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.

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, Economics, Energy, Environment, Food Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

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...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Economics, Energy Tagged With: , , , ,

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...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, Environment, Food, NGOs, Sustainability Tagged With: , , ,

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.

Filed Under: Climate Change, Economics, Energy, Environment, Media Tagged With: , , , ,

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...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, CSR, Economics, Energy, Environment, Media, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

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...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, CSR, Economics, Energy, Environment, Media, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, Economics, Energy, Environment, Health, Media, Small Business, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , ,

Warren Buffett’s coal problem

April 21, 2013
Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett

Last winter, I traveled to southeastern Montana (brr!) to report on a battle over a coal mine being proposed by Arch Coal, America’s second-biggest coal company, and a coal-carrying railroad that’s needed to transport the coal from the mine to coal-burning power plants, either in the U.S. or in Asia. The railroad, called the Tongue River Railroad, is owned by Arch Coal, by the BNSF Railway, which is a unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and by the candy billionaire Forrest Mars Jr.

It’s a fascinating story, for a bunch of reasons. The coal mine and the railroad are interdependent; both will be built, or neither will be. They need the approval of state and federal regulators. And opposing them are an unlikely coalition of Montana cattle ranchers, members of the northern Cheyenne tribe, a small Amish farming community that recently moved to to the state in search of peace and quiet, and some very determined environmental activists from the Northern Plains Resource Council, the National Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club.

My story was as just published in the May/June issue of by Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, under the headline, Warren Buffett’s Coal Problem. Like the Sierra Club, I think this coal mine is a bad idea–a very bad idea–and that’s one reason why I wanted  to write the story. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Business Ethics, Climate Change, Energy, NGOs, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Walmart’s index: A real-life toy story

April 17, 2013
Is My Little Pony sustainable?

Is My Little Pony sustainable?

This is the third in a series of stories about Walmart’s supplier sustainability index. An overview is here, and a story about flour, bread and agriculture is here. Today’s topic: plastic toys and PVC.

Walmart wants to improve the sustainability of plastic toys. The giant retailer isn’t playing around.

The company wants to improve the safety of workers who make the toys. It wants to make sure that manufacturers are taking steps to use fewer so-called “chemicals of concern” in toys. It would like suppliers to deal with any issues raised when kids outgrow Barbie or GI Joe and throw them away. If paper or wood goes into toy packaging, Walmart wants to know whether it is “sourced in accordance with a credible certification system that addresses ecosystem impacts and biodiversity.”

Some critics think Walmart is taking this too far. That’s what this story is about.

Walmart’s supplier sustainability index, which is being rolled out to thousands of suppliers, is the biggest environmental initiative in the company’s history.  It will likely do enormous good–requiring companies that make consumer products to examine their environmental impacts in ways they have never done before. But the index also raises questions about how the world’s largest retailer (2012 revenues: $469 billion) is exercising its market power.

Is Barbie toxic?

Is Barbie toxic?

Consider, as an example, PVC, or polyvinyl chloride plastic, commonly known as vinyl. It’s a widely-used plastic, and it shows up in toys, including such iconic plastic toys as Hasbro’s My Little Pony and Mattel’s Barbie. It can be made soft or rigid, it’s rugged, moldable, low-cost and excellent at holding color.

What, if anything, is wrong with PVCs? That depends on who you ask. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, CSR, Energy, Environment, Health, NGOs, Sustainability, Transparency, Workplace Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Walmart’s index: Better than sliced bread?

April 16, 2013

flourvertical

This is the second in a series of three stories about Walmart’s supplier sustainability index. An overview of the index can be found here. 

Can Walmart change the way wheat is grown in America?

The company is trying to do just that. Here’s how.

Start inside a Walmart store in Laurel, Maryland. On sale here are nearly 40 brands of flour, many more varieties of  bread and countless other products made from wheat, including cookies, cakes, crackers andpancake mix.

In theory, Walmart has influence over every one of those products. The giant retailer (2012 revenues: $469 billion) sells more groceries than any other supermarket chain. Brands like Pepperidge Farm and Arnold and Sara Lee need access to its shelves.

To make agriculture more sustainable, Walmart has begun asking its suppliers probing questions about the grains they use. What percent of your grain is provided by suppliers that track fertilizer use and have goals and a program in place to optimize fertilizer use? What percent of your grain is provided by suppliers that monitor soil fertility and have goals and a program in place to minimize soil degradation and erosion? What about fuel use? What about water? What about pesticides? What about managing biodiversity?

Whew.

For the flour and bread makers, this is new territory.  Most never deal with the farmers who grow their wheat. They buy from middlemen.

“When you run into production agriculture, with thousands of growers, the product is commingled, it’s by definition a commodity,” says Fred Luckey, a retired Bunge executive who is now chairman of Field to Market, a nonprofit group that is working with Walmart.

Now they have to did deep into their supply chains, if they want to stay in the good graces of Bentonville. No company has ever tried anything like this before. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, Energy, Environment, Food, NGOs, Sustainability, Transparency Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
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