fat intake by 15 percent. Most saturated fat comes from meat and high-fat dairy foods.

Sodexo first introduced Meatless Monday at about 900 hospitals, and recently extended the initiative to more than 2,000 corporate and government cafeterias, including those at Toyota, Northern Trust Bank and the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The response has been “overwhelmingly positive” so far, Arlin says, but it’s not without challenges. Some of the company’s chefs are being asked to go beyond their comfort zone because Sodoexo needs to come up with a variety of tasty, appealing, nutritious and filling vegetarian entrees. It’s sponsoring a cookoff with the James Beard Foundation to generate new recipes. [click to continue…]

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Smithfield Foods: Sustainable pork?

April 27, 2011

Unless you avoid pork for religious reasons, you’ve probably eaten pork products from Smithfield Foods: the bacon or sausage in a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin, Armour-Eckrich bologna or ham, pork from Bob Evans or Jimmy Dean’s, an Esskay hot dog at Baltimore’s Camden Yards, and quite likely your Easter ham.

Smithfield is a pork giant. It has 49 factories, 500 or so hog farms, 48,000 employees and about $11 billion in revenues in FY2010. It slaughtered about 27 million animals last year in the U.S. “We’re the largest pork producer in the world, by a long shot,” says Dennis Treacy, the company’s chief sustainability officer.

Yes, Smithfield has a chief sustainability officer–and that may surprise you if you remember reading horror stories about Smithfield’s confined animal feeding operations (CAFO’s), its problems managing pig manure, its labor conflicts or animal welfare  issues in places like The New York Times and Rolling Stone. The company was featured–not in a flattering way–in the movie Food Inc. and sued by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Waterkeeper Alliance.

Dennis Treacy

Treacy had problems with Smithfield, too, before joining the company. In fact, Treacy, who was the director of the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for the state of Virginia from 1998 to 2002 under Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore, once sued Smithfield for polluting the state’s waters.  (You could look it up.) In 1997, Smithfield was fined $12 million, one of the largest fines at the time, for violations of the federal Clean Water Act.

Now, though, Treacy says Smithfield has cleaned up not just the water but its own act. He’s been with the company for nine years, and says he was hired to make the company more sustainable and improve its reputation. “We have slowly but surely built a sustainability program,” he says. “It’s the right thing to do, and everybody wants to work for a company that is respected.”

I met Dennis earlier this week in Washington. He seems like a good guy, and he’s spent his career on environmental issues–he studied fisheries and wildlife at Virginia Tech, got a law degree from Lewis and Clark in Oregon, which is a top environmental law school, and he lives on a small farm near Richmond where he and his wife raise chickens and rabbits. [click to continue…]

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GMOS and organics: Why can’t they get along?

April 26, 2011

Today I’m at the Atlantic Food Summit, a jam-packed gathering of Washington policy-makers, ag experts, consultants, lobbyists, foodies and chefs (Alice Waters! Sam Kass!) who have gathered to talk about sustainable agriculture, feeding the global poor, the obesity crisis, farm subsidies, school lunches and the White House garden.

What I’m struck by is the not just the discussion about what all agree is the big issue — how to feed a global population that will grow to 9 billion by 2050 – but persistent confusion about underlying facts, evidence and science.

Maybe it’s because food is such an emotional topic. Maybe it’s because it’s complicated. Maybe because it’s local, with no one-size-fits-all solution Or maybe it’s because partisans have reason to sow misunderstanding.

Particularly around the issue of genetically-modified organisms, which may–or may not be- the key to driving agricultural productivity, there’s confusion as well as disagreement. It surfaced during a panel on sustainable agriculture that featured, among others, Gary Hirshberg, the ce-YO of Stonyfield Farm, and Nina Federoff, a molecular biologist and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [click to continue…]

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Walmart: The power–and limits–of efficiency

April 24, 2011

Arguably, Walmart has done more than any environmental group, politician, government regulator or Silicon Valley clean tech firm to nudge the U.S. economy towards sustainability in the last five years.  Walmart’s 2011 Global Responsibility Report, published last week, makes clear that despite the recession and some revently rough going for the company–lately its stock has lagged the S&P500 –Walmart is pushing ahead towards its big goals: To generate no waste, to be 100%-powered by renewable energy, and to sell lots more products that sustain people and the environment.

Yet a closer look at the report demonstrates that there are limits to what any company, even one as vast as Walmart, can do. Most of its environmental gains have come from doing what Walmart has always done very well–driving efficiency in its stores and supply chain. When sustainable initiatives cost more money, as they sometimes do, progress has been halting.

Still, Walmart deserves at least two cheers, maybe two-and-half for its efforts, particularly in the current, dispiriting political climate.

As Elizabeth Sturcken of the Environmental Defense Fund, which works closely with Walmar, told me:

Leadership on environmental issues is coming from Bentonville these days, not from Washington. Some people in Washington want to roll back basic environmental protection on clean air and clean water, saying it’s bad for business. Our work with Walmart proves that’s not true….Generally,  all the signs that I see are full speed ahead.

Andrea Thomas, who has led Walmart’s sustainability work for the past six months, made a similar point. The company set big, bold, broad goals back in 2005, without knowing how it would meet them. Since then, it has discovered unexpected business benefits.

Rather than being paralyzed by (the goals), they ignited  a lot of energy behind doing experiments, trying different things. Today, there’s a lot of interesting work going on, not just in the U.S., but all over the world. I’m very encouraged by the progress we’re making.

Here’s one success story from the report, a promising new initiative and an arena in which Walmart’s progress appears to have stalled:

Walmart recycling with "super sandwich bale"

Waste: WMT has turned its garbage into an asset, just by thinking about the stuff it throws away in a more disciplined fashion. Across California, more than 80% of waste has been diverted from landfills and made into something else, turning what was a cost center into a source of new revenue.

Said Thomas: “We would pay for people to haul our trash away. And we paid to put it in a landfill. Now people are paying us.”

Success hasn’t come as easily as it sounds, of course. To help find an outlet for food waste, Walmart’s foundation donated 100 refrigerated trucks to food banks. “ Now they have a means to pick up and deliver some of the food that we can’t use in the stores, but that’s still good food,” Thomas said.

Supporting small, local farms: Last fall, WMT announced an array of targets related to agriculture. In the U.S., the company promised to double sales of locally-sourced produce, so that it accounts for 9 percent of all produce sold by the end of 2015. Globally, WMT said it will sell $1 billion in food sourced from 1 million small- and medium-sized farmers in emerging markets by the end of 2015.

To achieve those goals, Thomas told me, WMT has to simplify its supply chain to deal directly with farmers and eliminate some middlemen. “The logistics aren’t as difficult as you might think,” she said. “The farmer can actually drop off produce at the distribution center or at the store.”

If all goes according to plan, WMT  should be able to sell fresher, local food at lower prices, and eliminate some of the greenhouse gases generated by a global supply chain for food. Like the waste initiative, the agriculture initiatives mostly dovetail nicely with the culture of efficiency at Walmart.

Clean energy: To achieve its goal of being powered by 100% renewable energy, WMT has made its fleet, stores and distribution centers more efficient. But its commitment to wind and solar power  has been limited because they cost more than electricity from fossil fuels. The report says:

During FY11, we successfully completed several renewable energy projects, including the installation of 35 solar projects in Arizona, California and Puerto Rico. Eight of the solar projects installed in FY11 utilized thin-film solar, which created manufacturing jobs and accelerated this new technology’s entry to market. We installed seven fuel cell projects in California this year and completed two microturbine wind projects on the parking lot light poles at the Walmart in Worcester, Mass., and at the Sam’s Club in Palmdale, Calif.

This is all to the good. By buying renewable energy in selected markets, WMT will help bring costs down. But because wind and solar power generally cost more than electricity from coal, nuclear or natural gas in most places, WMT can’t or won’t buy clean energy on a  scale that matters. (If the company says in its report how much of its energy now comes from renewable sources, I couldn’t find it. I’d guess it’s well under 10% of  WMT’s total energy spend, but I’m ready to be corrected.) Buying renewable energy would drive up its costs, with no tangible benefits to customers, and put the company at a competitive disadvantage, as the company says in the report:

In our efforts to ensure our operations are contributing to everyday low prices for our customers, it has sometimes been difficult to find and develop low-carbon technologies that meet our ROI requirements.

This, then, is where we run up against the limits of efficiency and, more broadly, what any company can reasonably be expected to do to become more sustainable.

More broadly, it’s a reminder that the rhetoric of green business — how green is gold, how green is green, how clean energy will generate jobs and growth — hasn’t always served the cause well. Sometimes, indeed often, “green” is more expensive than “brown,” or to be more precise, the full costs of “brown” (air and water pollution, GHG emissions) aren’t captured in its price. This is why policy matters. This is why we need to price carbon emissions into the energy economy.

Put another way, so long as environmental leadership is coming from Bentonville and not Washington, we’re in trouble.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Journalism: The Internet giveth, the Internet taketh away

April 20, 2011

Notwithstanding the terrible decline of newspapers, it is an exciting time to be a writer–and reader–of nonfiction.

I could spend half my time reading blogs, and the other half writing this one. (All too often, it feels like I do, alas.)

Now, thanks to  the Internet, which has hollowed out much of the traditional news media, here come a rush of new opportunities to publish and distribute high-quality journalism and good writing of all kinds. Read on, because most of the works that I’m about to describe are available free or at a very low cost:

Seth Godin’s Domino Project: This publishing venture, backed by Amazon, today released its second book, a 98-page manifesto called Do the Work by Steven Pressfield. It’s about getting things done, and overcoming a force that Pressfield  describes as Resistance. (Pressfield is probably best known as the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, which became a movie starring Will Smith and Matt Damon.) Do the Work will help keep you focused on the project at hand, and while it’s applicable to any big undertaking–a book, a business venture, a philanthropic project, a new romance–it strikes me as particularly useful for those of us who write and are easily distracted by, say, spending half the day reading blogs.

You can read an excerpt from Do The Work in Fast Company. Better yet, you can download the Kindle edition of the ebook for free, thanks to an unusual sponsorship deal with GE. Lest you fear that you’ll be assaulted with ads….don’t worry.  GE offers a few harmless platitudes in the beginning of the book (“A remarkable thing happens when you bring together employees who are driven to make a difference: They do.”) and after scanning them you’ll be on your way. [click to continue…]

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What’s the true cost of an electric car?

April 19, 2011

 

An electric car motorcade

Detroit’s the Motor City. California’s car culture is unsurpassed. But when the electric car industry staged an “innovation motorcade” of electric cars and trucks today, it did so in Washington, D.C.–fittingly, because, without the government, there would simply be no electric car industry.

Indeed, the market for electric cars is so distorted by government subsidies that it’s all be impossible to determine the true cost of an electric car.

Notice that I said cost and not price; there’s a difference, and it’s relevant to any conversation about business and the environment. Coal-powered electricity is cheap but the price doesn’t reflect the costs of burning coal, including lung disease, mining accidents and greenhouse gas emissions. (See Fossil Fuels: A Legacy of Disaster from the Center for American Progress.) Hamburgers are cheap but the true cost of beef includes methane emissions, farm subsidies and, arguably, heart disease. Gasoline-powered cars externalize costs that include smog, carbon emissions and, some would say, a foreign policy that favors stability, i.e., autocracy over democracy in the Middle East.

Markets, needless to say, work better when prices reflect true costs.

So what’s the true cost of an electric car? Hard to say. Sticker prices are high–Chevrolet’s Volt has an MSRP of $40,280, while the Nissan Leaf is priced at $32,780–but buyers get a $7,500 tax credit that reduces the cost. The government even gives tax credits to buyers of the $109,000 Tesla Roadster.

The tax credits are merely the most visible form of federal support. [click to continue…]

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Shell: We need tough fracking rules

April 17, 2011

Marvin Odum, the president of Shell Oil, made a revealing and insightful observation at the “Shell 2011 Energy Summit” last week in Houston.

“You are only as good as the worst operator in your industry,” he said.

Marvin Odum

He could have been talking about BP. Shell wants to drill offshore in Alaska, home to some of the richest undeveloped oil and gas reserves in North America, but there’s little chance of that so long as memories of the BP Deepwater oil spill remain fresh.

Or he could have been talking about the Tokyo Electric Power Co. Last month’s accident at Fukushima has cast a cloud over hopes for a global nuclear renaissance, fueling opposition to nukes from India to Germany to Minnesota.

In fact, he was talking about hydrofracking—the technology that will allow vast amounts of natural gas to be tapped from fields around the U.S., creating a boom in the shale fields of Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania.

But fracking, as it’s called, is controversial. When wells are improperly drilled, water supplies can become polluted. Some gas drilling companies won’t say what chemicals they are injecting into the shale to drive out the gas. Just last week, an unpublished study challenged the conventional wisdom that natural gas is a cleaner fuel than coal, arguing that the release of methane during drilling could aggravate global warming.

To head off the criticism, and clean up the highly-fragmented natural gas drilling industry,  Shell wants strong regulation of hydrofracking. The company says it will monitor its own wells carefully and disclose the chemicals it uses in its fracking fluids.  The goal, it appears, is to engage with critics and demonstrate to them that when well managed, fracking has benefits that far outweigh any harm. [click to continue…]

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Josh Goldman’s amazing (and true) fish story

April 13, 2011

Josh Goldman has been growing fish for nearly 30 years. He began as a student at Hampshire College, a hippie school in western Massachusetts (that also spawned entrepreneur Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farms). He started a company than farmed tilapia, and then another that farmed striped bass. Now, he’s the founder and chief executive of Australis, the world’s largest producer of barramundi.

Never heard of barramundi? You’re not alone.

This is what makes Australis such an interesting company. Josh decided to grow barramundi, not because it is a popular or well-known fish, but because the fish, which is native to Australia and southeast Asia, is an environmentally-preferable alternative to most farmed fish. It doesn’t need to eat a lot of other seafood to grow, it doesn’t make a lot of waste, it doesn’t require a lot of antibiotics and…oh, almost forgot…it tastes OK, too.

“It has a flavor profile that meets the broad preference of the middle of the market,” Josh says. “In other words, it’s a great fish because it doesn’t taste like fish. And it’s got a great health story, too.”

Josh Goldman

I met Josh last week at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference where I led a panel on sustainable seafood. (Yesterday’s blog covered Bumble Bee.) I’d read about him in Four Fish, a superb book on fishing by Paul Greenberg that was published last year. (See my blogpost The Industrialization of Fishing.) As Greenberg writes, “choosing which fish will be our domesticated ‘seafood’ will have huge ramifications for our species and for the planet.” Unhappily, we often choose wrong. Salmon, for example, has become one of the most widely-farmed fish because the demand for  wild salmon exceeds the ocean’s supply. The trouble is, farmed salmon need to be fed lots of  wild fish (roughly 3.5 pounds for every pound produced on the farm), the farmed salmon can escape and crossbreed with wild stocks and industrial-scale salmon farms generate lots of waste. [click to continue…]

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Bumble Bee CEO: The end of cheap tuna?

April 12, 2011

Bumble Bee Foods is a survivor. Founded in 1899, Bumble Bee, which is headquartered in San Diego,  owns two of the last three canned tuna factories in the U.S. (in southern California and Puerto Rico) and one of the last two canned clams plants (in Cape May, N.J.). The company went bankrupt in the late 1990s but it has emerged stronger, and it’s now North America’s largest branded shelf-stable seafood company.

But Bumble Bee’s tuna business, which accounts for more than half of its revenues of close to $1 billion, has a new worry: If the world’s fisherman can’t agree to  intelligently manage capacity, tuna stocks could well be threatened.

Chris Lischewski

“We’re at maximum sustainable yield,” says Chris Lischewski, Bumble Bee’s president and CEO.

Bumble Bee itself doesn’t own fishing boats–it’s a processor and marketer of  seafood–but its future obviously depends on a reliable supply of fish.

I met Chris a week ago at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference, where I led a panel on sustainable seafood. (Tomorrow, I’ll blog about Josh Goldman of Australis, who also spoke.) A former management consultant who has run Bumble Bee since 1999, Chris told me that he didn’t worry much about fish supplies until the mid-2000s when it became apparent to him that global efforts to regulate tuna fishing weren’t working.

In response, Bumble Bee with the World Wildlife Fund and industry rivals, including Starkist (a unit of Korean fishing conglomerate Dongwon) and Chicken of the Sea (now owned by a Thai parent), created the nonprofit International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) in 2009. Chris now chairs its board, and he has had to become an expert in fisheries management. [click to continue…]

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Best Buy CEO: Sustainability is all about people

April 11, 2011

Best Buy’s in a tough business. The electronics giant ($50 billion in revenues in 2010) competes with Amazon, the best of the online retailers, and Walmart, the world’s biggest bricks-and-mortar retailer. The company’s shares have fallen lately.

What’s Best Buy’s competitive advantage?

It’s the people in the blue shirts, says Brian Dunn, Best Buy’s chief executive. “Our business is utterly dependent upon getting those 180,000 people aligned and moving forward,” he says.

This is why sustainability is important to Best Buy, the 51-year-old chief executive says. It’s about providing those people with opportunities, making sure they are heard and showing them that Best Buy cares about them and their values.

Brian gave the keynote speech this morning at the Boston College Corporate Citizenship Conference, which is being held in Minneapolis, Best Buy’s home town. We spoke briefly after his talk, which wasn’t your typical speech about sustainability or corporate responsibility. I don’t believe he mentioned the words “carbon footprint.” Instead he talked, in a personal way, about Best Buy’s people, their  aspirations, how they connect to sustainability and how he connects to them. [click to continue…]

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