Why sustainability has to be a team sport

February 21, 2013

imagesOne of the great virtues of market capitalism is that power is widely dispersed–among consumers, corporate executives, investors and regulators. Lots of people get lots of votes that collectively shape business, and that’s good. But decentralization creates a daunting problem for anyone who cares about corporate sustainability: It’s hard to get things done.

In conversations today at the GreenBiz Forum in New York, people who could be described as powerful—executives with big titles (vice chairman, vice president, CEO) at big institutions (NASDAQ, McDonald’s and Ingram Barge, America’s biggest barge company)–all lamented the limits on their influence over what their companies do, let along how industries can change.

This is why sustainability has to be a team sport. Very few people–or companies–can do much on their own.

Take Bob Langert, vice president for corporate responsibility at McDonald’s, who is one of the most respected sustainability executives in the US. He’s got credibility inside the company and with NGO partners. But to get anything done, he’s got to win over thousands of owner-operators of McDonald’s stores, as well as a a diverse set of suppliers and, in some instances, the tens of millions of people who eat at Mickey D’s every day.

“We are the world’s largest small business,” Langert said. The overwhelming majority of McDonald’s outlets are “owned and operated by independent business people. They have a lot of power in our system. That means we can’t dictate from on high. I challenge people to show me a company that’s more democratic than McDonald’s.” [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Consumption, CSR, Environment, Investing, Sustainability, Water Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The pleasures of slow food

September 8, 2012

On a biking trip last week through Piedmont, a mostly unspoiled agricultural region in northwest Italy, I came across many things: charming hilltop towns, sleepy sidewalk cafes, vineyards that stretch for acres, fields of corn or cows, lush backyard vegetable gardens and fruit trees bearing plums, peaches, apples and lemons. Even the smaller towns have their own pasticceria (bakery), macelleria (butcher shop) and alimentari (grocery selling fresh fruits and vegetables).

 

Noticeably absent were fast food restaurants or supermarkets. Piedmont is known for its wine, cheese, meats and truffles and the region has created its share of global brands, among them Barolo, Moscato and Nutella. But even in Turin, the region’s commercial hub, you have to look hard to find a McDonald’s or Walmart. (Carrefour Express has outlets in Turin, but they stock more fresh foods than packaged goods.)

This is no accident. Piedmont is home to the Slow Food Movement, which was launched in 1989 after its founder, an Italian journalist named Carlo Petrini, led a campaign that stopped McDonald’s from opening a restaurant near Rome’s Spanish steps. Since then, Slow Food has grown into a global NGO with about 100,000 members in 153 countries (Slow Food USA is based in Brooklyn), a thriving publishing arm and its own small college, the University of Gastronomic Sciences, which is near Bra, Petrini’s home town. [click to continue...]

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

Cindy Hoots: Transparency and social media at McDonald’s

September 6, 2012

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Today’s guest post comes from Cindy Hoots of Cone Communications, the company founded by Carol Cone that does excellent work around cause marketing and corporate responsibility. Cindy, whose clients include Johnson & Johnson and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (but not McDonald’s), previously spent 10 years at Starbucks, working on stakeholder engagement, communications and social media. She also edited The Inspired Economist blog. You can find her on Twitter at @ethicalbiz.

When it comes to multinational corporations, we want to “see the man behind the curtain.” Better yet… we want to question him about his business practices. So what happens when we don’t get the opportunity to ask the burning questions? Well, we begin to spread rumors, create urban myths and make stuff up. McDonald’s Canada has decided to lift “the curtain” (at least a little) and directly answer customer questions through the brilliant use of social media.

Over the summer, the fast food giant launched an initiative called “Our Food. Your Questions” which allows customers to ask questions through Facebook and Twitter and then receive personalized responses from the McDonald’s Canada team. The team has promised to answer every question and has already confronted a number of hot button CSR issues including genetically modified organisms (GM0s), Fair Trade, and animal cruelty. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Blogging, Consumption, CSR, Media, Transparency Tagged With: , , ,

A kinder, gentler hot dog

February 22, 2012

Melissa and Aaron Miller of Kinsman, Ohio recently received Food Alliance certification for their pastured pork and lamb.

Consider meat. It’s bad for the planet. It’s bad for your health if you eat too much of it, which most Americans do. (We eat three times more than the global average.) As for animal welfare, trust me, you don’t want to think about it.

Helene York is a vegetarian, but as director of strategic sourcing and research at Bon Appetit Management Co., a big food-service company, she needs to think about meat. This week, Bamco made a serious commitment to change the way it buys pork, beef, poultry and eggs.

First, the company said, it will

stop serving all pork produced using the cruel and inhumane practice of gestation crates and all eggs, including “liquid” ones (those removed from their shells), from hens confined to battery cages by 2015.

This won’t be easy. About 90 percent of female pigs are raised in metal cages so small that a pregnant sow cannot even turn around. This commitment aims to eliminate one of the worst practices in the meat industry.

Bon Appetit said it will also aim to drive best practices by promising that, by 2015,

at least 25 percent of all our meat, poultry, and eggs will meet the highest animal welfare standards, as verified by the independent third parties Animal Welfare Approved, Food Alliance, Humane Farm Animal Care, or Global Animal Partnership. These four groups don’t just ban gestation crates and battery cages, they prohibit routine antibiotics and all hormones, and reward producers for allowing animals to engage in their natural behaviors.

The news from Bon Appetit, which provides cafeteria food and catering to more than 400 companies, colleges and other venues in 31 states, comes in the wake of an announcement that McDonald’s–which, of course, is much bigger — will ask its pork suppliers to phase out gestation crates. (A stunned Mark Bittman wrote OMG: McDonald’s Does the Right Thing.) Bon Appetit and McDonald’s made their announcements in conjunction with the Humane Society of the United States, an animal rights group. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, Environment, Food, NGOs, Sustainability, Workplace Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Why I’m (still) an optimist

January 1, 2012

Happy New Year! And good riddance to 2011, a year during which we made little or no progress on some of the issues that I care most about: climate change, the long-term federal debt, social mobility (aka the American dream), and our dysfunctional Congress. Yet I remain an optimist.

Texas drought 2011

I could write many words about our woes. Instead, I’ll try to be succinct. On the climate issue, global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning jumped by the largest amount on record in 2010, we learned recently, and 2011 surely brought further increases.  Concentrations of CO2 are 39% above where they were at the start of the industrial era and approaching the point when some scientists say it will be nearly impossible to contain global warming, the Guardian reports. Neither the US nor the UN moved closer to regulating CO2. In a discouraging development, Republicans Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich backed away from their once-sensible support of greenhouse gas regulation, in what can only be seen as shameless pandering to the know-nothing wing of the Republican Party. Discouraging, too, was the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which will slow down the growth of carbon-free nuclear power. So will the failure of Solyndra. Meanwhile, the U.S. suffered massive flooding of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, a terrible drought in Texas, record wildfires and at least 2,941 monthly weather records that were broken by extreme events, according to the NRDC.. Coincidence? Uh, no.

Like the atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the federal budget deficit has been growing.That’s no coincidence either. We’re living beyond our means, whether by burning fossil fuels or taxpayer dollars, and sticking future generations with the cleanup bill. Just last week, the White House asked for a $1.2 trillion increase in the federal debt limit, raising it to about $16.4 trillion. According to Marketplace Radio, that amounts to about $52,000 for every American. For a typical  family of four, that’s bigger than the mortgage. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, CSR, Environment, Global Poverty, NGOs, Politics, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Smithfield Foods: Sustainable pork?

April 27, 2011

Unless you avoid pork for religious reasons, you’ve probably eaten pork products from Smithfield Foods: the bacon or sausage in a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin, Armour-Eckrich bologna or ham, pork from Bob Evans or Jimmy Dean’s, an Esskay hot dog at Baltimore’s Camden Yards, and quite likely your Easter ham.

Smithfield is a pork giant. It has 49 factories, 500 or so hog farms, 48,000 employees and about $11 billion in revenues in FY2010. It slaughtered about 27 million animals last year in the U.S. “We’re the largest pork producer in the world, by a long shot,” says Dennis Treacy, the company’s chief sustainability officer.

Yes, Smithfield has a chief sustainability officer–and that may surprise you if you remember reading horror stories about Smithfield’s confined animal feeding operations (CAFO’s), its problems managing pig manure, its labor conflicts or animal welfare  issues in places like The New York Times and Rolling Stone. The company was featured–not in a flattering way–in the movie Food Inc. and sued by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Waterkeeper Alliance.

Dennis Treacy

Treacy had problems with Smithfield, too, before joining the company. In fact, Treacy, who was the director of the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for the state of Virginia from 1998 to 2002 under Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore, once sued Smithfield for polluting the state’s waters.  (You could look it up.) In 1997, Smithfield was fined $12 million, one of the largest fines at the time, for violations of the federal Clean Water Act.

Now, though, Treacy says Smithfield has cleaned up not just the water but its own act. He’s been with the company for nine years, and says he was hired to make the company more sustainable and improve its reputation. “We have slowly but surely built a sustainability program,” he says. “It’s the right thing to do, and everybody wants to work for a company that is respected.”

I met Dennis earlier this week in Washington. He seems like a good guy, and he’s spent his career on environmental issues–he studied fisheries and wildlife at Virginia Tech, got a law degree from Lewis and Clark in Oregon, which is a top environmental law school, and he lives on a small farm near Richmond where he and his wife raise chickens and rabbits. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Consumption, Energy, Environment, Food, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dennis Salazar: the complete package

April 3, 2011

Dennis and Lenora Salazar

Back in 2007, Dennis Salazar and his wife, Lenora, took a leap.

With about a half a century of combined experience in the packaging industry, they decided to start their own company.

And to make it as “green” as possible.

Then Dennis did something smart. He wrote about his plans. He didn’t write a white paper. “They’re long, they’re boring, they take a lot of time and nobody reads them,” he says. Instead he started a blog, which is no easy feat for someone who’s technical skills aren’t top-of-the-class. “I’m not a young techie,” he told me, unnecessarily, as we struggled to connect via Skype.

He called his first blogpost “Am I retrainable for sustainable?” and wrote:

OK, I admit it. I am confused and perhaps even a tad nervous.

After more than 30 years as a packaging professional focused on flexible—dare I say—plastic packaging, this new movement people are calling ” sustainable” packaging has me seriously concerned.

He obviously didn’t have all the answers, but he promised to try to figure out what’s best for his customers and for the environment.  He listed Seven R’s — renew, reuse, recycle, remove, reduce, revenue and read, promising to education himself, his customers and ordinary consumers as he learned more. “That’s the beauty of this market,” he says. “While we teach on a daily basis, we learn on a daily basis.”

Today, Salazar Packaging is doing well. Based in Plainfield, IL, the firm has customers from all around the U.S. including well-known national brands like Stonyfield Farms and Method and smaller firms like Coyuchi, which makes bath, bedding and baby products from organic cotton, and Volcano Island Honey Co, which makes Hawaiian white organic honey.

I ordinarily don’t write about small b-to-b companies–my focus is the FORTUNE 500, and consumer brands–but Dennis, who is now 56, has a story is worth telling, for several reasons. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Consumption, Energy, Environment, Small Business, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , ,

What a long, strange trip it’s been for McDonald’s Bob Langert

February 10, 2011

Bob Langert worked in logistics for McDonald’s in the late 1980s when he was asked to take on a “temporary” six-month assignment to get chlorofluorocarbons out of the company’s clamshell packages.

Twenty years later, Bob has worked with WWF and Conservation International on marine stewardship and sustainable beef, spent a decade with Temple Grandin dealing with animal welfare issues, visited chicken farms and slaughterhouses, picked tomatoes with migrant workers in Florida, lectured on sustainability in China and taken a nine-day raft trip down the Amazon River with his pals at Greenpeace.

“I never, ever imagined this,” Bob said. “To have the good fortune to do this work, and make a difference in the world is beyond my expectations.”

I interviewed Bob, who is vice president for corporate social responsibility, at McDonald’s, today at the State of Green Business Forum in Chicago. We talked about what he’d learned about working with NGOs, his accomplishments, frustrations and whether selling hamburgers can be “green.”

Here are a few highlights:

A pioneering partnership: Langert’s work with packaging led to a partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund, which ruffled feathers in the corporate world and the environmental community.

“Fred Krupp [EDF’s chief] was a visionary back then,” Bob said. “It was not politically correct to work with big companies.”

EDF’s crew did a shift working in a McDonald’s, and proceeded to help with dozens of initiatives—from trimming the size of straws to using recycled paper in napkins.

Recalled Bob: “We didn’t spend one penny more. We saved millions and millions of pounds of packaging and costs.”

The future of fish: McDonald’s joined with the WWF to develop guidelines for the companies that supply its fish. What’s the business case, I asked, for investing corporate time and money in sustainable fisheries?

“Assured supply,” Langert replied. “The guy in charge of buying fish for McDonald’s, he was really concerned with being able to buy fish 10 or 20 years from now….The No. 1 job of everyone in supply chain at McDonald’s is to make sure we have stuff on the menu tomorrow.”

This kind of long-term thinking—so rare in big public companies—is a key to sustainability.

Picking tomatoes: When McDonald’s was urged to support efforts by migrant workers in Florida to win better wages, Langert worked side by side with the pickers. “ I couldn’t keep up with people half my size,” he remembered. “Females doing the work all day long in the sun and you see the living conditions which are not good at all.” Just last month,  the workers hashed out an agreement that should bring them higher pay.

Bears and the Amazon: When Greenpeace protesters dressed as chickens picketed a McDonald’s in London, accusing the company of destroying the Amazon, Langert’s first job was to calm down his colleagues.

He recalled saying: “Let’s not get all in a tizzy about their tactics. Greenpeace doesn’t have an advertising budget, so they had to use McDonald’s to get the word out. Let’s look at the issue.” The allegation was that tropical forest was being cut down to grow soy to feed chickens in Europe that became McNuggets.

When he asked trusted partners at Conservation International and WWF about the charge, he decided Greenpeace had a point. He approached the group and, before long, McDonald’s, Greenpeace and big suppliers like Cargill had agreed to stop buying soy from deforested land.

The raft trip came later. “We spent nine days—four of us from McDonald’s, four of us from Greenpeace, to get the lay of the land. I gave up a Chicago Bears Superbowl game to go so that tells you where my passion is. Anyone who knows me knows that besides my family and my faith, it’s the Chicago Bears.”

Langert’s to-do list: He’d like to find new ways to engage consumers in McDonald’s sustainability work. The company serves about 64 million people a day.

He also wants to do more to reduce the environmental impact of the company’s 33,000 stores, most of which are  owned and operated by others. “Energy’s a big issue for us,” he said. New initiatives are on the way, he hinted.

The problem with burgers: Because beef has such a big environmental footprint, I asked Bob how he could reconcile the company’s desire to grow—and sell more beef—with its environmental ethic. I told him that my rabbi, Fred Dobb, has said that one of the easiest things people can do to help the planet is to eat less beef, and asked if McDonald’s would try to wean its customers away from Big Macs.

“I’d like to talk with your rabbi,” Bob replied. He acknowledged the beef production has a big footprint, but said that “at the end of the day, we’re going to give people what they want. We’re going to do it in a good, responsible, clean, safe way. We’ve tried veggie burgers. They hardly sell at all. The day we can sell 500 a week in a restaurant, they’ll be on our menu forever and ever. I don’t have angst. You’ve got to face the realities of the world. And the reality of the world is that people eat protein from livestock and meat. Nothing wrong with that from my moral compass. I respect others that have a different moral compass. It’s our job as a company to make things better, though. We’re starting on that path–working with WWF on sustainable beef. That’s the  next step.”

Certainly McDonald’s offers choices to those who would prefer to avoid beef. Hey, the company even gave out pedometers and yoga CDs a few years ago to encourage people to be more active. But…given the climate crisis and the obesity crisis, maybe the next step ought to be to encourage those 64 million customers to make choices that are healthier for themselves and for the planet.

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, CSR, Environment, Food, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , ,

How to “green” a hamburger

January 4, 2011

Plastic bags, SUVs and hamburgers: No right-thinking tree-hugger would endorse them, at least not in public. But here’s the thing: While we can replace plastic bags with reusable ones, and we can electrify our SUVs, the world’s consumers will almost surely demand more, not less, beef in the years ahead.

Which is why the World Wildlife Fund has begun a conversation about, of all things, sustainable beef.

The WWF, led by Jason Clay, its iconoclastic senior vice president for “market transformation,” last fall convened a Global Conference on Sustainable Beef, bringing together environmentalists, academics and industry giants including Walmart, McDonald’s, Cargill and JBS, a Brazilian company that calls itself “the largest animal protein processing company in the world” and owns U.S. brands Swift and Pilgrim’s Pride.

The goal? To improve sustainability within the beef industry. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, Energy, Environment, Food, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Quiznos: Green enough?

February 23, 2010

People sometimes say we need to save the planet for our kids. I sometimes think our kids are going to save us.

If you doubt it, ask Rick Schaden. Schaden is CEO of Quiznos, the fast-food chain best known for its toasted subs, and the father of five children, aged three to 19. Today, Quiznos is rolling out new packaging (“Eat Toasty, Be Green”) made from renewable or recycled content that will reduce the chain’s environmental footprint. When we spoke by phone yesterday, I asked what led him to make the changes.

“Believe it or not, I was home watching a movie called Wall-E with my kids,” Schaden said. “You think about LEED-certified buildings and hybrid electric cars and all these really high-tech things, and then you watch Wall-E and the world is buried in trash.” The Disney-Pixar animated movie is the story of a robot named Wall-E, who is designed to clean up a Earth that has been overwhelmed by garbage.

Quiznos green packaging

Quiznos green packaging

His kids had always pushed Schaden to be more green at home. “My kids make sure everything is sorted and separated. If anyone in my house would dare to put a plastic bottle in the trash, my 14-year-old would give him a smack,” he said. “It’s the culture of the new generation. It tells you that’s where consumers are heading.”

So, he figured, why not see what could be done at Quiznos, where he is a large shareholder, and where he returned as CEO, after some time away, just about a year ago. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Consumption, CSR, Environment, Food, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , ,
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