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...]

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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...]

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Boris Mordkovich’s electric bike ride, and mine

April 14, 2013

LUNA LIFESTYLE-01Life, it is often said, is a journey, not a destination.

Boris Mordkovich’s journey has taken him from his birthplace in Lithuania to Brooklyn, back to the former Soviet Union with nonprofit Kiva, from Capetown to London (in an 1980 Land Rover) and, most recently, from New York to San Francisco, on an electric bicycle built by Evelo, his startup company.

And he’s just 27.

Boris Mordkovich

Boris Mordkovich

“When a good adventure is offered, you don’t refuse it,” Boris said, when we talked via Skype the other day.

Boris recently reached out to me to tell me about his latest adventure, Evelo, which is one of a dozen or so companies trying to persuade Americans to try electric bikes–which are not not motorcycles or mopeds, but bicycles with pedals that get a boost from an electric motor.

If you’re reading this blog, you’ve heard about electric cars. But you may not be familiar with electric bikes. I was surprised to learn from Boris that about 30 million electric bikes were sold worldwide last year. Probably 90% were sold in China, and another million or two in Europe. But even in the US — notwithstanding all the hype about Tesla, the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf–electric bikes may well have outsold electric cars. I’d be more definitive but reliable statistics on e-bikes are hard to come by.

Why would anyone buy an e-bike? The Evelo website answers that question with a set of questions of its own: [click to continue...]

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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...]

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In Haiti, philanthropy could lead to profits for NRG Solar

March 31, 2013
NRG Energy volunteers in Haiti

NRG Energy volunteers working in Haiti

A startling encounter with a young boy got David Crane, the CEO of NRG Energy, hooked on Haiti.

It was his first night in the Caribbean nation, months after the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 Haitians and destroyed 250,000 homes and 30,000 businesses.

As Crane tells the story, he and his daughter, who had traveled to Port au Prince to volunteer with the Clinton Global Initiative, left a cocktail reception to return to their hotel when she said, “Daddy, there’s a body under the car.”

A security guard gently kicked a boy of about 10, who emerged naked from beneath their SUV.

“This kid looked up at me,” Crane remembers. “There was no life in his eyes. No hope. Complete nothingness. I was so shocked. There were any number of things that I could have done for that kid. I just stood there and did nothing, except act like a dumb American.”

Since then, Crane and NRG Energy, its suppliers and its employees have done a great deal. He’s been back to Haiti a half dozen times, often accompanied by his wife and five children. NRG  made a $1 million commitment through the Clinton Global Initiative and  in partnership with Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) to bring solar power to rural areas of Haiti.

“I didn’t mean to get so emotionally caught up in Haiti, but I did,” he told me, when we spoke by phone the other day.

Now, Crane says, he is hoping that what began as a charitable initiative will demonstrate the power of solar energy to spur economic development in poor countries. It could also help create business opportunities in the Caribbean for NRG. [click to continue...]

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Taxing carbon at Disney, Microsoft and Shell

March 27, 2013

urlMany economists, left and right, favor a carbon tax. Requiring companies and, ultimately, all of us to pay when we generate greenhouse gas emissions would deliver many benefits. By raising the costs of fossil fuels, a carbon tax would help drive efficiency and conservation. It would stimulate investment in low-carbon sources of energy, and encourage research into new clean-energy technologies. It would, of course, reduce the emissions that cause global warming; right now, anyone is free to dump the equivalent of garbage into the atmosphere without paying a penalty.

More broadly, economists say, governments should impose taxes on things that we want less of, like alcohol, tobacco and pollution–these are known as Pigovian taxes–and try to reduce the costs of the things that we want more of, like jobs, which, unfortunately, cost more to create when government burdens employers with payroll taxes and health care mandates.

What impact might carbon taxes have on business? In my latest story for the Guardian Sustainable Business, I look at three companies — Disney, Microsoft and Shell — that have decided to impose carbon taxes on themselves. They also favor government action to regulate carbon emissions.

Here’s how the story begins:

Visitors who climb aboard the steam trains in the Disneyland resort in southern California need not worry about their carbon footprint. The trains are powered by soy-based cooking oil recycled from the resort’s kitchens.

It’s a Mickey Mouse gesture, really, when set against the millions of miles that park visitors travel by car and plane to reach Disneyland. But it’s driven, in part, by an innovative and forward-thinking tool that Walt Disney, which posted revenues of $42.3bn (£27.8bn) in 2012, uses to regulate its greenhouse gas emissions. A self-imposed carbon tax.

It’s not just Disney. Although most of the world’s governments have declined to put a price on carbon emissions, a handful of global companies, including Microsoft and Shell, have chosen to act on their own. They have established internal carbon prices in an effort to reduce emissions, promote energy efficiency and encourage the use of cleaner sources of power, just as a government tax or cap-and-trade program would.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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Sustainability by anecdote

March 24, 2013

imgresI write stories. I read stories. I love a good story.

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world,” says the British novelist Philip Pullman.

The corporate sustainability movement needs stories to inspire people, to win over customers, to change the world, as we heard last month at the GreenBiz Forum in New York.

But we need the right kinds of stories. Stories about people and companies that are having a meaningful impact. Stories that, ideally, drive broad and systemic change.

We’ve got big problems. We need big solutions.

Instead, my inbox overflows with stories that by themselves don’t get us where we need to go. Or stories that lack context.

Sustainability by anecdote, I call it.

Here’s one example that came in last month:

General Mills and Häagen-Dazs today announced an initiative designed to foster greater economic vitality for smallholder vanilla farmers in Madagascar and ensure the availability of high quality vanilla for future generations. [click to continue...]

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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...]

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An odd couple? HR and sustainability

March 19, 2013

savitz(5)Today’s guest post comes from Andrew Savitz, the author of a new book called  Talent, Transformation and the Triple Bottom Line: How Companies Can Leverage Human Resources to Achieve Sustainable Growth (Wiley 2013). As you can guess from the title, Andy argues that employees are the key to creating sustainable companies, but that they–and their colleagues  in human resources–are often overlooked when companies embark on environmental programs. I think he’s onto something. I’ve long thought that the single biggest business driver of corporate sustainability initiatives is the way they help better companies attract better people and motivate the ones they have.

Andy has been his career working with companies on social and environmental issues. A lawyer by training (and before that a Rhodes scholar at Oxford), Andy has been a congressional staffer, the general counsel for the Massachusetts Office of Environmental Affairs and head of the environmental advisory practice at PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Since 2005, he has led a consultancy called Sustainable Business Strategies.

Here’s our online conversation:

Marc: You say that you’ve written the book “in large measure to bridge the gap between sustainability and HR.” HR? Really? Why do we need human resource people to get involved with sustainability? They don’t know anything about carbon emissions, say, or LED lighting, do they? [click to continue...]

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Cause: Eat, drink, be merry, do good

March 17, 2013

IS2C6024 smallImagine a bar and restaurant that, like Newman’s Own, gives all of its profits to charity.

Beer and benevolence, it’s been called. Drafts and donations. More fun, in any case, than salad dressing.

That’s the idea behind Cause, a philanthropub (“a bar where having a good time helps a great cause”) that opened last October in the U. Street/Cardozo neighborhood of Washington, D.C., at 1926 9th St. N.W.  I’ve been three times–first to kick off the new year with the D.C. chapter of Net Impact, then to interview founder Nick Vilelle and this past week to have dinner with my wife.

Cause isn’t alone. “Have a pint, save the world,” says the Oregon Public House, which plans to open soon in Portland, a hub of both craft beer and NGO activity. In downtown Houston, bar owners came together last year to open the Okra Charity Saloon; customers, who get a vote with every drink, decide which charity should receive the next month’s profits. The ideas for these charity pubs evidently arose spontaneously and independently. They’re the latest in a wave of mission-driven businesses that blur the lines between the for-profit and non-profit worlds. [click to continue...]

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