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...]

Filed Under: Consumption, CSR, Environment, Food, NGOs, Sustainability 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: , , ,

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: , , , , , , , , ,

Walmart’s index: This is big. Really big.

April 15, 2013
A Walmart with LED lights

A Walmart with LED lights

This is the first of three stories about Walmart’s supplier sustainability index.

Since launching its sustainability program in 2006, Walmart has reduced energy consumption in its stores, installed solar panels on its rooftops, curbed emissions from its trucks and recyled millions of tons of its trash. Now that the world’s biggest retailer has streamlined its own operations, it is turning its attention elsewhere–actually, almost everywhere.

Since last fall, Walmart has rolled out what it calls a supplier sustainability index to thousands of suppliers, asking them pointed questions about their operations and prodding them to better understand and manage their own supply chains.

It’s Walmart’s most ambitious environmental project ever, and if all goes according to plan, it will change the way all kinds of consumer products–clothes, toys, electronics, food and beverages–are made. The typical Walmart stocks 125,000 to 150,000 products (!), and the envirommental and social performance of most of the companies that make them them will soon be rated and ranked in Bentonville.

So Walmart is asking lots of questions of its suppliers. Among them:

How can wheat be grown with less water and fertilizer? How can chemicals of concern be removed from toys? What mining practices were used to extract copper, gold and silver for computers or jewelry? What percentage of your televisions sold last year were Energy Star certified? Do the grapes in a bottle of wine come from a farm with a biodiversity management plan? How much water was needed to produce those polyester pants?

If this sounds like a massive and fiendishly complicated undertaking, well, it is. It has been in the works since 2009, when Walmart unveiled The Sustainability Consortium, a nonprofit coalition led by the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University that was set up to provide scientific research to undergird the effort. Since then, a few other retailers (Tesco, Kroger, Ahold, Best Buy) and dozens of consumer products brands (Coca-Cola, Disney, Kellogg’s, Mars) have signed on to the consortium. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Consumption, CSR, Energy, Environment, Food, NGOs, Sustainability, Transparency, Uncategorized, Workplace Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Mark Tercek: The business case for nature

April 7, 2013

Tercek-Adams-Natures-FortuneThe value of nature is astonishing, when you stop and think about it. Marshes protect coastlands. Urban trees clean the air. Forests provide timber. Oceans give us seafood.  Snow-capped mountains store drinking water. Some might say nature is priceless.

Not Mark Tercek, the former investment banker at Goldman Sachs who became CEO of The Nature Conservancy in 2008. His new book, Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature (Basic Books, 2013), argues that nature provides enormous economic benefits to society, business and consumers, and that, if we can figure out how to value and pay for those benefits, we can slow down and even reverse the degradation of nature that threatens our well-being.

It’s an important and potentially controversial argument, as Tercek acknowledges. While the 20th century conservation was all about protecting nature from people, Tercek and some of his allies in the environmental movement would like the future to be about protecting nature for people. If nothing else, he argues, recognizing the economic value of nature will expand the base of the environmentalist beyond the white, college-educated and relatively affluent folk, the backpackers and hikers and birdwatchers at its core. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Books, Climate Change, CSR, Environment, Leadership, Media, NGOs, Politics, Sustainability, Water

In defense of environmental extremism

March 21, 2013
David Brower and friends

David Brower and friends

The other night, I saw A Fierce Green Fire, a documentary history of the environmental movement, as part of the excellent DC Environmental Film Festival. The movie was OK, worth seeing, but not great, a bit PBS-like in its sweep.  By trying to cover a  lot, the filmmakers mostly skim the surface: Here’s Sierra Club  founder John Muir, there’s Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, remember when Jimmy Carter put a solar heater on the White House roof, say hello to Stewart Brand and Bill McKibben, meet Wangari Maathai, and let’s not overlook environmental justice and the Copenhagen climate talks, and wasn’t that Buckminster Fuller? Nor does the film look critically at environmentalism; it’s narrated by Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, Van Jones, Isabel Allende and Meryl Streep, which pretty much tells you all you need to know.

FierceGreenFire_posterHaving said that, the film, sometimes by design and sometimes inadvertently, manages to deliver a useful reminder about radicals and rabble-rousers: They are often the ones who drive change. Had Barry Goldwater been an environmentalist, he might have said that extremism in defense of the earth is no vice and that moderation, when it comes to climate change, is no virtue. The environmental movement’s heroes, at least in this telling, are David Brower and Lois Gibbs and Chico Mendes and Greenpeace, and not those who work inside the Beltway or travel to UN conferences. At the very least, grass-roots, bottom-up activism created the conditions that drove change in Washington.

Consider, for example, these stirring words from a presidential State of the Union address, which is (too) briefly excerpted in the movie: [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Books, Climate Change, Environment, NGOs, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Verlasso: Farming salmon the right way

March 10, 2013

salmon“In the fish counter, all the salmon are dead, all the salmon are red, and none of them can tell a story. It’s incumbent on us to tell the story.”

That’s Scott Nichols, the director of Verlasso. Verlasso, a joint venture of DuPont and AquaChile, farms salmon in Patagonia, and seeks to do so in a responsible way. So Scott has a story to tell.

“We feel a tremendous urgency to get this right,” Scott said, when we met recently in Washington. “We have to learn our way into it. We don’t have all the answers, and we may not have all the questions.”

Scott Nichols

Scott Nichols

A PhD. biochemist who studied business at Wharton, Scott, who is 57, never expected to find himself in the business of fish farming. But as he researched new business opportunities for DuPont in the mid-2000s — he had earlier worked on improving the productivity of maize and beans and on Sorona, the company’s plant-based fiber — he got interested in salmon aquaculture. Aquaculture was booming, for obvious reasons: demand for fish is growing, and the supply of wild-caught fish is flat. The problem, was, salmon aquaculture then and now usually relies upon fish feed made in part from forage fish, such as anchovies, herring and sardines. About four pounds of wild-caught feeder fish are typically needed to produce the fish oil to make one pound of salmon, according to Verlasso. So salmon aquaculture, rather than easing pressures on the ocean’s stocks of wild fish, was actually making things worse.

“The system was broken,” Scott said.

Scientists at giant DuPont (2012 revenues: $35 billion) discovered that they could substitute a genetically-engineered yeast for the fish oils, and preserve the [click to continue...]

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

Patagonia helps to save….Patagonia

February 10, 2013

A merino sheep ranch under Ovis XXI management in the Patagonian Steppe ecoregion of Argentina’s Neuquén Province. The Conservancy is working with Ovis XXI to protect Argentina’s temperate grasslands by promoting best practices in sustainable grazingThe more I learn about Patagonia Inc., the more impressed I am with the way that Yvon Chouinard and his colleagues run their business. The outdoor gear and clothing company supports what it calls the “silent sports” of climbing, skiing, snowboarding, surfing, fly fishing, paddling and trail running–none of which require a crowd or a motor to be enjoyed. It’s an enterprise that lives up to its mission: Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

Until recently, though, Patagonia did no business in Patagonia–a remote region of South America that includes temperate grasslands of Argentina, about 400 million acres (nearly three times the size of California) that are said to be among the most threatened, most damaged and least protected habitats in the world.

Now the company has embarked on an unusual partnership with a network of Argentine ranchers and The Nature Conservancy that is intended to build a sheep-grazing business that will not only protect, but restore parts of the Patagonian grasslands.

It’s a test of an intriguing idea–that a company that sells stuff to people can not only do less harm to the earth, but use the power of business to do environmental good.

“Can a company ever be regenerative?” asks Jill Dumaine, Patagonia’s director of environmental strategy. “We aspired to it, but we couldn’t envision what that would look like.”

[click to continue...]

Filed Under: Consumption, Environment, Global Poverty, Leadership, NGOs, Sustainability, Water Tagged With: , , , , ,
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