September 2011

Fair Trade: Even in tough times, growing fast

September 29, 2011

The proliferation of labels and claims at the grocery store can befuddle even the most conscientious consumer. What to buy? Organic produce? Locally grown vegetables? MSC-certified fish? Fair Trade coffee or chocolate?

Paul Rice, the president and CEO of Fair Trade USA, isn’t worried by the clutter. All the labels, he says, reflect a big trend–the growing appetite of food shoppers for  more “transparency and traceability.”

Says Rice: “Consumers want to know where their stuff is coming from. They want to know if it’s safe. They want to know if it’s healthy. They want to know what the impact is on the environment.”

“Consumers are increasingly using their purchasing decisions to express their values,” he says.

Of course, we’ve been hearing for decades that consumers are voting with their dollars; the trouble is, too many of us vote for crap too much of the time. But–and this is important–there’s good news when it comes to Fair Trade: Despite the sluggish US economy, it’s growing fast.

Sales of Fair Trade Certified products at mainstream grocery stores grew by 87 percent in the second quarter of 2011 over the previous quarter, according to recent data from  SPINS, which tracks the natural foods industry. Sales in the specialty and gourmet channels grew by 32 percent, for an overall growth rate of 63 percent.

What’s more, the range of products that are Fair Trade certified is expanding rapidly to include not just coffee, tea, cocoa and bananas, all which are grown in the tropics, but also sugar, flowers, honey, herbs and spices, beans and grains, wine and, most recently, apparel and sports equipment.

[Disclosure: After I'd begun writing this story, the people at Fair Trade USA, which is the leading independent certifier of Fair Trade products in the U.S., sent me a basket of goodies that included coffee, tea, chocolate bars, honey, Honest Cocoa Nova, Pink Guava Drizzle and a soccer ball. Let me know, please, if you've got a great recipe that calls for Pink Guava Drizzle.]

I spoke via Skype the other day with Paul Rice and Robert Grgrurev, a brand manager at Green & Black’s Organic chocolate which is going 100% Fair Trade, to learn more about Fair Trade and its impact. [click to continue…]

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This carpet has moral fiber

September 27, 2011

If you’re like me, you don’t think much about carpets.

Except maybe when you spill on one.

But like so many everyday things that we take for granted, carpets have a story to tell,  and it’s becoming an intriguing sustainability story.  Shaw Floors, the world’s largest carpet manufacturer, which is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, recycled 121 million pounds of used carpet last year– reclaiming it from homes or offices, breaking it down into caprolactam, a compound which is a building block of nylon, and then redeploying the nylon to make new carpet.

The carpet pictured above is branded as EcoWorx. It’s a PVC-free, fully recyclable alternative to traditional carpet tile, designed from the get-go to be broken down and remanufactured into itself again and again. More than half of the carpet sold by Shaw is now certified as Cradle to Cradle, the protocol developed by McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry.

In Shaw’s sustainability report, Buffett writes:

Companies today have to consider what kind of impact their decisions will have on both their businesses and the planet – ten, twenty, thirty or forty years from now. And when in doubt, it’s wise to err on the side of the planet.

Nice. Recently, I met with Paul Murray, Shaw’s vice president of sustainability, and David Wilkerson, director of sustainability, to talk about Shaw. It’s a big company–revenues topped $4 billion last year and Shaw employs about 25,000 people, most in manufacturing jobs in the southeast, near its headquarters in Dalton, Ga., the world’s carpet capital. Like its peers, Shaw is enduring hard times because its business is closely tied to the real estate industry; its sales have fallen from a peak of $5.8 billion in 2006. [click to continue…]

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BSR’s Aron Cramer: Leaders need to listen to weak signals

September 26, 2011

Aron Cramer

Today, I’m pleased to publish the second in a series of guest posts about redefining leadership from Aron Cramer, the president and CEO of BSR. BSR (formerly Business for Social Responsibility) works with its 250 member companies to promote a more just and sustainable world, through research, consulting and industry collaborations. Aron, who’s a longtime colleague and friend, has worked all over the world on business issues ranging from labor rights in global supply chains to Internet freedoms in China to the meaning of “sustainable consumption.” Here, he writes about the importance of listening to and learning from voices at the margins.

When I was researching my book Sustainable Excellence, Nike CEO Mark Parker told me that he manages by the principle that “there are a lot of smart people in the world, and most of them don’t work for me.” And while Parker is duly proud of the people he does have at Nike, he points to a central truth: Valuable insight and knowledge is now held in more hands than at any other time in human history.

As we consider how leadership is changing, it is clear that today’s most effective leaders have the ability—and willingness—to listen to weak voices they would have considered irrelevant to their business a generation ago. Indeed, these leaders are able to see across multiple disciplines, perspectives, and geographies.

Historically, leadership used to be exercised by people (usually men) who  had a corner on information, and who would speak with unshakeable authority. They were expected to have all the answers. Today, those who lead do so through their ability to find  all the answers. As Stewart Brand famously said, “information wants to be free.” In a world which is drowning in data, no own can monopolize knowledge; but smart leaders can win by listening to voices that others ignore and by mining the data  for fresh insights. [click to continue…]

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Green business’ go-to guy is going

September 25, 2011

Andrew Shapiro, one of the most prominent sustainability advisers in corporate America, is leaving GreenOrder, the consulting firm he started in 2000.

GreenOrder, which is based in New York, is best known for its work with General Electric on its ecomagination initiative. The firm has also advised such blue-chip companies as General Motors, Hewlett Packard, JP Morgan Chase, along with major utilities and real estate developers.

Shapiro, who is 43 and a Yale Law grad, will stay at GreenOrder until the end of the year, while a replacement is sought. GreenOrder was acquired three years ago by LRN, an ethics and compliance firm led by Dov Seidman, himself a prominent adviser to FORTUNE 500 firms and the author of How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything.

Ron Gonen, a founder of RecycleBank, a company that rewards consumers for recycling, has become an adviser to LRN, “to help lead the alignment of GreenOrder Advisory Services with the company as a whole,” according to Seidman. But Gonen told me by email that he will not be taking over at GreenOrder.

In announcing the change to colleagues, Seidman said: “Andrew’s creative and entrepreneurial vision stands at the core of GreenOrder’s advisory role.”

Before saying more, a few disclosures are required. I’ve known and liked Andrew and his colleagues at Green Order for years, and wrote about the company for Fortune.com in 2007. [See Green business' go-to guys] I consulted for LRN for about eight months in 2009, so I know Dov, too; in fact, Andrew introduced us. GO Ventures, an investment firm co-founded by Shapiro, owns a stake in GreenBiz Group, where I’m a senior writer. And my friend and colleague Joel Makower has been a senior strategist with GreenOrder, as well as a small shareholder in the firm. As ecologists like to say, we are all connected. (Cool music–check it out.) [click to continue…]

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What can we learn from Solyndra’s failure?

September 22, 2011

Our national conversation has become so politicized that it’s hard to talk about anything without setting off an argument.

Not the weather. And certainly not the failure of Solyndra, the solar company that went bankrupt after getting a $535 million loan from the Obama administration.

Today’s hearing of the  Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, focusing in part on Solyndra, was more like an inquisition than a fact-finding exercise.

It was titled “How Obama’s Green Energy Agenda is Killing Jobs.” That was before the testimony began.

No matter that chief inquisitor Darrell Issa, who now denounces clean energy subsidies, once sought a loan guarantee for Aptera, an electric car maker that wanted to set up shop in his district. Dan Burton, the No. 2 Republican on the panel, supported a federal guarantee for Abound Solar, a company in his district.

What hypocrisy.

Democrats are little better, particularly as they blather on about green jobs. Sure,  when Washington subsidizes clean energy, jobs may be created. The thing is, when the government subsidize anything (oil exploration, ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, home ownership), you get more of it, and more jobs. Does this mean that market-distorting subsidies are an efficient way to create jobs? The question answers itself.

[By the way, there was some amusing back-and-forth at the hearing about what constitutes a green job. It turns out that bus drivers, whether driving they are driving hybrid buses  or not, are doing "green jobs" because mass transport is greener than driving,  my friend Matthew Wald reports in The Times.]

So what, if anything, can we learn from Solyndra’s failure? Should the government stop financing clean energy, as some Republicans say? Or preserve today’s subsidies, as the industry would like? [click to continue…]

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Fixing older buildings…and market failures

September 20, 2011

Markets promote efficiency and drive out waste…

Except when they don’t.

A glaring example of market failure in the U.S. economy is the energy wasted in buildings. When the Empire State Building renovated its heating and cooling system, upgraded its lighting and installed new windows, the owners cut their energy bills by 40%. Think about it—a 40% cost savings. That’s big.

Today, at an event called Business Climate 2011 in New York, a group of cities and companies and a nonprofit called the Carbon War Room announced a plan to curb wasted energy and unecessary pollution—importantly, at no taxpayer cost.

Jigar Shah of the Carbon War Room, which put the group together, said this is a very big deal. “I think this is the most important climate announcement in the last five years,” he said.

“Building retrofits have been a colossal failure,” Jigar said, and that’s about to change. [click to continue…]

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Two Degrees: The business of fighting hunger

September 18, 2011

Buy a nutrition bar.

Feed a starving child.

That’s the simple idea behind a startup company called Two Degrees. For every bar the company sells, Two Degrees will through its nonprofit partners give a nutrition pack to a hungry child in Africa or Haiti.

Fighting malnutrition is “why we started the company,” Lauren Walters, the CEO and  co-founder of Two Degrees, told me during a recent visit to Washington. Lauren, who is 60, is a former lawyer, U.S. Senate staff member, consultant and real estate developer. His co-founder Will Hauser, who is 25, is a Harvard grad who spent a year at Goldman Sachs before choosing to go into business for himself. They knew one another  because Will’s father is one of Lauren’s friends.

You can think of Two Degrees as inspired, in part, by TOM’s Shoes, Newman’s Own and Clif Bar. TOM’s is the company that gives away a pair of shoes for every pair it sells. Newman’s sales of salad dressings, popcorn and the like have generated $300 million for charities since 1982. And Clif, of course, made nutrition bars into popular (and guilt free, sort of) snacks. [click to continue…]

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An NFL rivalry…over solar

September 15, 2011

Dan Snyder, the owner of The Washington Redskins, is not exactly a tree-hugger. To the contrary, he once offered to pay the National Park Service $25,000 to cut down trees on federal land near his estate overlooking the Potomac River. So when Snyder embraces solar power, by installing more than 8,000 solar panels at FedEx Field, well, that tells you something.

It tells you that the economics of solar make sense–because Snyder is known for extracting every dollar he can from the business of the Redskins.

It also tells you that he’s a competitor.  The Redskins deal with NRG Energy, a Princeton, N.J.-based independent power producer,  took root at last year’s Super Bowl, after the NFL East rival Philadelphia Eagles announced that they were installing solar, wind and biofuel energy at Lincoln Financial Field. [See my 2010 blogpost, Climate leaders: Chevy, NRG Energy and the Eagles].

No surprise, then, that the Redskins/NRG announcement made a point of calling the solar project “the largest installation at an NFL stadium.” It’s also the largest solar installation in the Washington, D.C., metro area.

While I prefer baseball to football, and the New York Giants to the Redskins (despite last Sunday’s game), I made the trek  to FedEx field by Metro today to see the solar panels and hear what Snyder and David Crane, the CEO of NRG, had to say about them. [click to continue…]

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Steve Savage: Organic food is not the answer

September 14, 2011

Sunday mornings, after my weekly long run, I enjoy visiting the Bethesda Central Farm Market. I’ll buy some organic greens, tomatoes, peaches or whatever’s in season from Bending Bridge Farm or Twin Springs Fruit Farm, enjoy coffee and a danish, maybe see friends or neighbors and look forward to some good, healthy eating. Sure, the food’s pricey, but I feel good that I’m protecting farmworkers from chemical pesticides,supporting local growers (well, sort of local, since Twin Springs is 70 miles away) and — most importantly — helping the environment.

Steve Savage says I’m fooling myself.

Steve is a Stanford-trained biologist with a PhD in plant science from the University of California at Davis. He’s a prominent critic of those who make big claims on behalf of organic agriculture. (See, for example, yesterday’s blogpost, Maria Rodale: Why organic food is the answer) Organic agriculture won’t save the planet, he says. What’s more, and this is important, it won’t feed the planet.

Steve Savage

A couple of things to know about Steve. He’s a consultant for the agriculture industry, as well as for investors, so he’s got a stake in what advocates like to call “modern agriculture,” i.e., pesticides, chemical fertilizers and biotech crops. But he’s by no means a defender of the status quo and, in fact, he’s got his own interesting thoughts about how to make agriculture more sustainable. One problem, he notes, is that so much U.S. farmland is rented, and he suggests restructuring farmland leases to give farmers a long-term stake in building soil quality on the land they rent,  about which more below.

But first, organics. Organic agriculture is small–very small, when measured as a percentage of farmland in the U.S. As Steve writes here, despite the oft-repeated claim that organic is the fastest-growing segment of the food industry, only about 2.5 million acres of US cropland were certified as Organic in 2008, the year in which USDA did its most comprehensive survey of organic farmers. That’s 0.7 percent of the 370 million acres of US cropland. At current growth rates, organic will cover less than 3% of U.S. cropland in 2050. So organic food is a niche, plain and simple, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, given the price premium that growers need to keep farming organically.

“I never have any problem with anybody farming, including organic farming,” Steve says, “just as long as people aren’t under the illusion that they’re saving the planet that way.”

“A less than 1% solution after 30 years isn’t a big solution, and we do need a big solution,” he adds.

Of course, organically acreage would grow faster if more people bought organic food. That’s why Maria Rodale wrote her Organic Manifesto. So is that where we need to go as consumers?

No, says Steve, for a couple of reasons. First, organic food as a rule costs more. (See this pro-organic website, and this 2008 New York Times story and this USDA data set for specifics.) In recession-era America, asking mainstream shoppers to pay a premium for their food is asking a lot. “If the economics were more favorable to organic agriculture, you’d see more organic agriculture,” he says. Or, as an NGO exec I know once put it: “Organic food is like private school–nice if you can afford it.” [click to continue…]

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Maria Rodale: Organic food is the answer

September 13, 2011

Maria Rodale

“If you do just one thing–make one conscious choice–that can change the world, go organic….No other single choice you can make to improve the health of your family and the planet will have greater positive repercussions for our future.”

That’s a bold statement. Is eating organic more important than avoiding meat, stopping coal plants, biking instead of driving or donating to worthy causes?

Yes, declares Maria Rodale, the CEO of the Rodale Inc. publishing empire (Mens Health, Prevention, Runners World) and author of the aptly-named Organic Manifesto: How Organic Food Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World and Keep Us Safe (Rodale Books), from which the quote is drawn.

“There’s so many benefits that come from that one choice,” Maria explains. “You’ve removed a bejillion pounds of dangerous, synthetic, disease-causing environment-destroying chemicals from the soil, the water our bodies. We would all immediately be healthier. Our children would be healthier.”

Farmers and their families and farm workers would be better off, too, she goes on: “And our kids would be smarter. There are actually studies that show that a lot of these chemicals do reduce intelligence.”

I arranged a phone interview with Maria after meeting her last spring during Cooking for Solutions, a great conference and food fest on sustainable agriculture and fishing organized by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’d read her book and wanted to delve deeper into the issues surrounding organics. Tomorrow, I’ll offer a dissenting view from Steve Savage, an agricultural consultant who is dubious about many of Maria’s claims. [click to continue…]

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