Seafood is having its Portlandia moment

May 19, 2013

nonflash-1

Cooking for Solutions is a delightful annual conference, fund-raiser and celebration of seafood sustainability produced every spring by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m just back from the 2013 event, and there is reason to feel good about the progress the seafood industry is making.

Consumers, chefs and, most importantly, major retailers in the US and Europe are more aware than ever that the choices we make about what kinds of fish to eat–and not to eat–have an impact on the health and sustainability of global fisheries.

The result is that, in the last decade or so, virtually every major retailer and food service company in the US and EU has adopted a seafood sustainability policy. Some are stronger than others, but the issue is on the agenda and not going away.

“Large corporations may very well turn out to be our angels of salvation,” said Matt Elliott, an oceans expert at California Environmental Associates, which last year published a landmark report on global fishing practices.

You could say that seafood is having its Portlandia moment. I’m referring, of course, to the hilarious scene on the cable TV show in which a couple interrogate a waitress about the chicken on the menu. (“How much room did the chicken have to roam?”) Chefs who gathered last week in Monterey told me that they are asked by diners if their salmon is wild or farm-raised, and whether their shrimp is local or imported from Asia.

By themselves, consumers can’t drive changes in fishing practices. But when consumers make themselves heard, and emerge as part of a larger ecosystem that includes activist NGOs such as Greenpeace, business-friendly environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, certifying bodies like the flawed but important Marine Stewardship Council and brands like Whole Foods Market and Darden, change happens. Regulation of the oceans–a public commons if ever there was one–is important, but markets, too, can drive sustainability. [click to continue...]

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

Walmart’s index: A real-life toy story

April 17, 2013
Is My Little Pony sustainable?

Is My Little Pony sustainable?

This is the third in a series of stories about Walmart’s supplier sustainability index. An overview is here, and a story about flour, bread and agriculture is here. Today’s topic: plastic toys and PVC.

Walmart wants to improve the sustainability of plastic toys. The giant retailer isn’t playing around.

The company wants to improve the safety of workers who make the toys. It wants to make sure that manufacturers are taking steps to use fewer so-called “chemicals of concern” in toys. It would like suppliers to deal with any issues raised when kids outgrow Barbie or GI Joe and throw them away. If paper or wood goes into toy packaging, Walmart wants to know whether it is “sourced in accordance with a credible certification system that addresses ecosystem impacts and biodiversity.”

Some critics think Walmart is taking this too far. That’s what this story is about.

Walmart’s supplier sustainability index, which is being rolled out to thousands of suppliers, is the biggest environmental initiative in the company’s history.  It will likely do enormous good–requiring companies that make consumer products to examine their environmental impacts in ways they have never done before. But the index also raises questions about how the world’s largest retailer (2012 revenues: $469 billion) is exercising its market power.

Is Barbie toxic?

Is Barbie toxic?

Consider, as an example, PVC, or polyvinyl chloride plastic, commonly known as vinyl. It’s a widely-used plastic, and it shows up in toys, including such iconic plastic toys as Hasbro’s My Little Pony and Mattel’s Barbie. It can be made soft or rigid, it’s rugged, moldable, low-cost and excellent at holding color.

What, if anything, is wrong with PVCs? That depends on who you ask. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, CSR, Energy, Environment, Health, NGOs, Sustainability, Transparency, Workplace Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Walmart’s index: Better than sliced bread?

April 16, 2013

flourvertical

This is the second in a series of three stories about Walmart’s supplier sustainability index. An overview of the index can be found here. 

Can Walmart change the way wheat is grown in America?

The company is trying to do just that. Here’s how.

Start inside a Walmart store in Laurel, Maryland. On sale here are nearly 40 brands of flour, many more varieties of  bread and countless other products made from wheat, including cookies, cakes, crackers andpancake mix.

In theory, Walmart has influence over every one of those products. The giant retailer (2012 revenues: $469 billion) sells more groceries than any other supermarket chain. Brands like Pepperidge Farm and Arnold and Sara Lee need access to its shelves.

To make agriculture more sustainable, Walmart has begun asking its suppliers probing questions about the grains they use. What percent of your grain is provided by suppliers that track fertilizer use and have goals and a program in place to optimize fertilizer use? What percent of your grain is provided by suppliers that monitor soil fertility and have goals and a program in place to minimize soil degradation and erosion? What about fuel use? What about water? What about pesticides? What about managing biodiversity?

Whew.

For the flour and bread makers, this is new territory.  Most never deal with the farmers who grow their wheat. They buy from middlemen.

“When you run into production agriculture, with thousands of growers, the product is commingled, it’s by definition a commodity,” says Fred Luckey, a retired Bunge executive who is now chairman of Field to Market, a nonprofit group that is working with Walmart.

Now they have to did deep into their supply chains, if they want to stay in the good graces of Bentonville. No company has ever tried anything like this before. [click to continue...]

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

Walmart’s index: This is big. Really big.

April 15, 2013
A Walmart with LED lights

A Walmart with LED lights

This is the first of three stories about Walmart’s supplier sustainability index.

Since launching its sustainability program in 2006, Walmart has reduced energy consumption in its stores, installed solar panels on its rooftops, curbed emissions from its trucks and recyled millions of tons of its trash. Now that the world’s biggest retailer has streamlined its own operations, it is turning its attention elsewhere–actually, almost everywhere.

Since last fall, Walmart has rolled out what it calls a supplier sustainability index to thousands of suppliers, asking them pointed questions about their operations and prodding them to better understand and manage their own supply chains.

It’s Walmart’s most ambitious environmental project ever, and if all goes according to plan, it will change the way all kinds of consumer products–clothes, toys, electronics, food and beverages–are made. The typical Walmart stocks 125,000 to 150,000 products (!), and the envirommental and social performance of most of the companies that make them them will soon be rated and ranked in Bentonville.

So Walmart is asking lots of questions of its suppliers. Among them:

How can wheat be grown with less water and fertilizer? How can chemicals of concern be removed from toys? What mining practices were used to extract copper, gold and silver for computers or jewelry? What percentage of your televisions sold last year were Energy Star certified? Do the grapes in a bottle of wine come from a farm with a biodiversity management plan? How much water was needed to produce those polyester pants?

If this sounds like a massive and fiendishly complicated undertaking, well, it is. It has been in the works since 2009, when Walmart unveiled The Sustainability Consortium, a nonprofit coalition led by the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University that was set up to provide scientific research to undergird the effort. Since then, a few other retailers (Tesco, Kroger, Ahold, Best Buy) and dozens of consumer products brands (Coca-Cola, Disney, Kellogg’s, Mars) have signed on to the consortium. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Consumption, CSR, Energy, Environment, Food, NGOs, Sustainability, Transparency, Uncategorized, Workplace Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Who’s responsible for factory conditions in poor countries? Has CSR gone too far?

January 6, 2013

garment-factoryJust who is responsible for the fire in a garment factory in Bangladesh that killed more than 100 workers in November?

The factory owner? The government of Bangladesh? US and European brands and retailers who bought the clothes made there? Shoppers who demand the latest styles at low prices?

And who deserves credit for the improvements in working conditions at Foxconn, China’s largest employer and Apple’s biggest supplier?

Apple? The Chinese labor market? Journalists at The New York Times?

Similar questions could be asked about paint factories that discharge pollution into rivers, toy factories that use dangerous chemicals or factories everywhere that run inefficient equipment or burn dirty fuels.

For nearly two decades, a core belief of the social-responsibility movement  has been that western brands and retailers must take responsibility for the social and environmental performance of the factories in their supply chain. This has created an immense infrastructure–an industry, really, of consultants who write codes of conduct for those factories, inspect the factories, report on them and deploy a combination of carrots and sticks that, at least in theory, bring about improved performance.

In essence, US and European brands have become quasi-governmental, undemocratic standards setters and enforcers of social and environmental norms.

So how’s it working? The year just past put a spotlight on a glaring failure of that system–the fire in Bangladesh, where factory conditions in the garment industry are widely deemed to remain unsafe–and on what has been cited as one of its successes–the new transparency of Apple’s supply chain, and the improved conditions at Foxconn, which supplies HP, Sony, Dell and other electronics companies, as well as Apple. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Business Ethics, Consumption, CSR, Economics, Environment, Global Poverty, Health, Human rights, Sustainability, Transparency, Workplace Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Instead of shopping, why not yerdle?

November 22, 2012

It’s Black Friday. Instead of shopping, why not yerdle?

Yerdle is a sharing and shopping website and mobile app being launched today by two stalwarts of corporate sustainability — Adam Werbach, the former Sierra Club leader and Saatch & Saatchi marketing guy, and Andy Ruben, Walmart’s first sustainability director.

Andy and Adam, who are both 39 and live in San Francisco (natch), have come up with a very cool idea. Yerdle is a way for people who have stuff to give away, or other stuff they want, to share with one another–before heading out to the store to buy something new. By today, after a beta test in the Bay Area, they expect that more than 10,000 items will be offered on Yerdle.

I took a sneak peek at the site the other day and found, among other things, a Ikea children’s table and chairs, a yoga DVD, Sesame Street DVDs, red Baby Gap sweats, a dustbuster, a radio alarm clock, a laptop sleeve, a pasta maker, kids books, a collection of little wooden dress-up dolls, and more–and that’s before inviting my friends to join. [click to continue...]

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

Best Buy: Sustainability amidst turmoil

September 30, 2012

Best Buy has made headlines this year, and not the kind that any company wants:

Best Buy Cutting 50 Stores to Get Profitable. Good luck with that. (Forbes)

Best Buy CEO Resigns Under Cloud (Minneapolis StarTribune)

Best Buy Suffers For Lack of a Plan (New York Times)

Best Buy in Turmoil: Will It Survive? (Forbes, again)

Best Buy is losing market share to Amazon, its stock is down by 25 percent since the beginning of year (while the S&P 500 is up by 15 percent) and the company’s  founder Richard Schulze stepped down as chairman because he failed to tell the board about allegations that then-CEO Brian Dunn was having an inappropriate relationship with a female employee. Now Schulze wants to take the company private, maybe with money from Qatar. It’s more than enough to paralyze an organization or, at a minimum, distract everyone.

So how are the company’s sustainability efforts going? As it turns out…very well. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Consumption, CSR, Energy, Environment, Sustainability, Transparency, Workplace Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Corporate sustainability, by the numbers: Who’s up, who’s down, who cares?

September 13, 2012

This has been a big week for corporate sustainability rankings, with the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) and the Carbon Disclosure Project releasing new reports. Vote Solar and the Solar Power Electric Industries Association showcased the  top 20 corporate users of solar power in the US. A book called Good Company just landed on my desk, along with its own 2012 Good Company Index. And October will bring the World Series, Halloween and, of course, the annual Newsweek “green” rankings of big public companies.

All of which raises a couple of questions.

Do these ratings and rankings matter?

More important: Should they?

Undeniably, they do matter, mostly but not entirely because of the prestige they confer upon companies that do well. Press releases are flying! “Carbon Disclosure Project Salutes Con Edison” (Really?) “PepsiCo Earns Sustainability Accolades.” “GM Named Top Solar User in the U.S. Auto Sector.” This is all well and good. Some middle-management executive had to fill out those CDP forms or buy those solar panels, and why not recognize their efforts with a salute or an accolade? [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, CSR, Energy, Environment, Investing, NGOs, Socially Responsible Investing, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Inside the Sustainable Apparel Coalition

July 25, 2012

The story of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition begins with a letter designed to get the attention of even a busy CEO. At the top: the logos of Walmart and Patagonia. John Fleming, who was then Walmart’s chief merchandising officer, and Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia’s founder, signed the letter, which invited chief executives of some of the world’s biggest clothing companies–fierce competitors, ordinarily–to join together to develop an index to measure the environmental impact of their products.

Their pitch, in part, read like this:

Creating a single approach for measuring sustainability in the apparel sector will do much more than accelerate meaningful social and environmental change. Standardization will enable us to maximize sustainability benefits for all buyers without investing in multiple sustainability technologies and certification processes, and ultimately empower consumers to trust claims regarding sustainably sourced apparel.

Finally, as an industry, we will benefit from the unique opportunity to shape policy and create standards for measuring sustainability before government inevitably imposes one.

…The time is right and the need is great for the apparel sector to move forward now, without further delay, in unison, with strong partners like you.

It was a risky proposition. What if it turned out that a competing company had a better sustainability story to tell? Would consumers be given access to the index? NGOs? Regulators? Most big retailers knew that they had very little visibility deep into their supply chains. Did they really want to find out, for example, that a supplier to one of their suppliers, in a factory they had never visited in China or Vietnam, exploited workers or dumped pollution into a nearby river? Any meaningful index would require companies to ask tough questions and, eventually, face demands from others to share what they had learned.

The letter went out on October 1, 2o09. Less than three years later, despite those risks, the apparel industry has made major progress towards creating a global sustainability index, which will be known as the Higg Index, to measure and score products, factories and companies. A first version will be released today (July 26) by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, the nonprofit group that developed the index. Its vision? Nothing less than  “an apparel and footwear industry that produces no unnecessary environmental harm and has a positive impact on the people and communities associated with its activities.” The Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC)  hired an executive director, Jason Kibbey, in January, and today it has more than 60  members, representing brands, retailers and suppliers who together account for more than a third of the global apparel and footwear industry.

Consumers won’t see labels with scores attached to their T-shirts, dresses or sports jackets for years, but some companies are already using the tool to measure the energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, chemical use and waste of their factories around the world.

The coalition and the index mean to do more than drive incremental change, Jason Kibbey (left) told me when we spoke last week. “This is about industry transformation so everyone can benefit from reduced risk as well as efficiency,” he said.

How and why did Sustainable Apparel Coalition and the Higg Index  come together so quickly? To find out, I interviewed key players including Kibbey; Rick Ridgeway, the vice president of environmental initiatives at Patagonia and a member of the SAC’s board; Mary Fox, a former Walmart executive, who with Ridgeway got the coaliation going; Michelle Harvey of Environmental Defense Fund, a member of the group’s board; and  John Whalen, a principal at BluSkye, a boutique consulting firm that helped guide the process. This story shows what an industry can do when people get together, commit to a goal and set aside as best they can their personal and corporate agendas.

* * *

[click to continue...]

Filed Under: Consumption, CSR, Human rights, Investing, Leadership, NGOs, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Zero waste: Exciting, radical and real

June 13, 2012

Zero waste is one of the most exciting ideas I’ve come across in nearly a decade of writing about business and sustainability.

In the short run, it makes business sense.

In the long run, it has the potential to transform the way we design and make things.

Garbage–and how to eliminate it from our lives–is more interesting than you’d guess. I’ve kept an eye on the zero waste trend since writing a story called The End of Garbage for FORTUNE in 2007. More recently, I wrote about DuPont’s efforts to eliminate waste. Walmart did so well at reducing and recycling waste that it turned what had been a cost (landfill fees) into an asset (revenues from recycling.). Even Waste Management, the nation’s biggest trash hauler, is remaking its business to extract value from waste. [See my 2010 FORTUNE story, Waste Management Earns Its Name]

Why is zero waste a radical idea? Because, as I wrote in Fortune, it leads to a new way of thinking:

Getting to a wasteless world will require nothing less than a total makeover of the global economy, which thinkers such as entrepreneur Paul Hawken, consultant Amory Lovins, and architect William McDonough have called the Next Industrial Revolution.

They want industry to mimic biology, where one species’ excrement is another’s food. “We’re not talking here about eliminating waste,” McDonough explains. “We’re talking about eliminating the entire concept of waste.”

In two weeks, I’ll be in Costa Mesa, CA, at the first national business conference on zero waste, sponsored by the U.S. Zero Waste Business Council, a fledgling nonprofit set up to promote the idea of zero waste in the corporate world. The event begins on June 26, and I’ll be giving a talk (called “Zero waste: Exciting, radical and real!) on June 27. I’m also hoping to learn more about progress towards zero waste, as well as what obstacles stand in the way.  Toyota Motor Sales, SuperValu/Albertsons, Ricoh Electronics, Inc and Sierra Nevada are among the companies sending speakers.

If your company has a story to tell about waste, let me know in the next week or so (by email, please), and I will consider working it into my talk or my coverage. And I hope to see some of you there.

Filed Under: Consumption, CSR, Economics, Energy, Environment, NGOs, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , ,
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