UL Environment

Will American consumers ever go “green”?

April 5, 2011

It’s been another action-packed day at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference on business and the environment. Lively conversation about the future of coal (it’s not going away), sustainable seafood (about which more another day), geoengineering and marketing to the green consumer.

The “green consumer” panel featured SC Johnson’s CEO H. Fisk Johnson, Steve Wenc of UL Environment and marketing guru Suzanne Shelton. It was moderated by my friend and colleague Joel Makower, the founder and editor-in-chief of GreenBiz. They all agreed that much of corporate America has moved ahead of its customers when it comes to embracing green products.

Wait, it gets worse: Joel and Suzanne argued that consumers fool themselves about their green behavior. They buy a CFL bulb or green cleaning product or perhaps a Prius and then decide they’ve done their part for the planet. They tell pollsters that they consider sustainability factors in their purchasing decisions and describe themselves as “conscious consumers” but the reality is quite different. They’re greenwashing their own behavior, Joel noted.

Is this bottle necessary?

Fisk told a story that illustrates this sometimes-depressing reality. [click to continue…]

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Forestry wars: Who’s peddling pulp fiction?

March 28, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Power of One: UL Environment

December 5, 2010

“The Power of One” is a series of stories about people who have helped to make their companies more sustainable. They can’t do it alone, of course. But by coming up with a good idea, enlisting the help of others and making persuasive arguments, one person can change a company and, sometimes, even an industry. The story of how Chuck Gerhardt helped create a new business for Underwriters Laboratories, the product safety certification organization that dates back to the 19th century,  begins with an email.

Chuck Gerhardt

“First, I’m not a tree hugger,” the email began. “As you know, I’m a corn-fed Midwesterner who is surprised that he is even thinking ‘green.’ However I do value the environment and all it has to offer.”

It was July 29, 2003, when Chuck Gerhardt, a facilities manager at the Santa Clara office of Underwriters Laboratories, sent an email about what he described as “a thought rummaging around my head lately.” Chuck, who is 43 and has worked for UL for 25 years, isn’t an engineer or an MBA. “I’m just a working stiff”  with a high school education and a little bit of community college, he tells me. But it struck him that UL, a global organization that has become the most trusted name in product safety, might expand to become an arbiter of what’s green, and what’s not.

As he wrote:

Has UL put much thought into the “Green” or “Sustainable” arena? In my simple thinking I see the standard UL mark on a lamp cord but I also see another lamp next to it that has a UL mark but this one has a little green leaf meaning it not only should be safe but it has been manufactured by a company that has a LEED rating on their facility, (More about LEED in a minute) and if the company doesn’t have a LEED rating on their facility maybe they manufacture their products in an environmentally sound way. So, I buy the lamp with the green leaf because I want to help the environment. Since UL promotes public safety this seems to all kind of fit together.

The thought running that was running around Chuck’s head is today a real business. UL Environment , which calls itself a “full-service environmental solutions company,” offers independent green claims validation, product certification, training, advisory services and standards development. It’s got close to 60 employees, based all over the world, and it expects to certify products in 12 to 15 categories by the end of 2011. There’s no “little green leaf” — not yet, anyway. [click to continue…]

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The business of rating business

May 30, 2010

good-better-bestIs 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 [click to continue…]

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A new green sheriff in town

February 12, 2009

Coca Cola Enterprises claims its aluminum cans contain more than 50% recycled content.

Clorox claims its Greenworks all-purpose cleaner is made with plant and mineral-based ingredients.

And GE claims its compact fluorescent lightbulbs use up to 75% less energy and last up to 10 times longer than standard bulbs.

How do we know that those claims are true?

The fact is, we don’t. My experience tells me that the risk of exposure and embarrassment is enough to deter any big brand-name company from lying about the environmental attributes of its products. But there’s lying, and then there’s telling a selective truth or merely leaving out inconvenient facts.

What we need is a reliable, independent and trusted source to analyze such claims, the way websites like Politifact separates truth from fiction in the political arena. One organization that could emerge as a standard-setter, fact-checker, product-tester and verifier has been around for more than a century—Underwriters Laboratories. These are the people who test thousands of products to make sure they meet strict safety standards. Last month, Underwriters Laboratories launched a new subsidiary called UL Environment. It’s intended to help industry and the public make sense of the “green” claims that are flooding the marketplace.

Think of UL Environment as the new green sheriff in town.

“There’s a lot of greenwashing out there,” says Marcello Manca, who is vice president and general manager of UL Environment Inc. “We want to get rid of some of the confusion.”

I spoke by phone with Marcello, who’s based in Milan, Italy. He’s an Italian who got an engineering degree from the University of Nevada, spent 13 years working in Nevada and California, and then returned home to Italy. The president of UL Environment is Steve Wenc, a Chicago native now based in Geneva. UL has 66 offices, clients in 104 countries, 127 inspection centers and it employs about 5,000 engineers, scientists, chemists and technicians. A nonprofit that oversees a group of for-profit subsidiaries. UL is paid by the manufacturers of the products it tests and certifies.

Marcello told me that UL Enviromnent initially plans to focus on two categories, building materials and consumer goods. The company intend to begin by verifying environmental claims about energy, water use and recycled content.

“One of our employees recently purchased an all-natural mattress for his newborn child because he didn’t want his son to be exposed to chemicals,” Marcello told me. But because manufacturers of products ranging from household cleansers to children’s toys are not now required to disclose their ingredients, claims like “all-natural” are hard for consumers to verify.

UL Environment also hopes to establish standards for sustainable products, working in an open and transparent manner with manufacturers, retailers and NGOs. This, too, will require the cooperation, and financial support, of manufacturers, many of whom are existing UL clients.

“We’re taking a very pragmatic approach,” Marcello says. “Our intention is not to make the world perfectly green from the outset. We know that’s Mission Impossible.”

Finally—and this gets really interesting—UL Environment would like to take a broad look at company operations. So, for example, if a product claiming to be “green” is made by a supplier in China who pollutes a nearby river or the air, UL Environment could decide that the product failed to meet its standards.

“There is a school of thought that says that you cannot build a green product unless you are a green company, too,” Marcello says.

What’s intriguing about all this is that standards are enormously important to business. Think about how the organic standard has affected the food industry. Or how the Energy Star rating has driven appliance-makers to sell more efficient dishwashers or refrigerators. Or consider the impact of the LEED building standards on the real estate industry. An array of sustainability standards has the potential to drive green business practices deep into the economy.

Of course, that makes it sound simple, and it’s not. Devising standards and getting them recognized is a long and complex process, requiring value judgments. As my friend Joel Makower is fond of asking, “How green is green enough?”

What’s more, Marcello says: “Doing it right is expensive. Doing it right takes a lot of passion.”

UL Environment will have to convince manufacturers, retailers and consumers in the midst of a global recession to invest in environmental claims verification and sustainability standards. It won’t be easy. But it will worth watching closely.

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