sustainable consumption

Marks & Spencer: Sustainability, profits and a carbon-neutral bra

June 22, 2011

No company approaches sustainability more comprehensively—or more creatively—than the British retailer Marks & Spencer.

M&S is the UK’s largest clothing retailer and a big seller of food too (market share 3.9%). It operates about 1,000 stores and employs about 78,000 people. Its supply chain includes 2,000 factories and 20,000 farms. Some 21 million customers visit the stores each week, and revenues last year were £9.7 billion ($15.7 billion).

The company’s sustainability effort, which is called Plan A – because  there’s no plan B to protect the planet — touches executives, rank-and-file employees, customers and suppliers. Executive pay is based, in part, on meeting sustainability targets.  Store managers compete to save energy and waste. Factories and farmers that sell to M&S are rewarded for going “green.” Increasingly, customers invited to get involved, too.

“Plan A, at heart, is a change-management tool,” says Mike Barry, head of sustainable business for M&S.

I met Mike this week at M&S headquarters in London. M&S is making demonstrable short-term progress towards big long-term goals (about which, more below) but what stuck in my mind were these examples of how Plan A is changing the way the retailer does business:

Cleaning out the closet: M&S and Oxfam have teamed up to reward shoppers for recycling unwanted clothes bought at M&S. The clothes are donated to Oxfam, which raised about £3.3 million ($T.K million) by reselling them. Anyone donating an item of M&S clothing to Oxfam gets a £5 voucher to use on a purchase of £35 or more on clothing, homeware or beauty products at M&S. This develops brand loyalty, and points to the circular economy of the future, where stuff is recycled and make into something else instead of being thrown away. [click to continue…]

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Nike: running towards sustainable consumption

February 20, 2011

A  company’s journey to sustainability is always going to be — cliche alert! — a marathon and not a sprint.

Just ask Nike. The company is a leader in environmental design, and yet it has a long way to go to reach its sustainability goals.

At least Nike knows where it’s headed. It has a bold  long term called the North Star. A key tool is known as Considered Design, where the goal is to

design products that are fully closed loop: produced using the fewest possible materials and designed for easy disassembly, while allowing them to be recycled into new product or safely returned to nature at the end of their life.

This is a big, radical, inspiring idea. Here’s a cool video, just a minute long, about Considered Design:

I run marathons, so I know that you need to take a lot of steps to reach your goal. Recently, I saw down with Lorrie Vogel, the general manager of Considered Design, to learn more about what steps Nike has taken, and what’s left to do, after hearing her excellent presentation at the State of Green Business Forum in Chicago. [click to continue…]

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A bold–and green–idea from Best Buy

January 10, 2011

Imagine that, instead of buying a TV, laptop  or mobile phone, and worrying that it will become outmoded, you could lease it, knowing that you could easily upgrade to the next new thing.

We’re not there yet, but Best Buy, the nation’s largest electronics retailer, with nearly $50 billion in annual revenues, today took a step closer to a subscription model for electronics by offering a Buy Back plan, which invites shoppers to “future-proof” their new gear– for a price, of course.

They’d pay an upfront fee–say $69.99, for a laptop or tablet–and then get 10 to 50 percent of the value of the product back if it’s returned within two years, assuming normal wear and tear.

This is smart business for Best Buy, which has struggled lately, and it’s good for the planet.

“What we are really after here is stickiness,” said Brian Dunn, the CEO of Best Buy, when we spoke by phone this morning.

The Buy Back program encourages repeat business because consumers who bring back gear they no longer want are paid with a Best Buy gift card. [click to continue…]

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Sustainable consumption: Opportunity or oxymoron?

August 19, 2010

Imagine that you’re the chief sustainability officer of a FORTUNE 500 company. During a meeting with your CEO, you say: “We need to talk to consumers about using less.”

Improbable? Sure.

Impossible? Perhaps not.

An important conversation to start? Absolutely.

So, at least, says Aron Cramer, the CEO of Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a nonprofit association of companies, whose mission is to promote a just and sustainable world.

“The American model of consumption cannot be extended to the entire world, and won’t be, because the planet simply can’t support it,” Aron told me, when we spoke by phone the other day. Yet billions of people around the world want to improve their standard of living. Figuring out how they can enjoy a better life, without destroying the environment, “is the mother of all innovation challenges,” Aron says,

Last month, BSR published a 26-page report called The New Frontier in Sustainability: The Business Opportunity in Tackling Sustainable Consumption [PDF, free download). It’s an attempt to get business leaders to think about what sustainable consumption might look like.

The topic “has been the third rail of sustainability politics,” Aron told me, but he added, with his usual optimism, that “more companies are ready to have this discussion.”

If nothing else, the report makes clear the urgency of the issue. Citing a WWF report [PDF], it says:

By recent estimates, our global footprint now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30 percent, and if our current demands continue, by 2030 we will need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles.

And yet:

…countless people have insufficient access to basic needs like food, clean water, and adequate shelter, and they also lack access to the resources they need to improve their lives. In 2006, the 1.2 billion people in the OECD countries had an average annual income per capita of US$30,580, while the 5.4 billion people in the rest of the world earned an average of US$3,130. Of those, 19 percent suffer from hunger, 28 percent are drinking polluted water, and 29 percent are illiterate.7 More than 2 billion people continue to rely on less than US$2 per day to meet their needs.

The question is, what business opportunities, if any,  await companies that figure out how to give poor and middle class people what they want in a sustainable way? [click to continue…]

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