Environment

Expo West: Beyond chocolate and chia

March 21, 2012

Today’s guest post comes from the aptly-named Catherine Greener, the CEO of co-founder of consulting firm Clear Green Advisors. Cat, as she’s known, is one of the sharpest people in the world of environmental consulting. A native of Detroit who is trained as a industrial engineer, she’s an expert in manufacturing, among other things, and began her career as a maintenance supervisor for Pontiac Motors. Cat knows how things get done, and she knows business, too–she has an MBA from Michigan and has advised Procter & Gamble, FedEx, Shell, Nissan and Ingersoll Rand, among others. She filed this report after a trip to Natural Products Expo West, a giant trade show held every year in Anaheim, CA.

Back at my desk in Boulder after three days at Natural Products Expo West, the largest convention of people in the natural, organic and supplements industries, I am tired and I have a list of people to email or call. But I am filled with an optimism that is rare after attending a trade show.

At Expo West, as it’s known, about 50,000 or so vendors, retailers, buyers and product seekers convened in Anaheim to learn about emerging ideas and and exciting new products in these high growth businesses, which encompass everything from raw organic energy bars to shampoo made from beer. I took the opportunity to listen to legends like Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm, meet authors including Paul Greenberg (Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food) and enjoy a beer with Adam Lowry, Co-founder of Method, one of the leaders of a new wave of young entrepreneurs.

Expo West overwhelms the senses. The vast convention center is filled with organic chocolate that will stop you in your tracks, essential oils, raw vitamin drinks, gluten-free grilled cheese sandwiches— and something even for the eyes—the chance to be photographed with Fabio.

I attend Expo West to see trends. This year’s product trends were easy to spot: raw, GMO-free, gluten-free (and delicious) and Chia, which is not just for “pets” anymore, but is being added to foods for its health benefits (Omega-3′s and fiber).

But for me, at least, the most interesting trend at this year’s Expo West had nothing to do with products; it had to do with the companies that were exhibiting–the emergence of the Benefit Corporation, or “B-Corp”.

King Arthur Flour proudly displayed their B-Corp logo next to their other 3rd-party certifications.  Why should this matter? Shouldn’t only the quality of the product matter to the shopper? “Consumers are interested in the type of company that you are, just as much as the kind and quality of the product that you make,” explains Tom Payne, Director of Marketing, at King Arthur Flour.

I may be going out on a limb, but it feels like a movement is growing here. Companies that are good for the world want to “occupy your cart, refrigerator or cupboard.” And shoppers seem ready to listen.

Consumers want to know more–not just about what they are buying, but who they are buying from. They want to know if there is “pink slime” in their kid’s lunch, or if their cans have BPA in the liner, and, if so, why a company felt the need to use it there. If a company can assumer its customers that it is providing them with the most natural and healthy product possible, and that it cares about the community and the planet, and that it embraces a new way of doing business, it can build a powerful brand around transparency, authenticity and trust.

I look forward to Expo West 2013. As for trends, I think we are going to see even more Certified B Corps. It’s the right marketplace. It’s the right message.

Print Friendly

{ 0 comments }

GM, RelayRides: Strange green bedfellows

March 19, 2012

General Motors is in the business of selling as many cars as it can.

But you may not need to own a car, says Shelby Clark the co-founder and chief community officer of RelayRides, a peer-to-peer car sharing service.

So why is General Motors investing in, and supporting RelayRides?

That was the question on my mind last week when I moderated a panel called Connected Cars and Beyond  at VERGE DC, a conference organized by GreenBiz, where I’m a senior writer.

Shelby Clark

Shelby Clark was on the panel and so was Nick Pudar, vice president of planning and business development at GM’s OnStar unit. GM Ventures, the venture capital arm of General Motors, has invested in RelayRides. (See my blogpost, Car sharing, revving up). Its OnStar unit is going further, by making it much easier for RelayRides to do what it does: play digital matchmaker between car owners and renters.

RelayRides launched in Boston and San Francisco, but recently became the first of a bevy of peer-to-peer car sharing firms to go national. Renters typically pay $5 to $9 per hour–they set the rates–and owners get 65% of the revenues, with the rest going to RelayRides. The median age of both owners and renters is the mid-30s, and they aren’t entirely motivated by money. “Frequently, it’s the environmental and community benefits they like,” Shelby said. [click to continue…]

Print Friendly

{ 0 comments }

(Solar) power to the people

March 14, 2012

A Grid Alternatives installation in Kerman, CA

Like many environmentally-friendly products, rooftop solar power is a luxury that most Americans can’t afford: Before subsidies, it costs tens of thousands of dollars to power a typical house.*

GRID Alternatives, an Oakland, CA-based nonprofit, is trying to change that–and making headway.

Launched in 2004, GRID Alternatives has grown along with the solar industry. This year, it expects to install solar on the rooftops of about 1,000 California homes owned by low-income people. It has seven offices, a staff of about 100 people and a budget of about $25 million. The organization will soon expand to Colorado and beyond. [click to continue…]

Print Friendly

{ 11 comments }

When “green business” isn’t enough

March 7, 2012

Into my inbox every day come press releases about this company putting solar panels on a roof or that one making its fleet more efficient. These incremental steps are laudable but  also (1) boring (2) old  hat and, most importantly, (3) unlikely to get us the environmental change we need.

Transformational change, by contrast, usually requires entire industries or groups of industries to work together, often with NGOs, sometimes with government. That’s  been going on for years–Unilever and WWF organized fisheries, NGOs and companies to form the Marine Stewardship Council back in 1997 to promote sustainable fishing practices–but lately, there seem to me more of these cooperative but complicated efforts. That’s reason for optimism.

Last fall, for example, I attended a Starbucks “cup summit” at the MIT Media Lab where the company, with the help of business guru Peter Senge, brought together paper companies, NGOs, government officials and rivals like Green Mountain coffee to figure out how to design a system to eliminate waste from coffee cups. [See The Starbucks Cup Dilemma in Fast Company.] Now Alcoa, with the help of sustainability consultant BluSkye, leading a broad and even more ambitious effort to drive up recycling rates across the US.

Reclaiming (valuable) aluminum cans

To learn about the Alcoa initiative, I met last week  in San Francisco with Jib Ellison, the founder of BluSkye,  and talked by phone with Kevin Anton, Alcoa’s chief sustainability officer.

The problem, as they both described it, is simple: Between $1 billion and $2 billion worth of aluminum cans end up in landfills each year.

Now that’s waste! [click to continue…]

Print Friendly

{ 10 comments }

Car sharing, revving up

March 5, 2012

Who would have thought that Bill Ford, the executive chairman of the Ford Motor Co., and GM Ventures, the venture capital arm of General Motors, would invest in peer-to-peer car sharing companies?

The big automakers historically craved market share, which means selling as many new cars as they can. If Americans decide that they don’t need a car–or maybe that they only need one, instead of two or three–the car companies could be hurt.

But Bill Ford’s Fontanalis Partners, a firm that invests in “the future of mobility,”  invested last month in a campus-based car sharing startup called Wheelz, and GM Ventures is backing RelayRides, another startup that announced today that it is rolling out its service nationally.

Maybe the peer-to-peer car sharing biz is going to be a big deal. Certainly it’s revving up.

To learn a little about car sharing, I arranged to speak last week with Jeff Miller, the co-founder and CEO of Wheelz. Next week, I’ll interview Shelby Clark, the founder and chief community officer of RelayRides, at VERGE DC, a conference organized by GreenBiz, where I’m a senior writer. (Please join us a VERGE DC if you can.)  I’ll also be interviewing Steve Case at VERGE; he’s been an advocate for the sharing economy as an investor in Zipcar and in a vacation home-sharing company. [For more, see How Steve Case and his company are driving the sharing economy in The Atlantic and my own blogpost, The sharing economy and me.] [click to continue…]

Print Friendly

{ 7 comments }

Suck It Up: My book about climate change, geoengineering and air capture of CO2

March 2, 2012

I’m pleased to let you know that my book, Suck It Up: How capturing carbon from the air can help solve the climate crisis, is being published today as an Amazon Kindle Single. Please buy the ebook here for just $1.99.

The book reflects two years of reporting and my best thinking about three topics that matter: climate change, geoengineering and a technology called direct air capture of CO2. It explains why we’ve made so little progress (none, actually) in dealing with the climate threat, and how that might change. Part of the answer is to look for ways to recycle and reuse CO2.

I’m going to print the introduction to the book below, but first a word about the publishing process. As the newspapers, magazines and book publishers that traditionally support long-form journalism are struggling, exciting new outlets like blogs and ebooks are opening up. I’m the publisher as well as the author of Suck It Up, with a big assist from Amazon, which has selected the book as a Kindle Single.

The Kindle Single allows writers to tell stories that are longer than a magazine article and shorter than a book. Suck It Up is about 17,000 words long, the equivalent of 60 to 70 double spaced typewritten pages. It’s intended to be read in one or two sittings, and it’s priced so the ideas in it will spread. If you don’t own a Kindle, you can read the book on your smart phone, iPad or laptop. Just download the free Kindle software here.

I’d like to sell lots of copies of Suck It Up not just because I think it’s a good read about an important topic, but because I want to make the ebook business model work. It’s an exciting new platform for in-depth reporting.

So, please read the intro, check out the book and if you like it, help me spread the word through social media or the old-fashioned way–tell a friend about the book. [click to continue…]

Print Friendly

{ 4 comments }

“Rethinking CO2″ at Yale Environment 360

February 23, 2012

I’ve been a devoted reader of  YaleEnvironment360, an online magazine that offers excellent reporting and solid analysis of all things environmental, since its launch in 2008.  So I’m pleased that this week I wrote my first story for the website.

The story is about how carbon dioxide can be removed from the air, a technology I reported on last fall for FORTUNE and that will be the subject on my forthcoming book, Suck It Up: How capturing carbon from the air can help solve the climate crisis. The ebook will be published next month as an Amazon Kindle Single. I’ll have more to say about it (and the ebook publishing model) when the book is released.

The YaleE360 story is headlined: Rethinking Carbon Dioxide: From a Pollutant to an Asset.

Here’s how it begins:

With global greenhouse gas emissions still on the rise, despite decades of talk about curbing them, maybe the time has come to think differently about the climate crisis. Yes, we need to burn less coal, oil and natural gas, but clearly fossil fuels are going to be around for awhile. So why not try to clean up the mess they make?

That’s what a handful of prominent scientists are trying to do by developing technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air. These scientists have launched start-up companies and attracted well-to-do investors — most notably Bill Gates — along with venture capital and, most recently, the attention of Wall Street. They say their technology does not need government support, though it would help. What it needs, above all, is a mindset that regards CO2 not simply as a pollutant but as a valuable commodity.

Nathaniel “Ned” David, the chief executive of a startup called Kilimanjaro Energy, puts it this way: “The single largest waste product made by humanity is CO2. Thirty gigatons a year. It’s immensely valuable, and today we just blow it out the tail pipe. What if there were some way to actually capture it, use it, and make money?”

You can read the rest here.

Writing the story gave me the opportunity to reconnect with Roger Cohn, the editor of YaleE360, who was a classmate of mine at Yale in the 1970s (although we didn’t know one another then.) Roger, who went on to report for The Philadelphia Inquirer and edit Audubon magazine and Mother Jones, has done an excellent job with the Yale site.

A last thought: If you write a blog or host a radio show (or know someone who does)  I’d like to get the word out about the book, which explains why we’ve failed to deal with global warming and why air capture of CO2 could be a promising, market-based response to climate change. I’ll be attending the first scientific conference devoted to air capture in Calgary, Alberta, on March 7-8. More to come, soon.

Print Friendly

{ 1 comment }

Peter Gleick, climate hero?

February 22, 2012

I need to say a few words about Peter Gleick.

If you haven’t heard of him, you will. Gleick is a co-founder of the respected Pacific Institute, a widely-recognized water expert and a McArthur Foundation “genius” fellow, but none of that matters anymore. This week, Gleick confessed to lying to the Heartland Institute to obtain confidential documents. He wrote:

I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

Until he resigned last week, Gleick was chair of the American Geophysical Union’s Task Force on Scientific Ethics.

This is a sad and shocking turn of events, and you can be sure that those who try to undermine or distort climate science will make the most of it. They already are, here and here and here at Heartland. Ugh. [click to continue…]

Print Friendly

{ 15 comments }

A kinder, gentler hot dog

February 22, 2012

Melissa and Aaron Miller of Kinsman, Ohio recently received Food Alliance certification for their pastured pork and lamb.

Consider meat. It’s bad for the planet. It’s bad for your health if you eat too much of it, which most Americans do. (We eat three times more than the global average.) As for animal welfare, trust me, you don’t want to think about it.

Helene York is a vegetarian, but as director of strategic sourcing and research at Bon Appetit Management Co., a big food-service company, she needs to think about meat. This week, Bamco made a serious commitment to change the way it buys pork, beef, poultry and eggs.

First, the company said, it will

stop serving all pork produced using the cruel and inhumane practice of gestation crates and all eggs, including “liquid” ones (those removed from their shells), from hens confined to battery cages by 2015.

This won’t be easy. About 90 percent of female pigs are raised in metal cages so small that a pregnant sow cannot even turn around. This commitment aims to eliminate one of the worst practices in the meat industry.

Bon Appetit said it will also aim to drive best practices by promising that, by 2015,

at least 25 percent of all our meat, poultry, and eggs will meet the highest animal welfare standards, as verified by the independent third parties Animal Welfare Approved, Food Alliance, Humane Farm Animal Care, or Global Animal Partnership. These four groups don’t just ban gestation crates and battery cages, they prohibit routine antibiotics and all hormones, and reward producers for allowing animals to engage in their natural behaviors.

The news from Bon Appetit, which provides cafeteria food and catering to more than 400 companies, colleges and other venues in 31 states, comes in the wake of an announcement that McDonald’s–which, of course, is much bigger — will ask its pork suppliers to phase out gestation crates. (A stunned Mark Bittman wrote OMG: McDonald’s Does the Right Thing.) Bon Appetit and McDonald’s made their announcements in conjunction with the Humane Society of the United States, an animal rights group. [click to continue…]

Print Friendly

{ 2 comments }

Working fewer hours is good for the planet

February 19, 2012

Juliet Schor

What if, instead of telling people what not to do–don’t drive SUVs, don’t live in big homes, don’t buy too much stuff–environmentalists pushed to empower people to choose to work  fewer hours, enjoy more time with family or friends and–maybe best of all, in these times– help create jobs?

This appealing vision comes from Juliet Schor, an author and social critic whose best-selling books about work, consumption, culture and the environment include The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (1992) and The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (1998). In her latest, originally called Plenitude but re-branded for the paperback edition as True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy, Schor offers a “strategy for living that gives people more time, more creativity, and more social connection, while also lowering ecological footprints and avoiding consumer debt.”

Her core message: We can work fewer hours, buy fewer things, enjoy life more, help save the earth and even drive down today’s stubbornly high unemployment rate.

I heard Schor speak last week at the Garrison Institute, a renovated monastery on the Hudson River an hour north of Manhattan, during a conference called Climate, Mind and Behavior that brought environmentalists together with academics–psychologists, sociologists, divinity school and law school profs–to talk about how to talk about climate in ways that better connect with more people. [click to continue…]

Print Friendly

{ 10 comments }

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →

Coupons
Coupon Forum
Trompi.ro