Fortune Brainstorm Green, and the limits of corporate sustainability

May 2, 2013
Harrison Ford at Fortune Brainstorm Green

Harrison Ford at Fortune Brainstorm Green

The 2013 edition of Fortune’s Brainstorm Green conference was, by most accounts, a hit. We had a record number of attendees, including more than 50 CEOs of companies and nonprofits, big and small; plenty of entertaining and informative conversation; and a healthy dose of fun, with celebs like Harrison Ford, will.i.am and (my favorite) ultra marathon runner Scott Jurek. As co-chair of the event since the first Brainstorm Green in 2008, I love to reconnect with colleagues and sources, meet new folks and learn from and, occasionally, by inspired by our top-notch speakers. The theme of the conference has been a constant: How can business profitably help solve the world’s most important environmental problems?

Unavoidably, the challenge of an event like Brainstorm Green (as well as a conundrum for anyone who writes about corporate sustainability) turns on the question of how much to cheer or jeer the efforts of companies that are trying to “go green.” My job, as I see it, is to do both–to applaud the leaders, to prod the laggards, and to do my best to tell one from the other. That’s difficult balance to do in a conference setting where the mood is one of bonhomie, where the speakers are our “guests,” and where the presumption is that everyone is doing the best they can. The trouble is, that’s usually not good enough.

Mark Tercek at Brainstorm Green

Mark Tercek at Brainstorm Green

As Mark Tercek, the CEO of The Nature Conservancy, who I interviewed at Brainstorm Green, put it in his excellent new book, Nature’s Fortune:

Nearly every precious bit of nature–teeming coral reefs, sweeping grasslands, lush forests, the rich diversity of life istelf–is in decline. Everything humanity should reduce–suburban sprawl, deforestation, overfishing, carbon emissions–has increased.

Sad but true.

So if corporate America is changing for the better when it comes to the environment–and no doubt, many companies are–the pace of change is too slow and the ambitions of business leaders are too modest. Incremental change is not getting us where we need to go. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, CSR, Economics, Energy, Environment, Media, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sustainability by anecdote

March 24, 2013

imgresI write stories. I read stories. I love a good story.

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world,” says the British novelist Philip Pullman.

The corporate sustainability movement needs stories to inspire people, to win over customers, to change the world, as we heard last month at the GreenBiz Forum in New York.

But we need the right kinds of stories. Stories about people and companies that are having a meaningful impact. Stories that, ideally, drive broad and systemic change.

We’ve got big problems. We need big solutions.

Instead, my inbox overflows with stories that by themselves don’t get us where we need to go. Or stories that lack context.

Sustainability by anecdote, I call it.

Here’s one example that came in last month:

General Mills and Häagen-Dazs today announced an initiative designed to foster greater economic vitality for smallholder vanilla farmers in Madagascar and ensure the availability of high quality vanilla for future generations. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: CSR, Environment, Food, Global Poverty, Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

Oxfam America: Big Food is failing the poor

February 25, 2013

fig-2-brands-72dpi-1280px-nologosNew research by Oxfam America into the social and environmental policies of the world’s 10 biggest food and beverage companies puts Nestle, Unilever and Coca-Cola at the top of the list and Associated British Foods, Kellogg’s and General Mills at the bottom. In the middle of the pack are Pepsico, Mars, Danone and Mondelez International (formerly Kraft).

Oxfam American said in a presss release that the Big 10 food and beverage companies, which together make $1 billion a day, are “failing millions of people in developing countries who supply land, labor, water and commodities needed to make their products.”

That stark accusation was tempered more than a little during a telephone news conference where Oxfam America launched a new global consumer-focused campaign called Behind the Brands.

Ray Offenheiser, the president of Oxfam America, described the big food companies as “recognized industry leaders.” Jane Nelson, a senior fellow at Harvard who specializes in corporate responsibility, went further, saying these are among the “most responsible, best managed, well governed companies” in the food sector.

So which is it, really? Are these companies industry leaders or are they failing the poor?

Maybe a little of both. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, CSR, Energy Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Clorox Green Works: What were they thinking?

January 28, 2013

Are corporations people? I’ll leave that for legal scholars to decide.

Are corporations funny? Uh, almost never.

Today’s evidence comes in a breathtakingly dumb digital ad campaign from Clorox Green Works. It runs the risk of  insulting the consumers of its environmentally-friendly cleaning products while managing to ridicule millions of people who are trying to be more conscious about the social and environmental impacts of the things they buy.

Worse, it’s not even funny.

See for yourself, if you can bear it.

Now, I’ll admit that deep green consumers can be extreme. I’m recalling, right about now, the menu of a 100% organic vegan restaurant called Cafe Gratitude in Santa Cruz where dishes had silly names like “I am Fulfilled” and “I am Open Hearted.” The food turned out to be fantastic.

But Clorox, instead of guiding people through a confusing landscape of sustainability claims, here chooses to caricatures conscious consumers as people who reuse dental floss, who say things like “I can’t believe you’re wearing leather,” who ask irritating questions about the provenance of their fish and who go ga-ga over “local, gluten-free, bio-dynamic, Fair Trade, dolphin-safe, edible” hair conditioner.

I honestly don’t understand what Green Works is trying to do, and reading the press release accompanying this marketing campaign only confused me further. [click to continue...]

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

A puzzling list of sustainable companies

January 23, 2013
Canada's oil sands: Sustainable?

Canada’s oil sands: Sustainable?

Here comes a new list of the “most sustainable corporations in the world,” and it’s a doozy.

Two of the top five companies on the 2013 Global 100 list are oil and gas companies:

3. Norway’s Statoil ASA

4. Finland’s Neste Oil.

Read farther down and you find:

No. 81. Suncor Energy,

which was the first company to develop Canada’s oil sands, source of some of the dirtiest fossil fuels on the planet.

A notch below is:

No. 82. Unilever

the consumer products giant whose sustainable living plan embodies the broadest and deepest commitment to corporate responsibility of any big, global company.

This is….er….puzzling.

So what’s going here? And what does this tell us about corporate sustainability rankings and their meaning, a topic that never seems to go away? [See my blogpost Corporate sustainability: Who's up, who's down, who cares?] [click to continue...]

Filed Under: CSR, Environment, Investing, Media, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

2012′s green business heroes

December 23, 2012
Bill McKibben does the math

Bill McKibben does the math

Some say, and with reason, that 2012 was the best year ever. Never in the history of the world has there been less hunger, less disease and more prosperity. Of course there’s plenty to worry about–the fiscal cliff, gun violence, chaos in Syria and the Congo–as always there will be. But, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, the long arc of history bends towards a more just and sustainable world.

In the little corner of the world that occupies much of my attention–the places where business and sustainability intersect–it has not been a good year. Global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. We’re burning more coal, oil and gas than ever. Policy is stuck, in the US and internationally. This will be the hottest year on record in the US, and still people don’t accept the science of climate change. Go figure.

That said, in this final blogpost of 2012,  I’d like to salute some people (again, mostly from the world of business and sustainability) who fought the good fight during the year  just past. Some are business people, others are politicians, activists and even journalists, but they are all doing what they can to bend the arc of history. They’re my green business heroes for 2012. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Energy, Environment, Media, NGOs, Politics, Sustainability, Transparency, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Unilever: Boldly going forward…

April 24, 2012

Since launching its ambitious Sustainable Living Plan in 2010, Unilever is buying more sustainable palm oil and cage-free eggs, putting less salt and fat in its tomato sauces and spreads, selling water purifiers to poor people in the global south and rolling out climate-friendly freezers for its ice cream.

No big company is doing more to limit its environmental footprint, while improving health and well being and growing its business. Unilever’s commitments are wide and deep. It’s no wonder that the firm and its CEO, Paul Polman, have become darlings not just of corporate-friendly NGOs like WWF, but also a favorite of  hard-charging activists from Greenpeace and the Humane Society of the US.

But even as Unilever today [Tuesday, April 26] reported making good progress towards its sustainability goals, questions remain about its strategy: Will consumers–and investors–notice and reward Unilever for its efforts?

It’s obviously too soon to say whether sustainability will drive growth at Unilever, but the early evidence appears mixed. Eco-efficiency efforts in factories have reduced waste and saved money. Unilever revenues have grown nicely, to $46.5 billion in 2011, up $44.2 B in 2010 and $39.8 B in 2009. But the company’s share price is up by less than 2% in the last year in the US market, slightly trailing the S&P500. (It’s doing better in European markets where currency factors don’t come into play.) Meantime, Unilever’s corporate identity is all but hidden behind consumers brands like Lipton, Skippy, Ragu, Bertolli, Hellmann’s, Suave, Dove, Ben & Jerry’s and Breyers, at least here in the US. That makes it hard to win over those consumers who care about companies that do good.

Today, I attended a Washington event with company execs, partners and NGOs where Unilever’s president for North America, Kees Kruythoff, released a progress report on the company’s sustainability efforts. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, CSR, Environment, Food, Investing, Leadership, NGOs, Sustainability, Transparency Tagged With: , , ,

Hunter Lovins at Brainstorm Green

April 22, 2012

CEOs like Alan Mulally of Ford and Lew Hay of Next Era made headlines at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green last week, but some of the most interesting ideas came from the NGOs, academics, writers and sustainability consultants at the conference.

One of my favorites is L. Hunter Lovins, a Colorado cowgirl (with medals to prove it) who’s been a leader of the sustainability movement for decades. Hunter is the co-author (with Paul Hawken and her ex-husband Amory Lovins) of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, a groundbreaking and influential book, maybe the most important ever written about “green” business. More recently, she wrote (with Boyd Cohen) an excellent book called Climate Capitalism that has been given a new title, which sounds more like Hunter, for the upcoming paperback: The Way Out: Kickstarting Capitalism to Save Our Economic Ass.

Nick Aster of Triple Pundit interviewed Hunter at Brainstorm Green, and she talked about how the sustainability movement is doing (not bad, but it’s mostly been about incremental movement) and why more radical change is needed companies (to save ecosystems that are required for life, to stop from overheating the planet). “All of the good work that’s being talked about at this conference isn’t enough,” she says. Companies need to rediscover their purpose to thrive, she argues. It’s worth taking 10 minutes to hear what she has to say about Unilever, Puma, the importance of bees and a new group of business advocates and advisers called The Blue Earth Network:

Filed Under: Climate Change, Environment, Leadership, Media, Sustainability 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: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Big brands take climate action but…

December 7, 2011

Led by Unilever, Astra Zeneca and Nike, consumer brands are taking climate change more seriously than ever, says a new report from Climate Counts, a nonprofit that rates some of the world’s largest companies on their climate impact.

Big companies are reporting emissions, committing to targets and becoming more vocal in the policy arena, according to the report.

“There’s evidence to suggest we have reached a remarkable tipping point,” says Mike Bellamente, project director of Climate Counts. “Global corporations are increasingly acknowledging climate change as reality and are adopting measures to reduce their emissions and environmental impact.”

This is the fifth report from Climate Counts, which is the brainchild of Stonyfield Farms CE-Yo Gary Hirshberg. The ratings are intended to make consumers more aware of leaders and laggards on climate — the term of art for this is “rank ‘em and spank ‘em — as well as to spur companies to do better. or whatever reason, companies are improving: Bellamente told me over the phone the other day that the average score for the 136 companies rated this year is up by an impressive 54% from the initial set of ratings. [click to continue...]

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