Have consumers ever been more powerful than they are today?

A Facebook posting led thousands of people to move money out of big banks and into credit unions. When customers revolted, Verizon dropped plans to charge a $2 “convenience fee” to pay bills online. A petition at change.org led to Bank of America back off a scheme to charge customers for using their debit cards.

“It’s a great time to be a citizen,” says Brent Schulkin. “It’s a really bad time to be a failed institution.”

Schulkin, who is 31, is the founder of Carrotmob, a startup that aims to use the power of consumers to do good. Instead of boycotting or protesting companies for missteps (or downright bad behavior),  Carrotmob organizes campaigns in which people offer to spend their money to support a business, and in return the business agrees to take an action that the people care about. It’s the opposite of a boycott, and it’s called Carrotmob (not to be confused with the comedian Carrot Top) because it uses a “carrot” instead of a “stick” to spark change.

Carrotmob in Sydney, Australia

You can think of Carrotmob as another way to drive sustainability by using social media. The idea has been kicking around Schulkin’s head since 2003 when he was an undergrad at Stanford. As it evolves, it is likely to look more like  Groupon (which uses the power of collective purchasing to drive discounts) or Kickstarter (where people can come together to raise money to support a project) while tapping into some of the frustrations that energized OccupyWallStreet.

“There are a huge number of people today who look at the machinery that makes our society work, and they think it’s broken,” Schulkin says, and he’s hope to channel their energy into fixing it.

The idea that consumers can influence companies with their pocketbooks isn’t new, of course. My friend Joel Makower, the founder of GreenBiz, wrote a book called The Green Consumer back in 1989. (You can buy it for a penny on Amazon.) And socially conscious consumers helped build brands like Newman’s Own and Ben & Jerry’s. even today, though, green consumers are not well-organized, or connected to one another. You may buy Seventh Generation laundry detergent or Timberland boots but it’s not clear what difference, if any, you have made by doing so.

This is Brent Schulkin of Carrotmob

Schulkin got Carrotmob going four years ago by organizing his friends and their friends to support a liquor store in the Mission district of San Francisco. They spent $9,000 in a single day on “beer and popsicles,” had a party afterwards and in return the owner did an energy retrofit on the store. They made a video of that first campaign and the idea spread, as good ideas often do on the net.

Since then, more than 175 Carrotmobs organized by grass-roots groups around the world, including France (“Invasion des Carrottes a Rennes”), Germany (“Erster Freiburger Carrotmob”) and Finland (“Porkannamafia!”, my personal favorite). Most have focused on energy and climate issues because retailers can be persuaded to invest in energy efficiency or clean power.

This is Carrot Top

These grass-roots efforts will continue, Schulkin says, mostly because they run themselves: “It’s their energy, their ideas, their passion. I just got an email from Estonia.”

The next step–and here is where things can get interesting and complicated–will involve harnessing all that buying power to support action by a big company or brand.

“What does it look like if we get millions of people into a network and drive millions of dollars in sales to a big company?” Schulkin asks.

This raises as many questions as it answers. How can Carrotmob insure that the quid for their quo is real? Who decides which companies or products are most deserving? And how does the venture govern and sustain itself?

Schulkin told me at the GreenBiz Forum in New York last week that Carrotmob is a work in progress, mostly supported by donations and sweat equity. He’s got bigger things in mind. The FAQ’s on the Carrotmob website point to a possible business model:

The primary model we are going to pursue will work like this: With our team and our technology we will help facilitate campaigns, and then we will charge businesses a small fee based on how much money the mob collectively spends. This fee will vary based on the circumstances of the campaign, but in general we think it’s the most sensible revenue model for us to pursue.

This makes Carrotmob sound a bit like Groupon, except that instead of a discount, its buyers get an environmental or social payback. Trust becomes a key factor at that point: consumers will have to trust Carrotmob and trust (or verify) that the company is, in fact, taking an action it would not otherwise do. Those are big hurdles. If Carrotmob can overcome them, it could become a real force for change.

This story was first published at GreenBiz.com, where I’m a senior writer.

Any day now, I’ll attract my 10,000th follower on Twitter. Whoever you are, thanks. Not coincidentally, Twitter has become my favorite social-media platform. So this seems like a good moment to reflect on social media, sustainability and journalism.

Like most of you, I imagine, I’m spending more time lately with social media — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google + and blogs (obviously) — and less with newspapers, magazines, television, radio and books.  While there’s obviously overlap between digital and traditional media, I’m finding social media to be an increasingly  efficient and effective way for me to gather and absorb information, which is what I do.

This post is not about how social media is transforming corporate sustainability–although clearly it is. Business has fewer secrets. Corporate communication has become a two-way process. Corporate shaming campaigns are more powerful than ever. Greenpeace targeted Kit Kat and Nestle very effectively last year on Facebook and YouTube, gay activists at All Out brought pressure on PayPal to drop its business relationship with hate groups and a petition on change.org helped spark a national conversation about shopping on Thanksgiving. This is powerful stuff.

Today, though, I want to talk about my own experience with social media. These platforms can be immensely valuable but they can also be a time suck. Here’s my thinking, as of now:

Why I love Twitter: I was on a conference call on August 23 when my home office started to shake. My first reaction was that a car or truck had hit the house. Then I checked Twitter, and found a bunch of posts about the earthquake that was making its way up the east coast. (Within a minute, according to Twitter, there were 40,000 earthquake-related Tweets.) Friends in New York read about the quake on Twitter and felt it moments later.

The point is, Twitter is a super-fast way of keeping up with the news. More important, it’s the best way I know of to stay abreast of the news that I need to know — about business, sustainability, energy, climate and corporate social responsibility. That’s because I’ve found people I trust on Twitter who share what they are reading and thinking about. By spending 15 to 30 minutes a day on Twitter (not counting the time reading links), I can stay on top of news and commentary that matters to me.

I follow nearly 500 people–too many, and so I intend to prune my list–but a dozen or two are especially useful to me. They include my colleagues Joel Makower and Hugh Byrne at GreenBiz, Jesse Jenkins and the crew at The Energy Collective, Andy Revkin of Dot Earth, Bryan Walsh of Time, the brilliant curmudgeon David Roberts of Grist, Tom Philpott and Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones, David Biello of Scientific American, Damian Carrington at the Guardian, CSR blogger Toby Webb, and writers Christoper Mims, Paula Crossfield and Sam Fromartz. I also follow groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, NRDC and Sierra Club, publications like Grist and a handful of companies, but I much prefer individual voices and tastes.

I love sharing what I’m reading on Twitter, and doing my part to help good work find a broader readership.  And, of course, I use Twitter to promote my own writing. We insecure writers (the adjective is superfluous, of course) want nothing more than to be read. Just getting “retweeted” or “favorited” delivers a tiny rush of recognition.

There’s much more to be said about Twitter–it can be a terrific way to interact with readers, and to seek out sources and ideas–but the point is, Twitter is one of the best thing to happen to journalism in years, and I say that even though I once wrote a post titled Why Twitter is bad for journalism. (It was about the risks of “live” tweeting.)

My Facebook problem: The enthusiasm I feel now for Twitter is similar to what I felt for Facebook when it first came along. These days, I find myself spending less and less time on Facebook. I’ve struggled to draw lines between my personal and professional use of Facebook, and as a result my feed is cluttered with updates of limited interest (“Check out this Xmas light show. All set to music”) from my 603 so-called friends, a group that includes real friends, relatives, running partners, business colleagues and professional contacts I barely  know. Even a few people I’ve never met.  Somehow I’ve made a mess of this.

The result is,  I’m reluctant to update my “status” on Facebook because I don’t want to bother my true friends and relatives with a stream of news about sustainability and business, and I can’t imagine thatbusiness colleagues want to hear about my Sunday morning runs or winter vacation.

Still, I don’t want to leave Facebook. So I’m planning radical surgery. I now have a Facebook page which is exclusively for business use, along with my personal profile which is a mishmash of work and play. Sometime around the New Year, I’m going to “unfriend” most of those people who are not really friends and thereby cut them off from my personal posts. l hope some will find their way to my page.

Unfortunately, I’ll lose a lot of connections, as well as information, that comes from professional colleagues on Facebook, but I can’t see a better way out.

Figuring out LinkedIn and Google +: I recently signed up for LinkedIn, and early on I opened a Google + account, but so far I haven’t spend much time with either.

I’m connected with 197 people on LinkedIn but I honestly don’t know why. Perhaps it will be useful if there comes a time when I need to look for work. LinkedIn has a news feed which works as a (crudely) personalized wire service, but I prefer the breadth of coverage and personal recommendations that I get on Twitter.

Google + could be the solution to my Facebook mishmash but, at least for now, it feels like more trouble than it’s worth. Beside, I’m already a heavy user of Google  services — search, email, calendar, sharing documents and tracking my blog traffic –and  I’m wary of becoming too dependent on any one company.

I’m curious: What’s been your experience with social media, particularly as they pertain to journalism and sustainability? How much time do you spend on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+? Thoughts? Advice?

Next week brings a global conversation around a big idea being called  VERGE. The notion is that  energy, information, building, and vehicle technologies are converging, in ways that will make the planet radically more sustainable. The coinage comes from my friend and colleague Joel Makower, the chairman and executive editor of GreenBiz Group, the  producer of Greenbiz.com, where I’m a senior writer.

Like the Internet that makes it possible, VERGE will have a “deep and lasting impact,” Joel says. “It will change everything. Or, more accurately, it will focus and accelerate the changes already under way.”

We’ll be talking about VERGE at three high-level VERGE roundtables on June 21 and June 22 — one in San Francisco led by Joel and another in Shanghai led by Rob Watson, a  pioneer in the world of green buildings. I’ll be moderating the conversation in London, joined by executives from such companies as IBM, Cisco, Marks & Spencer, CH2MHill and Autodesk. Sustainability gurus John Elkington and Peter Madden will be there as well. You’ll be able to tune in live to all three events, culminating in a free, six-hour virtual event on June 22.

Here’s how Joel explains the VERGE in a recent story at GreenBiz:

Each of the four VERGE technologies is evolving quickly, with its own market, economic, policy, and technological dynamics.

• Energy technology is becoming decentralized, cleaner, better managed, and easier to store.
• Information technology is making every device, building, and vehicle smarter, able to connect into a vast Internet of things that can be addressed, monitored, controlled, and optimized.
• Buildings are becoming more intelligent and efficient, better able to optimize energy and resource use and enhance human comfort and productivity, with the potential of becoming net-positive, from the standpoint of their environmental footprint.
• Vehicles are getting smarter, too, able to communicate with their drivers, other vehicles, and their surroundings, becoming safer and more efficient while connecting passengers and fleet managers to a broader transportation and energy grid.

The convergence of these technologies has happened organically, the natural result of innovations built upon other innovations. Increasingly, however, there is a larger vision: of a highly interconnected world, where information technology infuses energy systems, buildings, and transportation vehicles and networks, tying them together, making each smarter and, as a result, enabling continuous waves of innovation and radical resource efficiency. Together, this convergence also promises to improve lives, both in developed and emerging economies.

Some of this will sound familiar, of course. IBM has effectively placed itself at the center of this set issues with its marketing around Smart Cities and Smart Buildings. In a recent article in FORTUNE, Bill Ford, the chairman of Ford Motor, describes his company’s vision of the future of mobility. Cisco executives like to talk about the Internet of things. (See my blogpost, The Internet of parking spaces.)

It may sound like something out of The Jetsons but, as Joel writes,  early stages of the VERGE vision are already here:

Autonomous vehicles that can travel efficiently and safely with little or no driver interaction. Hyper-efficient, zero-energy buildings able to generate and store energy, variously buying or selling power to the grid. Cities embedded with intelligence that move traffic, connect people, reduce emissions, enhance safety, and maximize well-being. Platooning technologies that allow cars to travel at close range at high speed, reducing congestion and emissions.

These are not futuristic pipe dreams. Each is being developed or deployed, funded by governments, venture capitalists, and some of the world’s biggest companies.

Along the way, many of these companies are finding their way into new industry sectors. I’ve written in the past about the countless “new energy companies” — companies ranging from Dupont to Procter & Gamble that are finding themselves selling energy-related products and services. I’ve written about a similar phenomenon in the green building arena, with companies as different as Firestone and Fireman’s Fund developing significant business offerings in that market. So, too, with transportation — companies like Google and Qualcomm that are developing vehicle-related products and services.

Suffice to say, VERGE is a massive business opportunity.

Again, much as the Internet did, VERGE is blurring lines between industries,  distributing power  and threatening entrenched interests. Every company (or person) that puts solar panels on a roof becomes an electricity provider, competing with their local utility. We don’t know yet whether the wired home of the future will be brought to use by home builders, software firms, Home Depot, Best Buy or all of the above. Will there by the equivalent of an Apple in VERGE–a visionary company that makes life easier by solving an array of problems in a delightful way?

Like the Internet, VERGE will be hard to avoid, Joel writes:

If you’re involved with buildings, facilities, energy, purchasing, logistics, fleets, or IT — not to mention sustainability — you’ll find yourself increasingly buffeted by VERGE innovations. So, too, those who manage and operate cities, schools, and hospitals.

Over time, it will also affect our personal lives — how we shop, work, and travel, for example.

VERGE technologies are being accelerated, he goes on to say, by energy and resource constraints, urbanization and rapid growth in the development world where there is more awareness of environmental issues than there was when the U.S. industrialized and become more urban (and suburban). No one has to tell people in Brazil that littering isn’t cool; they know that.

Joel draws other parallels between VERGE and the Internet, among them the fact that the net took decades to develop, and mostly did so before most of us noticed. The same may be true of VERGE.

He quotes Stephan Dolezalek, group leader of the cleantech practice at VantagePoint Capital Partners and a Silicon Valley veteran, as saying that the convergence of IT, energy, buildings and vehicles is inevitable. Says Dolezalek, who will be participating in our San Francisco roundtable: “We know how this movie ends. We’re just not certain of the plot.”

That’s because it’s up to all of us to figure how to get from the world we’ve created — one which is wasteful, unsustainable and evidently on its way  towards a climate catastrophe — to a world that is clean, green, healthful and sustainable. As Alan Kay, the iconoclastic computer scientist once put it: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

To learn more, join us next week for GreenBiz’s VERGE virtual conference.

Ok, it’s not quite the state of the union, but the annual State of Green Business (SOGB) report, put together by my friend and colleague Joel Makower, is becoming a big deal in the world of green business, and for good reason. It should be required reading for anyone working at the intersection of business and sustainability.

This year’s report was released today at the first of three State of Green Business forums — we’re in San Francisco this week, Chicago next week and Washington D.C. on Feb. 16-17. It’s useful because it lifts us above the day-to-day news cycle to identify major trends and ask big questions.

“Are we making progress, are we losing ground or are we holding steady?” Joel asked this morning, at SOGB San Francisco.

The answer, not surprisingly, is all of the above. Corporate commitments “are broader and deeper,” Joel said, citing in particular the plans unveiled in the last year by consumer products giants like Unilever and Procter & Gamble. “But progress is incremental. We’re still doing less bad, which is not the same thing as doing good.” We’re seeing more corporate transparency, more “green chemistry,” and progress when it comes to setting standards for companies and products.

The SOGB report looks at 10 trends and measures a basket of indicators that assess the progress that business is, or isn’t, making in key areas.

Here’s one encouraging indicator:

Clean tech investments: They’re growing again, after an understandable dip during the recession. The number of clean tech patents is growing, Electric vehicle companies raised money, as did solar firms. “More and more of the investment is coming from big companies,” Joel noted. The SOGB report draws on date compiled by Ernst & Young which reported today:

US venture capital (VC) investment in cleantech companies  increased by 8% to $3.98 billion in 2010 from $3.7 billion in 2009 and deal total increased by 7% to 278, according to an Ernst & Young LLP analysis based on data from Dow Jones VentureSource.

This is good news because only through clean tech innovation do we have any hope of moving corporate America towards a more sustainable footing. To put the $4 billion in context, that’s still well below the $5.75 billion invested in the peak year of 2008.

Here’s one that’s not so encouraging:

Carbon intensity: While many big companies have pledged to either reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in absolute terms, or to cut emissions per unit of output (which is essentially about energy efficiency), they aren’t doing nearly enough. (Click on the chart to enlarge.) Research from the Carbon Disclosure Project suggests that the targets set by U.S. companies will not enable the country to achieve President Obama’s stated (and modest) goal of reducing emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

This would require a 1.05 percent average annual absolute reduction rate; instead, emissions of S&P 100 companies are growing at a rate of 0.36 percent a year, “creating a Carbon Chasm between current emissions trends and required cuts,” says CDP.

Since there’s no more important issue than climate change, the fact that companies aren’t doing enough is, or should be, a big, big worry. As Joel said: “That’s simply inadequate. At this rate, we’re simply not going to get there. It’s not happening fast enough.”

There’s much, much more in the report, which is available as a free download.

Better yet, join us next week in Chicago or the following week in Washington. We’ve got a great lineup of speakers. I’m looking forward to interviewing business and government leaders including David Crane of NRG Energy, Paul Anastos of EPA, Jeff Swartz of Timberland and Seth Goldman of Honest Tea. We’ll also hear from execs from Nike, IBM, Schneider Electric, Campbell Soup, BASF, Avon, among others. GreenBiz conferences are jam-packed with interesting people, new ideas and networking opportunities galore.

So I have a confession to make: I’m kind of bored by eco-efficiency.

Yes, I know that this week’s announcement of new government standards for refrigerators and the super-insulated double-hung windows in the Empire State building and Yahoo’s new ‘chicken coop’ data center in upstate New York are all important ways to conserve energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save the planet.

But what really gets me jazzed is innovation that gets us closer to a sustainable world, not incrementally, but by leaps and bounds: innovative business models like Zipcar and RecycleBank, innovative products like P&G’s Tide coldwater or Method’s 8x laundry concentrate, and innovative ways of thinking about business like Waste Management’s Green Squad, which helps companies reduce waste before it’s created.

That’s why I’m excited about the first Greenbiz Innovation Forum this month (October 19-20) in San Francisco. It’s about “models, methods and mindsets for transforming business” to make it more sustainable. My friends and colleagues at Greenbiz, led by Joel Makower, have put together a terrific group of speakers, as well as hands-on opportunities for all of us to learn how to think more creatively.

I’m looking forward to reconnecting with Janine Benyus of the Biomimicry Guild,  architect and designer Bill McDonough of cradle-to-cradle fame and Aron Cramer, author of a new book called Sustainable Excellence. (They’ve all spoken at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference.)  I’m eager to meet author Hunter Lovins of Natural Capitalism Solutions, John Warner, a pioneer of the green chemistry movement and Tim Brown, the CEO of Ideo, among others.

Corporate executives who will talk about how they foster innovation include Stephen Meller and Len Sauers of P&G, Scott Elrod of Xerox PARC, Jim Hall of Waste Management, and Adam Lowry of Method. I’ll be moderating a panel with Adam and Andrew Williamson of Physic Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in “companies that are developing technologies, products and services to enable consumers to adopt more sustainable lifestyles.”

I hope to see you there–you can request an invitation here.

And if you are in the solar business, I could well see you the week before (October 12-13) in Los Angeles, where I’ll  be moderating a CEO panel at Solar Power International 2010, North America’s largest business-focused solar industry convention. I’ll be speaking with Tony Clifford, the chief executive officer of Standard Solar; Dan Shugar, the chief executive officer, Solaria; Terry Wang, chief financial officer, Trina Solar; and Matthew Baker, commissioner, Colorado Public Utilities Commission. We’ll talk about what’s needed to dramatically speed the growth of the solar business in the U.S., and you can be sure innovation will be a big part of our conversation.

In between, I’ll be at the Society of Environmental Journalists 20th annual conference in Missoula, Montana. I’m a newcomer to SEJ, but I did get to last year’s conference in Wisconsin and it was a great learning opportunity. This year there will be lots of talk about the west–water, wolves, natural parks and such–as well as panels about nuclear power (which isn’t popular with the SEJers I’ve met), the BP oil spill, nanotechnology and and even geoengineering–perhaps the most innovative approach imaginable to the climate crisis.

Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest consumer products company, today unveiled a bold new sustainability vision.

Don’t start the cheering yet.

Yes, the company eventually aims to power of all its operations with 100% renewable energy, to use 100% recyclable or renewable materials in all its products and to have no waste from the manufacturing or use of its products end up in landfills.

The vision is unimpeachable.

But the path to get there is not so clear.

And the reason to withhold applause? In the next decade or so, if P&G continues to grow, its environmental impact is more likely to get worse that it is to get better.

This is a fundamental conundrum for consumer goods companies with traditional business models and even the best of intentions: The more stuff they sell (and of course they want to sell more stuff), the more they pollute.

What P&G does matters, a lot. It’s an $80 billion company (annual revenues, for the year ended June 30). Its brands include Tide, Pampers, Crest, Gillette, Bounty, Cascade, Oral-B, Pepto Bismol, Ivory, etc.  It reaches 4 billion–4 billion!–consumers around the world and aims to reach 5 billion in the next five years. And like General Electric, P&G is an executive training machine; many ex-P&Gers (Meg Whitman, Steve Ballmer, Steve Case, many more) have gone on to do big things.

You can read a straightforward account of the P&G sustainability plan here at Greenbiz and a thoughtful (and favorable) analysis from my friend Joel Makower here. This is the latest iteration of P&G’s sustainability commitment, and the company has some meaningful accomplishments, as Joel reports. Just the past six months, P&G has:

introduced to the U.S. its Future Friendly campaign, born in Europe, a multi-brand and multi-platform effort to raise awareness about greener products and greener practices;

created a high-profile panel of sustainability experts to advise on its Future Friendly efforts;

launched a supplier scorecard to measure their environmental impacts;

reformulated a bestselling shampooto reduce toxins;

announced concentrated versions of powder laundry detergentsthat significantly reduce packaging and energy use; and

introduced sugarcane packaging to three of its shampoo and makeup brands.

First, these are all visionary long-term goals. No target dates are attached to them.

Second, P&G has been slow to develop this vision–which is strikingly similar to the the one laid out by Walmart in 2005. Indeed, while comparisons are inevitably imperfect, my impression is that when you measure P&G against Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer, or GE, the world’s most admired industrial company, or IBM, whose Smart Planet work is path-breaking, P&G is moving more slowly and timidly than any of those iconic FORTUNE 500 firms. It’s also trailing innovative competitors like Method (See Revolution in the laundry room) and Seventh Generation. More evidence that P&G is following, not leading? P&G’s Tide, the market leader, trailed Unilever’s All in the race to shrink laundry detergent packaging.

Third, and most important, P&G is mostly talking about eco-efficiency, as Sauers, to his credit, acknowledges. To pick just one example, P&G’s interim goals for 2020 include a commitment to reduce “packaging by 20 percent per consumer use.” This won’t be easy, I’m sure, and it’s admirable. But….let’s assume that P&G grows by a not-unreasonable 25% over the next 10 years. The company will then be producing more packaging, not less, than it does today.

P&G also tends to measure its reductions of  greenhouse gas emissions and water usage on a per-unit, rather than absolute basis. Strictly from a business standpoint,  this makes sense because as the company buys and sells businesses, it needs a consistent metric against which to define progress. But, as I wrote back in 2008 at Fortune.com with respect to P&G (See Buy Toilet Paper, Save the Planet):

Relative efficiency doesn’t matter to the planet. What matters is how many tons of greenhouse gases are emitted, and most scientists say those numbers need to first stabilize and then go down, dramatically.

Like most companies, P&G is still wrestling with the challenge of how to grow revenues and limit its footprint at the same time.

Given that, let’s hope that P&G’s talent for innovation will be focused on making consumption more sustainable. This page on P&G’s website offers a few examples, some impressive, most not so. If P&G can persuade more consumers to use Tide Coldwater or, in Europe, Ariel Cool Clean, both of which eliminate the need to heat water for laundry, we’ll all be better off. Opportunities around sustainability also lie in emerging markets, from which much of P&G’s growth will come.

As Len Sauers told Joel & Greenbiz:

I have a firm belief that all issues of sustainability will be solved by innovation. And at P&G, one of our core strengths is innovation, so as we go down this path to tackle these issues that the world is facing, I believe it’ll be our innovative solutions that are very helpful there. I see this as business opportunity for the company.

Is Coca Cola a more sustainable company than PepsiCo? Which company is greener, Dell or Hewlett Packard? Both UPS and FedEx say they are environmental leaders—who’s right?

Underwriters Laboratories (UL) — one of the world’s oldest and most respected standard-setting organizations — is going to help settle some of those arguments.

In cooperation with Greener World Media – the publisher of Greenbiz.com, where I’m a senior writer — UL plans to launch a ratings system for companies by the end of the year. This is a big deal because it could help bring credibility and clarity to the very crowded and confused business of sustainability ratings, rankings and eco-labels.

The news that Greener World Media and UL are working together on a sustainability standard surfaced last week when Marcello Manca, the vice president and general manager of UL Environment, spoke on a panel at the Amsterdam Global Conference on Sustainability and Transparency convened by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). At the same time, my friend Joel Makower, the founder of Greener World Media, wrote a detailed blogpost, explaining the origins of the project, which go back to the early 2000s.  Joel calls the new venture “LEED for companies,” saying:

We’ve long described this in shorthand as “LEED for Companies” — that is, a point-based rating system along with good-better-best levels of certification. We have been inspired by the success of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED green building rating systems, which created definitions of “green building” where there were none. Those ratings systems were critical catalysts in spurring the green-building market. Similarly, we believe this new standard and rating system will help define sustainability at the enterprise level, growing markets for certified companies.

If all goes according to plan, the new ratings system will rise above the crowd because it combines the knowledge and networks of Joel and Rory Bakke, director of sustainability at Greener World Media, who has worked extensively with government purchasing agencies, with the brand and credibility of UL, a global nonprofit that has been ratings products for safety for more than 115 years. UL has 6,700 employees and 65,000 customers around the world.

The UL-Greener World Media product–it doesn’t have a name yet–could also complement the data on products being compiled by the Sustainability Consortium organized by Wal-Mart, whose members now include retailers Safeway and Best Buy, and consumer products giants P&G, Disney, General Mills, PepsiCo, S.C. Johnson and Unilever. Jon Johnson, co-director of the consortium, was also at the GRI panel, and he said that UL’s company ratings would be a good fit with the consortium’s product data.  “Walmart has reached out to ULE,” Johnson said.

For  now, the business of rating and ranking products and companies around sustainability is an ungodly mess–although not for lack of efforts. Media companies such as Newsweek and CRO Magazine have tried to rank the greenest, most sustainable or responsible companies but their efforts have generated as much derision as respect. (See 100 Best Corporate Citizens? What a CROck!) A startup called Good Guide that rates products on health, environmental and social criteria has won adherents but also criticism from corporations. Claus Conzelmann of Nestle complained at the GRI event that Good Guide doesn’t have enough specific product data–Nestle alone makes 100,000 different products–to do a reliable job, calling some of its ratings “grossly misleading.” Socially responsible mutual funds and financial indexes like the Dow Jones Sustainability Index rank companies, but most don’t make their standards or criteria public. Most recently, Fast Company magazine online has  published “sustainability faceoffs” (they should have called them “sustainability smackdowns”) comparing Apple to  Microsoft, McDonald’s to  Starbucks, and Coke to Pepsi, using data and methodology from a book called The HIP Investor. (See How to be a HIP investor.)

Allen White of the Tellus Institute,  a co-founder of GRI, said: “The quantity of information is exploding. Is the quality keeping up? Is the usability there?…It does, at times, become very confusing, overwhelming.”

Marcello Manca

Many details of the UL-Greener World Media approach remain to be determined. The companies have begun talking  with companies and NGOs about their approach, which will combine, as Joel indicated, a point system with good-better-best ratings, mostly likely giving companies a silver, gold or platinum seal, or no rating at all, meaning they have work to do.

The ratings will go beyond “green.” Said Manca: “We’re looking at governance. We’re looking at workplace. We’re looking at supply chain. We’re looking at community engagement. It’s a holistic approach, and it’s all based on verifiable data.”

Several questions remain:

Will the results be made public? “This is still under discussion,” Manca said. “Our strong desire is that all of our clients will accept full disclosure.” If companies resist, UL and Greener World Media will be in a tough spot–they intend to make money by charging the companies that will be rated.

Why would companies pay for ratings? Partly because they want  third-party snapshot of their sustainability performance but mostly because their customers — Walmart, other retailers, governments — will insist that they get rated.

Isn’t it a conflict of interest for companies to pay for their own ratings? The evidence is mixed. Bond-rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poors did a dismal job rating financial products, giving AAA ratings to bonds that turned out to be junk because they wanted the business. But UL’s safety ratings are respected even though they are paid for by the companies.

I can’t be objective about the UL-Greener World Media venture, not only because I work closely with Greenbiz but also because I have so much respect for Joel and his colleagues. I like to tease Joel that he’s the “guru of green business” (AP once called him that) but the truth is that he has thought more about this set of issues than anyone I know. So I’m betting that the UL-Greener World Media will bring clarity, rather than clutter, to the business of rating business.

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 Joel. 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 reduce their carbon emissions, and some of those commitments have been modest. Greenbiz reports that 37 percent of the reductions were set at 2.5 percent or less, while nearly 15 percent didn’t specify a target. That’s not going to get us where we need to go. Partly that’s because for many companies, the business case for voluntary action is weak.

As a senior writer at Greenbiz, I interviewed Carl Bass, he CEO of Autodesk, and moderated a couple of panels–one on corporate carbon strategy post-Copenhagen with Christina Page of Yahoo!, Robert Parkhurst of PG&E, Sarah Skikne of The Climate Group and Holly Kaufman of Environment and Enterprise Strategies, another on the intersection of big business and clean tech with Rick Rommel of Best Buy, Kevin Surace of Serious Materials and Lynelle Cameron of Autodesk.

The most surprising moment, at least to me, came when Carl Bass said he was occasionally discouraged by the lack of progress towards a sustainable economy. That morning, he’d said, he was on a platform waiting for the BART train to San Francisco as hundreds of cars flew by. Yep–the CEO of Autodesk, a $2-billion company, takes the subway. This shouldn’t be unusual behavior but, trust me, it is.

The carbon management panel uncovered some strategic differences over offsets. Yahoo! dropped its plan to go carbon neutral last summer, choosing instead to focus on energy efficiency in its data centers. Christina said the company didn’t think buying offsets was worth the money or commitment of executive time. (I’m summarizing, but that was the bottom line.) By contrast, PG&E has a Climate Smart program that, Robert explained, has signed up 700 customers who want to go carbon neutral despite the murky payoff. Sierra Nevada, for example, decided that buying offsets would score the beer company points with its customers and workers, he said.

My favorite panel explored “Green Marketing in the Age of Transparency,” again because it teased out some useful disagreements. Dara O’Rourke of GoodGuide.com talked about his effort to make GoodGuide “the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home.” The company has an iPhone app that can be used to scan a barcode of a product and quickly find out about its health, environmental and social impact.

O’Rourke argued that consumers are increasingly eager for guidance around sustainability issues. “We have people debating bisphenol-A and debating pthalates and debating carbon in ways they didn’t a few years ago,” he said.

But Wendy Cobrda, president of a marketing and research firm called Earthsense, was skeptical. She said:

Nobody wants to swim in filthy water or breathe fithy air but in your day to day life, it’s very hard to think about every product you buy.  Most consumers are thinking me first. My kids have to get to school. My boss needs me. If I’m not going to get an immediate benefit, it’s not likely to get on my radar screen.”

I’m inclined to agree with Wendy. Much as I care about sustainability, I’m not going to use an iPhone app to analyze the social and environmental impact of, say, a can of soup when I go to the store. The health impact, maybe, but don’t the nutrition labels take care of that?

The good news, also from that panel, is that big retailers and independent standard-setters may do the job better and more efficiently than hundreds of millions of consumers can. The sustainability consortium being convened by Wal-Mart is trying to measure the life cycle of products; presumably, Wal-Mart and other big retailers will then give preference to greener products. We also heard from UL Environment, which is developing standards around sustainability.

You can already see the impact on Wal-Mart in the chart below, taking from the State of Green Business report. It looks at one of the bright spots–packaging. And why has there been such a reduction in packaging? Partly because it’s a way that companies can save money, and partly because Wal-Mart has been asking urging pressuring its suppliers to reduce their packaging.

So there’s encouraging news out there if you know where to look.

]]> http://www.marcgunther.com/2010/02/04/why-green-business-is-like-teen-sex/feed/ 0 http://www.marcgunther.com/2010/01/25/next-steps-climate-action-and-green-business/ http://www.marcgunther.com/2010/01/25/next-steps-climate-action-and-green-business/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:25:34 +0000 Marc http://www.marcgunther.com/?p=3556

Under the category of shameless promotion of self and friends, I want to call your attention to three upcoming events where I’ll be asking questions of some very smart people.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, January 26), I will be moderating a webinar for my colleagues at The Energy Collective called Is Global Action on Climate Change a Pipe Dream? Breaking Down What Was (Or Wasn’t) Achieved at COP15.

Next Thursday, February 4, I’ll be in San Francisco to join my colleagues at Greenbiz.com, led by executive editor Joel Makower, at their annual State of Green Business Forum at the PG&E Auditorium.

The following Tuesday, February 9, Joel and I and the Greenbiz crew will reconvene for a State of Green Business Forum at the Chicago Mart Plaza.

Here are some details:

We’ve got a great panel for The Energy Collective webinar, which is free of charge. Robert Stavins, the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at the Kennedy School at Harvard, as well as director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. Prior to Harvard, Stavins was a staff economist at the Environmental Defense Fund. You can read one of his thoughtful blogposts about Copenhagen here. Aimée Christensen is an activist and consultant who’s worked in government, business, law and the nonprofit world on climate, human rights and development issues. She’s now got her own company, Christensen Global Strategies, which advises corporate, governmental,  and non-profit clients seeking to address the global challenges of climate change, ecosystem degradation, and resource scarcity. Her clients have included the Clinton Global Initiative,  Swiss Re, the United Nations Development Program, Virgin United, and Wolfensohn + Co.  Our third panelist will be Dirk Forrister, managing director at Natsource, a leading carbon finance company. Dirk previously worked for the Clinton White House and the Department of Energy, so he knows the Washington scene.  We’ll begin our conversation at 1 p.m. ET, and allow plenty of time for questions from the audience. You can register for the event here.

In San Francisco and Chicago, after Joel Makower and Greenbiz release their annual State of Green Business report, we’ll spend the day talking about where green business is going with an impressive array of business leaders. In San Francisco, they will include Carl Bass, the president and CEO of Autodesk, Rob Bernard, chief environmental strategist for Microsoft, entrepreneur and MacArthur fellow Saul Griffith, Rich Lechner, v.p. of energy and environment at IBM,  Rick Rommel, who leaders emerging businesses for Best Buy and Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials. (Van Jones, the former White House green jobs czar, is also on the SF agenda, but he will be appearing by telepresence from Washington, D.C.) In Chicago, we will be joined by David Baum, president of the Baum Realty Group, Jim Davis, executive director for sustainability at SAP, Donna Ducharme of the Delta Institute, Rich Lechner, Sonia Medina, U.S. country director for EcoSecurities, C. David Myers, president for building efficiency at Johnson Controls, and Richard L. Sandor, chairman and founder of the Chicago Climate Exchange, among others. To register for either event, or obtain further info, visit the State of Green Business website. We’ll be talking about these topics:

Carbon Management After Copenhagen: How are companies considering carbon now that the Copenhagen summit is behind us? Hear how companies are viewing carbon as a strategic issue, implementing sophisticated new accounting schemes, realigning their products and processes, and preparing to compete in a low-carbon economy.

Green Marketing in the Age of Radical Transparency: In a world in which vast amounts of information are available about companies and products, the rules of green marketing have changed. Today, companies must respond to green ratings and rankings from websites, media companies, nonprofit organizations, and big players like Walmart. In a world where consumers have unparalleled access to data about products and companies, how does a company truly be seen as green?

Can IT Solve the World’s Problems? The information technology sector is responsible for 2% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, but its impact on the other 98% is growing rapidly. Hardware, software, and service providers are creating new products and services that are enabling large and small companies to better measure and manage their environmental impacts.

When Green Business Meets Cleantech: It used to be that green business and clean technology were separate realms. No longer. Today, the two are converging, as global companies and start-ups alike are harnessing clean technology as the foundation for a new generation of green business opportunities. The result are some unlikely corporate players and alliances.

On a personal note, it’s been about a year since I began working with The Energy Collective and Greenbiz. Robin Carey at TEC and Joel Makower and Pete May at Greenbiz are great partners, and their support for my writing makes this blog possible. So, thanks guys!

Stopping by the supermarket today, I discovered something unusual: an environmentally-preferable product that costs less and performs as well as its competitors.

Marcal Small Steps paper towels are not only made entirely from recycled paper. They sell for less – in some instances quite a bit less – than paper towels made mostly from trees by the industry giants.

Greener and cheaper

Here’s how the consumer’s choices look, measured from cheapest to most expensive, in terms of dollars per 100 paper towels:

Marcal  $1.64

Bounty  (Procter & Gamble) $1.79

Giant (store brand) $1.85

Brawny (Georgia-Pacific) 2.04, on sale

Viva (Kimberly-Clark) $2.17

This is, of course, not the way things usually work. Solar power costs more than electricity made from coal. Organic food is pricier than conventional. You pay more for Starbucks’ coffee than you do for Dunkin’ Donuts. Partly that’s because the price consumers pay for conventional fare doesn’t  reflect the full cost of the product. (See, for example, Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food, Bryan Walsh’s recent Time magazine cover story, about the hidden costs of industrial agriculture.)

To say that I “discovered” Marcal isn’t precisely true. After I covered Greenpeace’s recent agreement with forest-products giants Kimberly-Clark, a PR woman asked me to look at the company. So I got on the phone with Tim Spring, Marcal’s CEO, who told me a little about Marcal and its history.

“This company was committed to saving trees for two decades before Greenpeace bought its first boat,” Spring said.

It turns out that Marcal, a 77-year-old maker of paper towels, napkins, toilet tissue and other consumer goods, has been using recycled stock since the 1950s. Based in suburban Elmwood Park, New Jersey, its paper-making factory employs about 900 people and draws much of its stock from those blue plastic recycling bins under office desks in Manhattan skyscrapers about 20 miles away.

“Every time I look at that skyline,” Spring says, “I see a big urban forest. I’ve got access to unlimited supplies of paper.”

Marcal, he says, is a little like the electric car—ahead of its time. “It almost, horribly, went off the face of the earth a couple of years ago.”

In fact, the family owned firm went bankrupt in 2006, in part because its environmental history isn’t exactly pristine. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency filed a claim of $945 million against Marcal over alleged pollution of the Passaic River, a claim that was disputed and later settled by the company. In any event, Marcal emerged from bankruptcy in 2008 under new owners, Highland Capital Management, an investment firm based in Dallas.

Spring, who is 47, was named CEO. He previously led a turnaround at Vlasic pickles and oversaw such consumer brands as French’s and Log Cabin. (Now he’s mopping up the mustard and maple syrup spills.) A longtime backpacker, he was eager to try his hand at green marketing.

“America is hungry for simple ways to be green,” he says.

Marcal is certainly pushing a green message. Its packaging says, among other things “A Small, Easy Step to a Greener Earth,” “Help Us Save 1 Million Trees,” “100% Premium Recycled Paper,” “Whitened without Chlorine Bleaching,” “No Dye or Fragrance Added,” “Right for the Environment” “Safe for your home,” and “paper from paper, not from trees.”

If consumers don’t get it, they’re not paying attention.

Tim Spring

Spring says the company’s goal is to appeal to mainstream buyers who want to be environmentally responsible without sacrificing anything in terms of price or performance. As he puts it:

We’re not talking to deep green user. We’re talking to mainstream America, the soccer moms. What they are saying is, is there any way we can be green without having to compromise?

I can’t speak to the performance of the Small Steps paper towels. Other forest products companies claim they can’t achieve maximum softness and absorbency without using virgin pulp, i.e., chopping down trees.

Spring differs: “The big guys are spending over $350 million a year promoting this concept of soft, and they’ve been doing it for the past 10 years. Everybody talks soft.” But many if not most commercial buyers of tissues and toilet paper purchase 100% recycled product and most consumers who use those products in hotels, schools or hospitals don’t notice any difference. Spring won’t say his products are better than others but he will say they “perform about as well” and at a lower price.

Recently, my friend Joel Makower, the executive editor of Greenbiz.com (where I’m a senior writer) wrote a column asking “Why Doesn’t Green = Better?” Joel, who knows as much as anyone about the green economy, argued that not enough green products are better (i.e., cheaper, more innovative, easier to use, healthier, more convenient, etc) than their competition. Joel wrote:

Until “green” is synonymous with “better,” it’s destined to remain marginalized, incapable of fomenting change at the scale and speed necessary to address climate change and other pressing problems.

Marcal, it seems to me, is taking a small step towards “better.” You can listen to a podcast I did with Tim Spring at Greenbiz.com.