Good Guide

Forestry wars: Who’s peddling pulp fiction?

March 28, 2011

Pity the shopper who wants to buy “green” paper or forest products.

They can choose products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) or by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI).

Only the most dedicated deep-green consumer can be expected to understand the differences between the two.

And few know there’s a war of words going on between backers of the FSC and SFI.

Todd Paglia, executive director of the activist group Forest Ethics, says this about the SFI:

SFI is dangerous because it is a lie – it tells consumers that the product bearing the label is green when it isn’t.  SFI allows logging in old growth, logging in endangered species habitat, clearcut logging on landslide prone slopes above salmon streams….  In other words, business as usual with a “green” façade.

When industry is helping write the rules and set its own standards they will be high on rhetoric and extremely low on substance. That is SFI:  this is a fake eco-label of, by, and for the forest industry.

Not surprisingly, this kind of talk angers the folks at SFI–so much so that they  approached The New York Community Trust, a foundation that supports Forest Ethics, to complain. On its website SFI says:

ForestEthics continues to peddle pulp fiction about the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, repeating the same old inaccurate and misleading information.

With just 10 percent of the world’s forests certified to any certification standard, groups should work together to increase responsible forestry. Instead, ForestEthics spends energy and resources on well-funded attacks to discredit SFI, often citing outdated, incomplete, inaccurate or misleading information.

Such conflicts aren’t unique to the forest products industry, although the rhetoric here is unusually heated. Eco-labels are supposed to guide consumers to environmentally-friendly choices, but they have become so numerous–more than 300, by some estimates–and so confusing that consumers now need their own guides to eco-labels, like this Greener Choices website from Consumer Reports. [click to continue…]

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Randall Davidson’s 20 green tips for small biz

January 24, 2011

Today’s guest post comes from Randall Davidson, who is the lead project manager at Audio Transcription, an eco-friendly transcription service based in San Francisco. Clients send audio files to the company, which are parsed into smaller clips, digitally distributed to a network of trained transcribers and returned as a complete, quality-assured transcript. In addition, the company offers online transcription services, which are the greenest form of transcription available because no CDs or flash drives need to be shipped through the mail. Randall, who is 28, has introduced a number of the green practices outlined below into Audio Transcription’s marketing operations.

Small businesses employ more than 52% of working Americans, according to the Small Business Administration, and comparable percentages in other developed countries. It follows that small businesses generate a substantial portion of the business world’s environmentally harmful waste. To help small business owners and employees minimize their environmental impact, here are 20 simple ways to more sustainably market a small business. I hope that you’ll contribute your thoughts – what I’ve gotten right and wrong and what I’ve omitted – in the comments.

  1. Print all marketing materials on recycled paper. Whether you’re going to send out flyers, pamphlets or other marketing literature, make sure it’s on recycled paper.
  2. Hold your meetings remotely. As you meet with your colleagues, including external vendors, try to hold as many meetings as possible over the Internet. Try tools like Skype, TokBox and other free videoconferencing technologies.
  3. Send email  instead of paper newsletters. Not only will you save money by switching to an email marketing service, but you’ll also do far less damage to the environment. Even better from a business standpoint is that email marketing provides huge insights into how your marketing efforts are being received that printed flyers cannot. For instance, email marketing services can generally tell you what percentage of your emails were opened, how long they were opened and which links were clicked. [click to continue…]

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Will Rosenzweig: Venturing in sustainability

December 14, 2010

Most venture capital investors don’t have a focus. Kleiner Perkins says it is “in search of the next big idea.” Draper Fisher Jurvetson “backs extraordinary entrepreneurs everywhere who set out to change the world.” Mohr Davidow values “entrepreneurs who identify impressive market opportunities and are not afraid to go after them.”

Physic Ventures is different. Its mission is “investing in keeping people healthy.” Specifically, the San Francisco-based venture firm, which has backing from corporate giants Unilever, PepsiCo and Humana, invests in “technology-enabled, consumer-facing companies that help people and the environment stay healthy,” according to Will Rosenzweig, its managing director.

Physic is betting that it can discover and invest in startups that can make “personal and planetary health” a big business, just as richer and better-established Silicon Valley VCs made fortunes by backing information technology startups like Apple, Google and Amazon.

Will Rosenzweig

I had lunch recently with Will Rosenzweig in Washington to talk about Physic and some of its portfolio companies. Will is an engaging and interesting guy, best known for starting a company called The Republic of Tea in the early 1990s. (He and his co-founders, Mel and Patricia Ziegler, who also co-founded Banana Republic, wrote an acclaimed book about the experience that’s also called The Republic of Tea.) Will, who is 51, was also an early organizer of the TED conferences, the head of marketing for Odwalla and a teacher at the Haas business school at Berkeley.

Will and Dion Madsen, who had run a venture fund inside Unilever, the $57 billion consumer products giant, co-founded Physic Ventures about five years ago. It’s an independent fund whose corporate backers who offer strategic advice and research insights. Its financial investors include CalPERS and CalSTRS, the California state and teachers’ pension funds.

Will has written about the fund-raising efforts and strategy in an article called 7 Reasons Why Great LPs Invested in Our First-Time Venture Fund . [PDF, download] He and his partners raised about $159 million by 2008–an impressive amount for a fund in a new sector, with no track record of successful exits.

It’s much too early to judge the success of the fund or its investment thesis, but there’s no doubt that Physic has invested in some intriguing startups. [click to continue…]

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Why green business is like teen sex

February 4, 2010

Corporate sustainability is like teen sex.

Everybody talks about it.

Nobody does it very much.

And when they do it, they don’t do it very well.

My friend and colleague Joel Makower likes to tell that joke, and it’s as good a way as any to introduce Greenbiz.com’s third annual State of Green Business report. The wide-ranging report was unveiled today in San Francisco at a conference hosted by 100203-sobg1-wJoel. I won’t try to summarize it;  it’s available free for download here, and well worth a read. Among other things, Joel and his colleagues identify 10 green business trends–they include radical transparency, green fleets, toxics as strategy, and the rethinking of packaging–and they measure progress (or the lack thereof)  around 20 different metrics, including carbon transparency, carbon reporting, clean-tech investments and green power use.

The teen sex joke is fitting because the ratio of of talk to action in the green business arena remains high. Particularly when it comes to climate change–now and most likely forever the No. 1 environmental issue for business, and for everyone else–progress has been halting because of the absence of consistent government policy, at the national or global level. Only 34% of the S&P500 companies have promised to [click to continue…]

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