Surviving the Meta Trends

I gave a presentation at the Los Angeles International Textiles Show earlier this week and the topic was Sustainable Meta Trends in Textiles.  In all honesty I didn't know what a Meta Trend was until a few weeks prior. I looked it up and basically META is something transformational.
So it is not just what is new, but what is going to change significantly.
Pretty daunting - and to boot, my presentation was pretty daunting as well, as the impact of the textile industry on the planet is significant.

Often however we hear these significant meta statements about poverty, climate change, obesity, water, land and energy shortages and we cannot comprehend how to digest that information into our daily lives. At least I find it quite difficult. So I started thinking about a way to make these huge pieces of information enter my brain with some kind of comprehension. And the way I look at it is to find some kind of transformational experience that I have already gone though and build a connection.

For instance - when I worked as a freelancer and now as a consultant and do not have the same income I was used to - you begin to adapt and start living differently, you prioritize, and alter your behaviors.  I have seen the same with friends and family who have children, your life is now different, you adapt.
Another example - our pipes broke and had to turn off the water in our home for a day, we re-looked at how we lived, what could we do without water and still live.

These maybe small items, but it shows how if we step back and look at the times in our lives that we have been able to change, and change our behaviors we usually can do it. So you can look at these Meta trends as warnings for the areas of the world that are going to change and you can start practicing now. 

A little inspiration for the weekend

I love to read.  And I love to underline thoughts of great interest.  And I love to feel inspired.  Once inspired all of a sudden the world feels a little lighter and with so much going on right now. I figure we all need a little inspiration for the weekend.
Since we all have something going on and it all doesn't feel very sustainable these days, here are some good things to keep in mind.

(I am just reaching for books in the shelf beside me here and flipping through to find some of those nice underlines)

"Bring your children here, and their children, in turn. Do like you and me done and show them how to take a bearing off those two mesas - show 'em how to find the arroyo and the saddle.  But most of all Buddy," he said, touching his grandson's hand, "tell them the stories" - Monty Bassett Slim the Guide

"I made a list of the happiest periods in my life, and I realized that none of them involved money.  I realized that building stuff and being creative and inventive made me happy." Tony Hsieh Delivering Happiness - A path to profits, passion, and purpose


"When something difficult arises, the mind often wants to jump in to comment on it, or try to fix it, or move away from it - anything but stay with it.  this may seem like healthy, self protective behaviour, but the truth is that is you can't be fully present with the difficult moments, chances are you won't be present with the best moments of your life either." Phillip Moffitt - Dancing with Life


"Imagine that the universe is a great spinning engine," he said, " you want to stay near the core the thing - right in the hub of the wheel - not out at the edges where all the wild whirling takes place, where you can get frayed and crazy. The hub of calmness - that's your heart" Elizabeth Gilbert - Eat Pray Love


Got any quotes you like?
Have a wonderful weekend

Who the heck am i?

As I keep venturing out into my sustainability consulting career I have have received some great feedback from colleagues and friends.  And a lot of it centers around my passion for sustainability not only in my career but in my personal life too.

I am very fortunate that I have learned a lot of great lessons about living a more sustainable life and have the opportunity to put my values into practice.  I have a LOT of areas of improvement, but I do have some great practices at home that allow us to reduce our impact.

I wanted to share some things we've put in place that hopefully give you a better sense of who I am and maybe some ideas for things you want to do too.

pickled turnips - all ingredients coming from the garden

me and my turnip "crop"

hanging laundry on the line to dry

my garden

the composter in the back ground - not only is it great for reducing our trash, but I use the compost in the garden which saves on buying dirt!

The vertical potato stacker that Andy made me

my commuter bike with a milk crate fixed on the back for a great basket. 

The kitchen recycling center - co-mingle recycling, soft plastics which we can recycle at the prAna offices, laundry for dirty dish rags and trash, which we take out only every couple of weeks

So there is a little peek into living sustainability. 

Fair Trade Certified makes its way into clothing

I don't think I would normally be this excited about a product, but it has been the focus of the last 18 months of my life, so I have to share...
I have to go back a few years. There has been a desire from customers to want to buy products that are made with high ethical manufacturing practices.  Many companies and organizations have been working on trying to bring that level of transparency, but with traditional manufacturing and spread out supply chains it is very difficult. Fair Trade Certified is label you see on products like chocolate, coffee, bananas, sugar etc. But in the past few years  Fair Trade USA had been working on project for Apparel.  To ensure to customers that the products are in fact Fair Trade they developed the Apparel and Linens standard and I got a chance to review it years ago.  The ideas were right, but there were too many questions with implementation.  However they listened to their stakeholders and continued to revise the standard to a place that as a brand it would be relatively straightforward to put into reality.
So when I started a new job with prAna in August of 2009, the values of social responsibility resonated with the brand, everyone at the company was on board to test this out.

I am writing about this now because finally you can buy prAna's first Fair Trade Certified product - the SOUL T on prAna.com

The process was incredibly interesting as prAna along with a small handful of companies were the tester brands for this new standard and I soon memorized the Fair Trade USA phone number.  The shirt was designed and developed by prAna's internal team and we worked with the Liberian Women's Sewing Project in Monrovia Liberia to make the shirts.  This is just one of many factories that have already been approved by Fair Trade USA to make Fair Trade Certified product.

When people ask me what is so special about Fair Trade Certified Apparel - it really is about having a transparent supply chain, knowing that there is environmental protection, direct trade, and getting fair wages into the hands of the workers.  We all feel this should always be the case, but it just isn't so. So to support a system that does this is incredibly important.  Ideally we would see Fair Trade attached to all manufacturing.

It is so inspiring to be a part of something that is bigger than yourself and that is what being involved in a project like this does.

Sending market signals to companies

If you have the option to vote your values with your dollars by supporting companies and products that aligned with what is important to you - wouldn't you?  Unfortunately before it was very difficult for consumers to do this.  You might hear a cool story about a company that was using organic, recycling their waste or creating their own renewable energy and buy their products, but if you look at your everything you bought in a week - there are almost too many products to know everything about.

But now there is a really easy solution - especially for all of you smart phone users (I know, I know, I'll get one some day) It is call GoodGuide, and their tag line is "Find healthy, green, ethical products according to scientific ratings".  (check out the video on how it works)

If you look through the website you will see that products are rated at a high level on Health, Environment, and Society. Dig deeper and each category is broken down into sub categories, so depending on how much detail you want you can learn about why a product or company was ranked the way it was.

What is unique about GoodGuide is the level of scientific analysis that goes on behind each of the rankings, data is collected from a wide variety of sources and is analyzed to come up with the score.  You can only imagine the difficulty in acquiring all of this data. The data is then normalized across product categories so like with like is ranked against each other.

It is interesting to see the ranking and then your personal and emotional reaction to that ranking.  For instance I don't buy Clorox Green Works cleaning products because I felt Clorox was a bad company - but in fact their dish soap ranked well.  So that got me interested in how my current dish soap is ranked and interestingly it was only slightly higher.

If you want to get even more issue specific about how you purchase from companies who share your values here is a list of other ranking websites and the issues they look at. (Let me know if I am missing others)

Climate Counts - companies and their commitment to tackling global warming

Free 2 Work - Human Trafficking and Slavery 

PETA - List companies that test on animals

Newsweek - USA top 500 and 100 global companies

Better world hand book - (Human rights, the environment, animal protection, community involvement, social justice) Various consumer products

Greenpeace - Green guide to better electronics

So try it out - see how your toothpaste, laundry detergent, and favorite candy bar rank - see if you would make any changes to your buying habits based on this new information.

Guest blog - Sustainability from your not so Average Joe

There are three (at least) reasons why I should not write about sustainability for this blog: 1) I really don’t know a lot about the topic. 2) I don’t exactly live an exemplary life when it comes to sustainable practices. 3) Even if I did have any insights, they likely wouldn’t apply to the population at large, because I live in a very remote and unique environment – the Canadian Arctic.

Nicole, however, won’t take no for an answer, and so here we are. I think, in her wisdom (?) she might think that I might have something relevant to say for the very reasons I think I don’t. So I’m going to tackle this piece from that perspective, then, and see what happens.

1. What do I know about living sustainability? Putting it simply, I would say it is about doing what you can. Not talking or thinking or wishing or regretting. But DOING. It is easy think of endless excuses why we cannot do X.  So perhaps the key is to start by focusing on doing Y…the things we can do. For example, where I live there is no recycling program and no organic options at our grocery store. I can’t do anything about it.  However, I can (and did) make the decision to be a single-vehicle family.  With two young children to cart around and a climate that involves 6 months of winter and temperatures that regularly drop below -30 and -40 degrees Celsius, it would obviously be more convenient for my husband and I to each have a vehicle, but we make it work with one. There is something we did.

2. Like I said above – I don’t recycle. And OK, so we only have one vehicle, but that one vehicle idles a lot (to keep warm in the aforementioned formidable climate). And sometimes I let the water run when brushing my teeth. We use disposable diapers (gasp!) I could go on. So why would Nicole want a baddie like me telling y’all about my thoughts on sustainability? I guess maybe because I’m an Average Joe. Nicole has a Masters in Environmental Studies and sustainability is her passion. That’s not me. I’m a librarian and right now just getting through life with a toddler and an infant is my passion. So sometimes it feels like maybe the same rules wouldn’t apply to an Average Joe that would apply to a keener like Nicole. But if you take a few minutes to actually think about sustainable living (as I’ve been forced to do by going through this exercise) and go back to my simple definition, then even the Average Joe can do something. Or even better, a bunch of somethings. And the somethings can be easy (how hard is it to shut the water off when brushing your teeth?) And the somethings can have spin-off benefits (e.g. having one vehicle also means spending less money). And probably, the more somethings you do, even more positive choices will follow as you begin to be more conscious about sustainability.  And we don’t need a Masters in Environmental Studies for that. (And FYI, if you ever want to make something a habit, enlist the help of a toddler…those little guys are militant about habits. Are you lazy about turning off lights before you leave a room? Just get my son to help you flip off the light switch one time, and I guarantee you’ll have a little light-turning-off enforcer for life.)

3. I’ve already mentioned just a couple of points about Arctic living that are not likely to be issues for the general readership. Even though I face some challenges up here, I’ve got some pretty amazing models from the Inuit culture, who managed to perfect sustainable living in the most cruel of environments. There are many, many more unique elements to my lifestyle (truly, I wish more people could visit up here and experience the wonders of the north). For example, when I take my kids for a “walk” at this time of year, one of them rides on my back in my amautiq and the other is pulled in a sled.  I think Nicole sees these anecdotes as a bit of a hook, because my experiences up here are so unique and tend to garner interest. But even if your life isn’t as glamorous or interesting as that of a northerner, I guess you can still go back to my simple definition of sustainable living and do what works wherever you happen to be, regardless of the challenges you face there.

Rae-Lynne Patterson Aramburo lives in Iqaluit, Nunavut in Northern Canada with her husband and two boys.  She graciously responded to my request to write a blog about living in the north and thinking about sustainability.  And I was right she has some great insights to share.  Thank you Rae.

Preconceived notions on sustainability

Have you ever run into a situation where the person already knows everything about what you are talking about.  Doesn't allow for much of a discussion does it?  When the mind is closed there are not a lot of opportunities, but if you don't know then the opportunities are endless.

This has been my experience the past couple of months as I talk to companies about integrating sustainability into their business. There is this strange resistance to the subject.  Which I just don't understand as the business case for sustainability is really just about surveying your operations - its impacts, risk and opportunities.  Additionally this results in higher employee retention and engagement which has a dramatic affect on your bottom line.

So why the resistance?  Some theories I have heard is that there was such an environmental activism approach to getting companies to consider the environment that there is just a built in mental push back on ANYTHING green.  Another idea is that companies to day have a lot going on to catch up with IT, design, social networking arenas, that to add the ideas of sustainability feel too much.

So it has been interesting to open up the closed minds to the subject of sustainability - what it means and how it can benefit their companies and them as people.  Around every corner there is more to learn.  I shouldn't be surprised by this, but my mind needs to open too. 

Share a little B-Love

B can stand for a lot of things - some important to me? Bassett, Beer, Business, Duke Basketball (I just threw that one in there for my boyfriend) and today's B goes to Benefit.

I have been thinking a lot about how structure dictates behaviour and if a company's structure dictates its behavior - what would it look like if that were changed.  I imagine this is a similar question that the folks at B Corporation thought about and then did something around.  In their case B stands for Benefit Corporation where their Declaration of independence says it all:

We envision a new sector of the economy

which harnesses the power of private enterprise to create public benefit.

This sector is comprised of a new type of corporation the B Corporation

which is purpose-driven and creates benefit for all stakeholders, not just shareholders.

As members of this emerging sector and as entrepreneurs and investors in B Corporations,

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

- That we must be the change we seek in the world.

- That all business ought to be conducted as if people and place mattered.

- That, through their products, practices, and profits, businesses should aspire to do no harm and benefit all.

- To do so requires that we act with the understanding that we are each dependent upon another 

and thus responsible for each other and future generations.

While B Corporation didn't start certifying companies until 2007 they already have 381 companies covering 54 different industries.  As social and environmental responsibility starts to percolate deeper into the various aspects of business companies are going to step it up to authenticate their values.  Being certified will be important to build that trust with the investment and customer communities. Keep thinking of all of these initiatives as a part of a building momentum to moving our mainstream business climate in the direction of embodying social and environmental factors for all of our survival.