Patagonia

Maybe the best retail ad ever

November 27, 2011

Patagonia's home page this weekend

In the midst of the madness of black Friday, and this weekend of American consumerism run amok, come a few wise words from the outdoor retailer Patagonia.

In a full-page ad in the New York Times, the privately held company asks shoppers to think more carefully about what they purchase, and the real cost of all the things we buy.

The headline: Don’t Buy This Jacket

“We ask you to buy less and to reflect before you spend a dime on this jacket or anything else,” the company says.

The rest of the ad is worth reading, and thinking about, so I’ll copy the text here:

It’s Black Friday, the day in the year retail turns from red to black and starts to make real money. But Black Friday, and the culture of consumption it reflects, puts the economy of natural systems that support all life firmly in the red. We’re now using the resources of one-and-a-half planets on our one and only planet.

Because Patagonia wants to be in business for a good long time – and leave a world inhabitable for our kids – we want to do the opposite of every other business today. We ask you to buy less and to reflect before you spend a dime on this jacket or anything else. [click to continue…]

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Radical transparency at Office Depot

February 22, 2011

Here’s a simple but powerful idea:

People have the right to know where things come from and what they are made of.

That’s the idea behind a free open-source, volunteer-driven platform called Sourcemap. Sourcemap will soon make its mass market debut, thanks to a partnership between Office Depot and New Leaf Paper.

The goal of the partnership is, not surprisingly, to sell more recycled paper. While you’ll get some argument about this, experts say that recycled paper saves trees, energy and water, produces less pollution, uses more benign chemicals, and requires less bleaching than virgin paper production.

The trouble is, recycled paper–for now–costs more.  That’s largely a problem of scale. If there were more demand for recycled paper, there would be more incentive to collect used paper, more infrastructure devoted to recycling and costs would come down.

So, to drive up sales and eventually drive down costs, Office Depot and New Leaf want to show customers — institutions, small companies and individuals — the environmental benefits of recycled paper, in part by telling them exactly where their paper come from.

“We’re trying to make environmental paper mainstream,” says Jeff Mendelsohn, the president and co-founder of New Leaf, which develops, markets and distributes environmentally-preferable paper.

Beginning later this year,  shoppers who buy Office Depot’s 100% Forest Stewardship Council-certified recycled paper will be able to use their mobile phones to read a QR code (a kind of barcode) on the package. They’ll then see a movie, like this one, that traces their paper back to its source. This paper was tracked from the GreenBiz’s State of Green Business Forum 2011 in Washington, D.C., back to the streets of Milwaukee. Please take a look:

I spoke with New Leaf’s Jeff Mendelsohn and Yalmaz Siddiqui, director of environmental strategy at Office Depot, last week in Washington, where they gave a lively talk on their project. [click to continue…]

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Running with a conscience

August 29, 2010

Melissa Schweisguth photo credit: TIME

Two of my passions are running and the environment. I do my best to marry them: I’ve recycled my old running shoes. I currently run in Vibram FiveFinger “barefoot” shoes, which are light weight and last a long time. I mix my own Gatorade from a 3 lb. 3 oz. can of powder, which saves plastic bottles. But I also use high tech equipment (Garmin GPS, Monster headphones, iPod shuffle), own dozens of T-shirts from races that are stuffed in a closet and drive 2-3 miles most days just to get to the place where I start my run. Over the years I’ve flown to marathons in Chicago, San Diego, Big Sur and Athens, Greece.

Melissa Schweisguth is a 36-year-old fellow sustainability professional and writer who also enjoys running. She puts me to shame, and not just because she clocked an impressive 3:11:07 in the Eugene (Oregon) Marathon this year. Melissa hasn’t thrown anything into a landfill since 2006, which earned her notice in Time magazine (due to non-consumerism and creative reuse.). She thrives on an organic, whole foods, locally-based and almost exclusively vegan diet, (as does famed ultra runner Scott Jurek). She’s been working on improving her running footprint to avoid trampling people or planet and has written three blogposts on running “au naturel” for her blog, Living Acoustically, which she’s kindly agreed to let me share here.  I don’t expect most runners to be as “green” as Melissa, but my hope is that she’ll inspire you, whether you run or not, as she has inspired me to make a change or two in your lives. When she isn’t running, Melissa works a freelance writer and consultant on sustainability issues and media relations, and as director of membership and development for the Food Trade Sustainability Leadership Association. Here’s her first post, about clothing and shoes:

Sometimes we need new, ready-made things, but, more often, we can reuse, buy used, or make something easily, and get a better, cheaper, more healthful product. It’s easy to forget this since marketers are skilled at wooing us, we’re encouraged to seek upward mobility and novelty, and our culture has devalued making things ourselves: gardening, basic cooking and the like.

While running, I’ve sought to maximize and improve performance while honoring a guiding principle that defines sustainability to me: “live simply so that others may simply live.” (Or, following this blog’s theme, unplug from consumerism and run acoustically.) Below are examples of things I do, some long term and some more recent changes. This is being shared for informational purposes only; it’s not intended to be preachy or judgmental, as that’s not my style. We all have different backgrounds and resource demands in our lives, and I’m the first to admit there are many things I can improve!

Clothing

When I started running, “technical” fabrics and performance-optimizing clothing weren’t on the market. I wore basic clothing and never really bought into the marketing around newfangled stuff. More apparel uses fabrics marketed as environmentally friendly, such as organic cotton, wool, bamboo, hemp and recycled poly, which are great if new things are needed. However, the most sustainable choices are items we have or can get used, which also saves money. I’ve found great shorts, tops and running tights at thrift [click to continue…]

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Who says green biz can’t be sexy?

November 28, 2009

womensSo what should I write about today, the blogger wonders. The smart grid? Combined heat-and-power systems? Or underwear? Well, given that it’s holiday shopping season….

Meet PACT, a company that wants to persuade you to change your underwear and change the world. [click to continue…]

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Why traceability matters

May 10, 2009

What are you wearing? Where did it came from? How much energy went into it? How much pollution was generated by its production and shipping?

You almost surely don’t know, and you may not care, but brands and retailers are digging deep into their supply chains to better understand the environmental and social impact of the things they make and sell. This is an emerging trend in business that goes by the name of  traceability or supply chain transparency. It requires companies to understand the full depths of their supply chains much better than most do. Companies getting serious about traceability include Patagonia, Wal-Mart, Tesco and Gap. More are sure to follow.

“If you don’t know where your stuff is coming from. how can you have a sustainability program?” asks Tim Wilson, the CEO of a British company called Historic Futures that specializes in traceability.

Tim talked about traceability on a panel that I moderated at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference about business and the environment. He was joined by Mike Kowalski, the CEO of Tiffany & Co., Kathy Abusow of the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, Jill Dumain of Patagonia, Arlin Wasserman of Sodexo and Jeremy Moon, the CEO of Icebreaker. Icebreaker is a fascinating company that makes clothing from New Zealand merino wool and invites customers to trace their garments back to the farmers who raised the sheep that made it—using a (Get it?)  Baacode. Very cool, and here’s the Icebreaker story.

From the composition of that panel, you can see that traceability crosses diverse industries—jewelry, wood and paper, food and clothing. In every case, the goal is to de-commoditize commodities—that is, to distinguish between gold mined under safe conditions in the U.S. and gold mined by children in Africa, or between wood that is harvested sustainably and wood that has been illegally logged. Fortune.com just published a brief story that I did about traceability. Here’s how it begins:

Laguna Niguel, Calif. –  Where was the cotton in your shirt grown? Who mined the gold in your wedding ring? What forest produced the paper in the magazine you are reading?

You almost surely don’t know, but a growing number of brands and retailers want to dig deep into their supply chains to better understand the roots (sometimes literally) of the products they sell. Their goal: to avoid risks and enhance their reputation as “green” business leaders, says Tim Wilson, the 41-year-old CEO of Historic Futures, a little British company that is riding a big idea in sustainability, known as traceability.

Using Internet-based systems and RFID tags, Historic Futures tracks such commodities as cotton and gold through the long and previously opaque supply chains of Wal-Mart, Gap, and Patagonia, among others.

Patagonia has done a terrific job of explaining traceability to the public on a website called The Footprint Chronicles. (That’s a graphic from the site below.) The Environmental Defense Fund spotlighted the work done by Patagonia in its 2009 Innovations Review, which I helped EDF to write. EDF also highlighted Wal-Mart’s Love, Earth line of jewelry—which promises customers that the gold and silver jewelry they buy has been mine and produced responsibly.

Here is a link to the EDF report about traceability, headlined Shining a Spotlight on the Supply Chain. Here’s a link to EDF’s account explaining how Wal-Mart created its Love, Earth line of jewelry, with the help of Historic Futures. Another example of traceability: Wal-Mart and Tesco have vowed not to buy clothing made with cotton farmed in Uzbekhistan, where child labor is rampant, requiring them to ask all their suppliers to know where their cotton is sourced.

Traceability isn’t a new idea, of course. We couldn’t have organic food or Fair Trade coffee or salmon certified by the Marine Stewardship Council without transparent supply chains that track goods from the store shelf back to the farm or fishery. But judging from the crowd at our Brainstorm Green panel on traceability, you’ll be hearing more about it in the years ahead.
top2_footprint_s9

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