So is BPA–the controversial, much-debated chemical that, right now, is almost surely lurking somewhere inside a can in your kitchen cabinet–dangerous? Or is it safe?

Scientists can’t come to agreement. Nor can regulators. Nor, unsurprisingly, can corporate America.

Fact is, it’s a daunting job for companies to figure out how to deal with BPA, as recent events at General Mills and The Coca-Cola Co. show. General Mills inched away from the chemical, by agreeing to keep it out of its Muir Glen brand of organic tomatoes. By contrast, Coca-Cola opposed a shareholder resolution asking the company to report on its plans to deal with BPA. The resolution got 22 percent of the vote at Coke’s annual meeting last week.

While the science of BPA remains clouded, there’s growing evidence that consumers aren’t willing to wait around for a decisive verdict from the lab. So smart companies at the very least should explore alternatives.

As Rich Liroff of the Investor Environmental Health Network wrote recently in a guest post here:

smart companies will change the way they communicate about BPA and as well as search for alternatives to better align themselves with consumer concerns. Some companies could gain reputational benefits and free media attention from supporting proposed legislation restricting use of BPA.

The IEHN supported the Coca-Cola resolution on BPA.

Some background for readers who haven’t followed the debate:  Bisphenol A is a chemical that’s widely used in products ranging from plastic water bottles to eyeglass lenses. As I wrote (How Wal-Mart Became The New FDA)  back in 2008:

BPA is everywhere, used to make polycarbonate, a rigid, clear plastic for bottles, bike helmets, DVDs and car headlights. It’s also an ingredient in epoxy resins, which coat the inside of food and drink cans. About 93% of Americans tested by the Centers for Disease Control had the chemical in their urine.

Since then, the debate over BPA has only intensified. Canada and Denmark have banned the chemical’s use in baby bottles, toys and other products for infants. Regulators in Japan and the EU looked at the evidence and decided that the chemical is safe. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in January that it had “some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children,” and that it would join other federal agencies in studying the chemical in both animals and humans.

In the meantime, some companies have paid a heavy price for their use of BPA. SIGG, the Swiss maker of shiny aluminum bottles, got into hot water last year when it got caught using BPA.

Until recently, General Mills assured consumers that they had nothing to fear from BPA, calling it a “critical component” of the coatings inside its cans. Here’s how the company responded in December to a customer inquiry, as reported by the La Vida Locavore blog:

But in its new 2010 corporate responsibility report [PDF], after saying that “General Mills continues to believe that BPA is safe,” the company announced a shift:

Viable alternatives have not yet been identified for all types of foods, including some of the packaging applications used by General Mills, but we are optimistic that safe and viable alternatives may be identified in time. For example, one alternative has proven safe and viable in our processing of tomatoes – and General Mills will transition to can linings that do not use BPA on our organic Muir Glen tomato products with the next tomato harvest.

After I emailed General Mills to ask why, spokeswoman Heidi Geller replied by email:

We made this decision because we know that some of our consumers would like us to pursue alternatives.  We have been working with our can suppliers and can manufacturers to develop and test alternative linings that do not use BPA for some time.

So why just organic tomatoes? Because “viable alternatives have not been identified for all types of foods,” she wrote.

Still, some companies are evidently working harder than others to eliminate BPA. Eden Foods says it has eliminated BPA from all its cans of organic beans and chili, while noting on its website that BPA-free cans cost about 14% more than those with the chemical.

Over at Coca-Cola, meanwhile, the shareholder resolution asking for a BPA study won over some impressive backers–not just IEHN, but CalPERS, the big California pension fund, and shareholder advisers RiskMetrics and Proxy Governance.  The resolution was introduced by social investment firms As You Sow, Domini Social Investments and Trillium Asset Management.

Coca-Cola said:

All available scientific evidence and testing shows that drinks in aluminum and steel cans are safe. BPA levels in canned beverages are extremely low, and it is physically impossible to consume enough canned beverages to ever approach the daily BPA limit established by leading health authorities, including those in the United States, Europe and Canada.

That may  be, but for better or worse, a small but growing number of consumers, some of them stirred up by the scare tactics of environmental groups, have decided to try to avoid BPA.

This makes life tough for corporate decision makers who would prefer to wait around for a scientific judgment. The trouble is, scientists can’t even agree on the best way to study the chemical’s effects, as this article in Nature reports, although researchers are now trying to  forge a consensus on experimental protocols.

The trouble is, once a chemical gets tagged with the adjective controversial — including by journalists like me, who don’t claim to understand or even to have read the science — it’s very hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube, or, in this case, the tomatoes back in the can. The result? Companies that don’t seek out safer alternatives could find themselves trying to catch up those that do.

No form of energy–not solar, wind, hydropower, obviously not coal or oil–comes without environmental tradeoffs.

One promising new energy source–a vast supplies of natural gas, trapped in shale deep beneath the earth’s surface–is getting renewed scrutiny these days, and for good reason.

While natural gas is often called a “bridge” to a clean energy future, critics are bombing the bridge with a frack attack, says energy policy analyst Kevin Book of Clearview Energy Partners.

Book was referring to the drumbeat of questions being raised by environmentalists, community activists, reporters and  members of Congress about  hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process during which water, chemicals and sand are pumped underground at  high pressure to cause tiny fissures in rock and force natural gas to the surface.

In the weeks ahead, new pressures will come from activist shareholders of a dozen energy companies. They’ve filed shareholder resolutions asking the companies to take a hard look at fracking and its risk, and they will raise the issue at annual shareholder meetings.

“Investors support natural gas drilling, but we want to make sure that it’s done right,” said Richard Liroff, executive director of the Investor Environmental Health Network. a group of investors and NGOs who focus on the financial and public health risks associated with corporate use of toxic chemicals. “What we are pushing companies to do is to implement the best management practices.”

In a news release announcing their campaign, the investors say:

Investors and investor advisors including As You Sow, Green Century Capital Management, Miller/Howard Investments, Catholic Healthcare West, First Affirmative Financial Network, the Mercy Investment Program, the New York State Common Retirement Fund, the Shareholder Association for Research & Education, Pax World Management, the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, the Sustainability Group, and Trillium Asset Management have begun to engage approximately 20 companies, and have filed shareholder resolutions with 12 companies including Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation (COG), Chesapeake Energy (CHK), ExxonMobil (XOM), Hess Corporation (HES), EOG Resources (EOG), and Range Resources (RRC) over these risks.

What’s the problem with fracking? The process, which uses millions of gallons of water and unknown chemicals,  has been linked to a range of health and environmental problems, including contaminated drinking water in Pennsylvania,  a massive fish kill in a creek along the border between Pennsylvania and West Virginia and a chemical spill that killed cows in Shreveport, Louisiana, as the Wall Street Journal has reported.

If you want to know more, let me recommend an excellent series of prize-winning stories published by the investigative news site, Pro Publica, and written by Abrahm Lustgarten, a former colleague of mine at FORTUNE. Abrahm has spent more than a year investigating hydraulic fracturing. While the industry insists that gas drilling is sage, he  writes that:

…the issues are far less settled than the industry contends, and that hidden environmental costs could cut deeply into the anticipated benefits.

For example, it remains unclear how far the tiny fissures that radiate through the bedrock from hydraulic fracturing might reach, or whether they can connect underground passageways or open cracks into groundwater aquifers that could allow the chemical solution to escape into drinking water. It is not certain that the chemicals – some, such as benzene, that are known to cause cancer – are adequately contained by either the well structure beneath the earth or by the people, pipelines and trucks that handle it on the surface. And it is unclear how the voluminous waste the process creates can be disposed of safely .

“This is a field where there is almost no research,” said Geoffrey Thyne, a former professor at the Colorado School of Mines and an environmental engineering consultant for local government officials in Colorado. “It is very much an emerging problem.”

The natural gas industry’s response to the allegations hasn’t helped its cause. EOG Resources and Cabot Oil & Gas both went to the SEC, asking that the shareholder resolutions be taken off the ballot. That failed. Chesapeake Energy has also challenged the resolution.

Worse, companies refuse to disclose the chemicals used in the fracking process, calling them trade secrets. The 2005 energy bill, spearheaded by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, exempted natural gas drilling from disclosure requirements of  federal clean water laws. Critics call that the “Halliburton exception” because Halliburton, the company where Cheney was once CEO, helped pioneer fracking.

Last month, Congressman Henry Waxman asked eight oil and gas companies that use fracking to provide information about the chemicals they use.

Rich Liroff

The IEHN’s Rich Liroff says owners of the companies can’t get the information they need to assess risk:

This is a sector-wide problem. There is virtually no meaningful disclosure from any of the companies about what safeguards they are employing and what efforts they are making to implement best management practices.

If you are an investor who wants to invest in the natural gas sector, and figure out what the risks are and the rewards are for any individual company, you just don’t have enough information to make an informed judgment.

Larissa Ruoff, director of shareholder advocacy at Green Century Funds and a leader of the investor coalition, is also calling for more transparency and engagement from the companies.

An industry website, Energy in Depth, says the concerns of critics are overblown. It notes that fracking is now responsible for about 30% of the U.S.’s domestic oil and natural gase, and that 60 to 80% of wells drilled in the U.S. in the next decade will require fracturing. As for the safety issues, the industry says:

Hydraulic fracturing is a safe, well-regulated, environmentally sound practice that has been employed over one million times without a single incidence of drinking water contamination.

If that’s so, why fight the critics? Why not engage with them?

As Gil Friend, the CEO of a consulting firm called Natural Logic, writes in his 2009 book, The Truth About Green Business:

Your business can wait to be dragged, kicking and screaming…or it can lead the way…. If you’re constantly reacting, you risk losing market share to innovators, while you’re spending more time and resources adjusting. Being reactive is no way to run a successful business.

Smart companies will be open about their practices and get ahead of this controversy before it gets out of control–unless they really do have something to hide.

Several questions for those of you who own shares of stock:

When’s the last time you voted a proxy?

When’s the last time you opened a proxy?

Do you even know what a proxy is?

Don’t be embarrassed. Roughly 80% of individual investors–let’s call them share owners, because that’s what they are–don’t vote their proxies. This is one reason why CEO salaries are too high, boards of directors are complacent and executives fail to recognize that owners want companies to behave responsibly, as well as deliver returns.

A startup company called Moxy Vote aims to change that, by awakening share owners to their nascent power.

“It’s an interesting challenge–to put passion into proxy voting,” said Doug Gates, a Moxy Vote vice president, when we talked the other day.

Doug, 41, is one of three Gates brothers involved in the venture–his twin brothers Kevin and Rich are three years younger. The startup was hatched at a West Chester, Pa., investment company called TFS Capital, where Kevin and Rich work and which put $2 million into the business.

By enlisting the help of shareholder advocacy groups, the Moxy Vote founders think there’s an opportunity to organize individual share owners so that their voices can be heard in the boardroom. About 30% of shares in public companies are owned by individuals, as opposed to institutions like mutual funds, pension funds and insurance companies (most of which, of course, represent the savings of individuals).

Interestingly, Moxy Vote already has had some success. Shareholders of a small tech firm called On2 Technologies, which is being sold to Google, organized Moxy Vote to oppose the deal, which valued On2′s shares at 60 cents apiece. In December, Moxy Vote said on its blog that it had voted about 11.5% of the shares outstanding. This month, Google sweetened the deal under pressure, raising the price from 60 to 75 cents a share, from a total of $106.5 million to $133 million. Whether Moxy Vote made a difference (or even how the shares were voted) is hard to know, but surely the fact that shareholders got organized collectively didn’t hurt.

Here’s how Moxy Vote works. It formed relationships with about 20 shareholder advocacy groups, including unions like the Teamsters and Change to Win, nonprofits like the Humane Society of the United States and the Investor Environmental Health Network, foundations, socially-responsible investors and religious groups including the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and the Sisters of Mercy Investment Program.

What these organizations have in common is that they use the power of shareholder resolutions (virtually all of which are advisory, by the way) to get corporations to change. Their issues include executive pay, climate change, human rights, diversity, animal welfare, toxic chemicals and so forth. They intend to use the site to recruit support.

As Michael Passoff, associate director of an advocacy group called As You Sow, put it by email:

While shareholders are technically the owners of a company, their voice is almost completely ignored. CEO’s regularly say that are doing this or that for the good of the shareholders, but as the latest financial crisis shows, many companies engage in risky business practices and the CEO’s still walk away with huge benefits even if they fail miserably at their jobs and destroy shareholder value. We believe in empowering shareholders to hold corporations accountable.

By email, Stu Dalheim, director of shareholder advocacy at Calvert Investments, told me:

Our sense is that too many investors do not vote their proxies because they do not have the time to think through all of the issues. Moxy Vote can help facilitate participation in corporate governance or shareholder democracy by giving individuals the information and tools they need to exercise their shareholder rights

Susan Morgan, co-founder of Investors Against Genocide, which is also working with Moxy Vote, said:

Over the past two years our shareholder proposal on genocide-free investing has been on the proxy ballots at the largest U.S. mutual fund companies including Fidelity, Vanguard, and American Funds.  We have found that most shareholders throw away their ballots without realizing that they have an opportunity to vote on an issue of great social importance.  We hope that through Moxy Vote and other related efforts, mutual fund shareholders will become more engaged in the voting process and realize that they can be a powerful voice for social change.

Moxy Vote itself doesn’t take sides on shareholder controversies. In fact, it’s hoping to enlist advocates on both sides–say, an animal rights group and a meat company. To make money, Moxy Vote may charge companies to be part of the site, or sell ads.

Doug Gates explained:

It was very much a conscious decision to stay out of the fray. We thought it would be more interesting, and more fun to build an open platform, and more successful in the long run.

Can apathetic share owners be awakened? Moxy Vote isn’t alone in trying. A nonprofit called ShareOwners.org (where my friend Nell Minow chairs the advisory committee) promotes better corporate governance and shareholder activism (“Rein in Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay abuses!”). A website called TransparentDemocracy.org invites people to learn more about political and corporate elections. Social media tools like Ning and Facebook make it easier than ever to organize like-minded folk.

In light of the fact that many people can’t be bother to vote for their president or Congress, it won’t be easy to induce them to vote as share owners. But in the wake of the financial crisis, when boards of directors performed horrible and the rest of us paid for it, this seems like the right time to try.

Sometimes, history is made quietly.

For decades, shareholder activists have filed dozens, if not hundreds, of resolutions with public companies asking them to improve their environmental policies and practices. Not one passed—until this year.

The breakthrough vote came in May at IdaCorp.,  a $988-million a year utility company and independent power producer based in Boise, Idaho. Despite the usual opposition from management, the owners of 51.2 percent of IdaCorp.’s shares voted to ask the company to adopt greenhouse gas reduction goals.

Hardly anyone noticed at the time because, well, it was Idaho and not even the shareholder activists expected a victory. “I expected a vote of about 25%,” said Michael Passoff of As You Sow, a nonprofit group that organized the investor vote.

Since then, the company responded. Legally, it didn’t have to act because, as you may know, most shareholder votes are “precatory,” a fancy legal term meaning that management can ignore even a majority of the company’s owners. In any event, IdaCorp. agreed to adopt goals for curbing the heat-trapping gases that cause global warming, issued its first request for a proposal for a wind farm and submitted a “smart grid” proposal, hoping to tap into the federal government’s stimulus money to upgrade the grid.

“The company was stuck in its ways,” Passoff said, “and I think the shareholder vote woke them up. To their credit, they’ve been very responsive. We seem to be developing a good working relationship with them.”

The IdaCorp. vote was the highlight of  a very good year of investor engagement with companies, according to a recap from Ceres, a coalition of institutional investors and environmental groups that works to get companies to become more sustainable.

“There’s growing investor concern about climate risk, and there’s a growing corporate response,” said Rob Berridge, manager of investor programs at Ceres, when we spoke by phone. “We’re very pleased with the agreements that investors were able get from companies.”

Among the 2009 highlights:

Chevron agreed to develop and disclose a business plan setting an annual GHG emissions reduction target for its operations, and to track emissions from its products

Citigroup agreed to establish a due diligence process loans related to mountain top removal (MTR) coal mining and to consider shareholder input in the development of that process

Pulte, the nation’s largest homebuilder, agreed to establish quantitative emissions reduction goals for its operations.

Of the 68 climate-related shareholder resolutions filed by investors in 2009, 31 were withdrawn after the companies agreed to take positive steps, according to Ceres.

Why the encouraging news?

Partly because Ceres has clout. It leads an alliance of 80 investors, called the Investor Network on Climate Risk, with assets of more than $7 trillion. Big  funds like CalSTRS, the New York City and state of Connecticut pension fund are active members.

Congressional action on climate regulation also came into play, we can assume. With the government moving to regulate GHG emissions, companies need to pay attention to climate-related risks.

What’s more, as Ceres notes, financial analysts who advise shareholders are taking the climate issue seriously. RiskMetrics Group (parent company of the powerful Institutional Shareholder Services proxy advisor) supported at least 21 resolutions, well over half of those that went to a vote.

Finally, as the climate crisis gets more attention, particularly from smart and influential companies like GE and DuPont, few companies want to be seen as laggards.

In that regard, the most surprising vote of the 2009 shareholder season may have been one at coal company Massey Energy, where a climate-change resolution got 45.6 percent support.

This can’t have been welcome news to Massey’s CEO Don Blankenship. He’s the CEO who said last year that “I don’t believe climate change is real” and that “the greeniacs are taking over the world.” (If only.) Of Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, Blankenship said: “They’re totally wrong. What they do is nonsense….They’re all crazy.” (You can watch his amazing You Tube video here.)

It’s safe to assume that Massey, with a CEO like Blankenship, has a conservative investor base. So that 45% vote tells you that times are changing.

For more details on company agreements, see the Highlights from the 2009 Climate Change Proxy Season  at the Ceres website.

The two most influential companies in America, I’d argue, are GE and Wal-Mart. GE has clout because of the respect accorded its managers, even after a tough run under Jeff Immelt. Wal-Mart matters because of its scale, meaning that most everyone in the consumer products business wants to do business with Wal-Mart. Both have wrestled seriously the idea of sustainability in the last few years. I never tire of writing about either company.

You’ll get lots of arguments about Wal-Mart, but I think the company has changed dramatically for the better under Lee Scott, who announced last month that he is stepping down as CEO. The company engaged with its critics, took a systematic look at its environmental impact and began an ambitious and far-reaching effort to become more sustainable. Its impact is felt in unexpected places. Did you know, for example, that Wal-Mart has taken on the repressive government of Uzbekhistan over the issue of child labor? I’ve taken an anecdotal look at a few of Wal-Mart’s initiatives in today’s Sustainability column.

Here’s how the column begins:

Children who are forced to pick cotton in Uzbekistan, farmers scratching out a living in Guatemala and salmon fishermen in Bristol Bay, Alaska, would not seem to have much in common. But all are feeling the global impact of Wal-Mart.

As the world’s largest retailer, with $379 billion in revenues last year, Wal-Mart has long been a powerful force in the global economy – a bully, its critics would say. For years, they assailed Wal-Mart for squeezing suppliers over costs, driving mom-and-pop stores out of business or crushing efforts to organize its workers.

These days, though, the company is winning praise for using its leverage – that’s a polite term for bullying – to protect the environment and help the poor.

The more people I meet who work Wal-Mart, and the more I talk with the company’s critics and partners, whether from environmental NGOS or socially-responsible investment funds–and their role as agents of change is vital–the more I am convinced that Wal-Mart is thinking expansively and creatively about its responsibility.

You can read the rest of the column here.

To save the planet, we need to take a handful of big steps, like regulating greenhouse gas emissions. We also need to take many, many small steps, like recycling, buying paper from sustainably-harvested forests and using less packaging. Last week’s high-profile defeat of the Lieberman-Warner bill to regulate greenhouse gases was a significant setback, a big step that won’t happen for at least another year.. So this posting will look at some small steps towards a cleaner planet that have not gotten as much attention.

We’ll start with Best Buy. Thanks in part to the work of an effective shareholder activist group called As You Sow, Best Buy announced last week that it will test a free recycling program that will offer consumers a convenient and safe way to get rid of old TVs, computers, cell phones and other unwanted gadgets. The trial will be offered at 177 Best Buy stores in eight states. The company already had an active recycling program, available when consumers bought a new product from Best Buy. The big change here is that Best Buy will take back e-waste that it did not sell.

Conrad McKerron, an activist with As You Sow, told me via email:

As You Sow has been in dialogue with Best Buy, the largest U.S. electronics retailer for several months, and filed a shareholder proposal with the company last fall asking it to look at using its stores for free take back of electronic waste, including TVs, and to partner with electronic manufacturers to develop a workable, convenient national collection system. We withdrew the proposal in exchange for an agreement by the company in April to develop a large scale pilot to test in-store recycling of electronics. They are now ready to roll out a pilot that will offer free take back of most consumer electronics, including TVs, at 117 of their stores in three areas – here in the SF Bay Area, Minneapolis and Baltimore. We believe this represents the first on-going large scale take back of consumer electronics offered by any major retail chain.

This is especially significant because of next February’s switchover from analog to digital TV broadcasting, which could render millions of old TVs obsolete. The ultimate goal—and we are gradually getting there—is for all manufacturers to assume responsibility for take-back all their products, as Dell and HP have for their hardware. (I recently shipped a couple of old printers back to BP, and the system worked well.) Sony’s the leader in the TV industry; its competitors have yet to come along. Best Buy could give them a push.

Speaking of HP, the company recently announced a comprehensive new paper-buying policy, developed in cooperation with NGOs Forest Ethics and World Wildlife Fund. We’ll spare you most of the (boring) details; suffice it to say that HP will set goals for all of its worldwide operations, maximize the use of recycled paper, give preference to papers certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, and report publicly on all of this. The paper products covered under HP’s new policy amount to more than 300,000 tons, including its retail printing paper, all packaging, promotional materials, and internally used paper.

Will Craven of Forest Ethics tells me that a growing number of companies are taking responsibility for the environmental impact of the paper they use. Among them are Limited Brands (after an activist campaign targeting the Victoria’s Secret catalog), Patagonia, REI, Crate & Barrel, Williams-Sonoma, Timberland, Nordstrom’s, and LL Bean and Dell. Visit www.ForestEthics.org or www.catalogcutdown.org for more info.

Finally, Wal-Mart marked a milestone recently—it now sells only concentrated liquid laundry detergent in all of its U.S. and Canadian stores, having phased out those wasteful, oversized jugs of Tide, All and the like. Essentially, Wal-Mart muscled its suppliers to ship their detergent in more compact containers, saving water, plastic, shipping costs and shelf space (in the stores and in your laundry room). It’s part of the company’s ambitious goal to reduce the packaging (and waste) of everything it sells.

Since about 25% of all the liquid laundry detergent sold in the U.S. is sold at Wal-Mart stores—yes, the company is THAT big—this means the beginning of the end of those oversized containers.

I’m interviewing Matt Kistler, Wal-Mart’s senior vice president of sustainability, later this week at a conference called Greener By Design organized by my friend Joel Makower. After we talk, I’ll report back on other WMT initiatives aimed at reducing packaging and designing products with a lighter environment footprint.

Given the reach of Best Buy, HP and Wal-Mart, these aren’t really small steps—they’re major steps. But let me be clear: They are no substitute for the big steps, like climate-change legislation, that will be required to bring about the change we need, at the scale we need, in a hurry.