Social change is in the air

Long story short - met some cool people. One of them has a social change endeavor and I wanted to share it with you.
Short story long - I went to school in northern British Columbia Canada, and still have the most amazing friends from elementary to Jr. High, to high school.  And one of my friends was down in the San Diego area.  He works for B-Lab - I talked about that organization in my blog post Share a little B Love.
While visiting, his girlfriend was down and we all met up for dinner along with friends of her's form when she lived in New York.  There at dinner I got to meet Joe and Scott.  Scott has a company and project called sheepless.  He is a graphic designer and social change agent.  I love initiatives like Scotts that asks the hard questions and aims to create a space where ideas can bloom.
You should check it out
www.sheepless.org

And check out Scott's video http://vimeo.com/24094235 

Growth

I got to thinking about our strange relationship with growth.  There are many times where growth is good and where it is bad.  But what is strange is how the definition of growth is interpreted.  I had a few thoughts.
I guess the simplistic way to look at it is that we want good things to grow and bad things to stop.  So then it gets down to what you define as good and what you define as bad.

For instance - corporate growth?  Is that good or bad?  If the company is mindful of its impact on the environment and is responsible to its employees and the communities in which it operates, then more of that kind of business is a good thing.
If the company is just growing to earn more profits at the expense of environmental and human health - then maybe that growth isn't such a good idea.

One way that people in business look at growth is to grow market share.  Simplistically this means that the pie of market is already at the size that it is going to be.  Say 10 million people all buying the product for a dollar.  So when a company grows they can either find more pie, which in this example is not an option, or they can take pie away from their competitors.  To me this type of growth within the sustainability world makes the most sense.  We already know we are in a finite world, so we can't really grow the pie anyway.  So why not have the more socially and environmentally responsible companies take away market share from those who are not doing those things.  This way there is growth, but there is growth towards a more sustainable model.

OK then one day all of the companies in the world, all of the products that get used are all sustainable - do we still have growth?  Probably, but growth is not constant it goes up and down so there will be growth to come out of dips.  But really I think WHAT is growing is going to change.

For instance - when we talk about personal growth, we aren't talking about things perse, we are talking about emotional experience, understanding and realizations.  These aspects of personal growth are what make life easier to live, to understand and to appreciate.  Really it is what makes people happier.  And this circles back to growth of "things" is not making us happier.  So how can we take that ideas of personal growth and incorporate them into business?
Maybe one day I will pay a company for the privilege of growing and sewing my own shirt.  What I am purchasing is acquiring the personal growth of the experience to learn a new skill set.  Buying experiences is one option.  But one thing is the world doesn't have enough resources for it to remain the same as the growth in stuff we know today.

Guest blog - sustainability of fast fashion? part 1

Today's guest blog comes from Christian Smith.  Christian is a master’s student at University College London, studying Environment and Sustainable Development. We connected because he also works in Fashion. To quote Christian "I love the way it feels to put on a well-fitting suit, the feel of a good quality sweater on the skin. But I also love people and the planet we live in. it’s the only one we have and we need to take better care of it. So I decided to write my dissertation on the intersection between fashion and sustainability – are they mutually exclusive or is there a way to combine the two successfully?"

Thoughts from Christian...

The main focus of this series of posts is to take a close look at various environmental issues surrounding fashion. The world is changing very quickly and resources that were abundant before are not anymore. There are 1.3 billion people in China, over 1 billion in India and nearly 300million in Brazil. If all those countries are to have the same standard of life as Europeans and Americans, we will need three planets just like earth to serve that need. We are getting to the point where “business as usual” right now means no business in the future.
A couple of interesting facts:
1. The global fashion and luxury sector was worth around $1.334.1 billion in 2008
2. The UK fashion industry was worth some £37billion to the UK economy in employing nearly a million.
3. Between 2002 and 2006, there was a 33% increase in the amount of clothing bought.
4. The average person goes through about 35kg of textiles a year, most of which is clothing and is thrown away within a year of purchase. In 2005 this resulted in 1.2 million tonnes of clothing going to landfill.

So what’s the problem? Well, clothing is getting cheaper, but climate change, water shortages and oil prices all point the other way. What is happening that makes clothing so cheap? Well, when value retailers sell their clothing cheaply they usually say it’s because of economies of scale; what they are less quick to say is that the fast fashion trend has also led to lower standards both in the quality of materials used and also in the quality of the finish.
Many have heard of the term Fast Fashion yet many may not fully understand what this means and the knock on effects this type of fashion has.
A report by the UK government states that “the culture of "fast fashion" encourages consumers to dispose of clothes which have only been worn a few times in favour of new, cheap garments which themselves will also go out of fashion and be discarded within a matter of months.” (Select Committee on Science and Technology, 2008)
Fast Fashion is a relatively recent development however, as environmental and ethical issues play more of a role in people’s decision making, this part of the fashion industry already finds itself at a crossroads not just because of its social and environmental impacts but also due to its link to a broken economic system which values short term profits over long term planning and does not accept responsibility for solving social and environmental problems it causes.

The fashion industry relies on many factors. Natural resources such as soil and water are just as important as the people who process materials and make the end products. Many items are today made from materials such as, polyester and nylon which are all oil based; as are women’s tights, zips, flip flops, fake fur and sneakers. Environmental conflicts in the fashion industry have always existed. Since the industrial revolution discharges/effluent from factories has flowed into rivers and lakes. At first this did not seem to matter as it was seen as the price to pay for progress. In more recent years the industry had managed to keep the realities of an extremely polluting industry hidden away from the public by relocating production to developing countries. In so doing, companies were able to outsource production and concentrate on the advertising and marketing of their products. Companies have been very reluctant to accept the role that they play in creating difficult working situations and environmental damage. The photo below shows the damage done through the irrigation of cotton.

This part of the industry works on volume – the more we buy, the more they produce the more profit companies. The only aim of is to squeeze margins. Yet with no monitoring and no real programs in place to collect waste, the majority of this clothing ends up in the trash only after a couple of wears. From a psychological point of view, if a t-shirt is only worth 2 pounds ($3.25 USD) – there is no incentive to keep that t-shirt as we tend to give more value to items that we consider expensive. But when you start to consider all the work that has been done to make these items, it just does not add up. For a cotton t-shirt, we need cotton transportation, processing, dyeing, marketing and advertising costs, paying staff at the point of sale as well as rent and utilities. All that from a 2 pound($3.25 USD) t-shirt? I think not. Something or someone is getting a very raw deal – namely the producers and the planet.

The more we make, the more we cause stress to the planet and the more pressure clothing companies put on their factories and therefore on the people who make clothing. The stories we hear about abuses in factories or children working in cotton fields are a direct consequence of our thirst for cheap fashionable clothing. Moving away from this way of business will allow us to recalibrate the way that business is done and encourage a new norm – one where people and planet are taken accounted for in the search of profit.
Firms are slowly coming to terms with factors that have begun to place limits on their growth. These are systemic issues which will the industry will have to contend and these tie in closely to the nature of the firm and its relationship with the ecosystem that supports it. The effect of globalisation when combined with modern technology is to effectively erase boarders. At the start of the outsourcing process, customers were uninterested in where goods came from. For them, the only thing that mattered was that items that they could not afford previously were now accessible. As environmental discourses started to emerge and the true impact of global industries started to come to light, stories of maltreatment and environmental degradation came to the surface and the supply chain factors are no longer a distant murmur.

The sustainability of time

I was warned of this - the consulting world is full of super busy times and dead times.  I am so very grateful for being busy right now. I am very fortunate to have a few projects going on that are keeping me learning and gaining to skills.
One of my new skills is this thing called "time management".  You see I have been a generally organized person, but for some reason these skills go on vacation when I have needed them.
For instance, the past few months of not being busy - wanting to be busy, I filled a lot fo my time with puttering.  I was getting good as "making work", filling time with random things, so that I didn't have to be reminded that I needed to find more work. Could have used some time management here.

Currently I have a few contracts going on which means I am too busy and scared that I won't get everything done to the quality that I want to.
And I know that I will be not busy again in the future - such is the life of a consultant. So time management is essential again.

Thus my desire to find sustainability with time.  What I have learned and been thankful for is that years ago I figured out what few things are the most important things that must always be in my life.  It is because I know these things they are always factored into my schedule. They are - exercise, eating well, time with my boyfriend, time for my family and friends, and sleep.  So in my newly acquired skill of mapping out my days I had to create a schedule for myself that included everything.
I don't get extra hours in the day, so somethings are shorter than if I had more time.
But I learned years ago when you don't require yourself to have the aspects of your life that give you balance then it all is not worth it.  I can't do an amazing job on something related to work when I am tired or have not exercised or eaten poorly or connected with my love ones.
So I do have a little excel file right now for the next 6 weeks plotting out my work / life balance.  But it is only 6 weeks of being ridged and hey as I have always been saying - sustainability takes some effort.  But is worth it. 

Sustainable food

I am currently up in Hood River Oregon where the valley is just glorious in all of the blossoms.  I am loving the conversations of all the fruit that is starting its growing process and keep asking when are these crops going to be ready to harvest?  You might notice I can't wait.

There are so many aspects to sustainable food and for this post I wanted to think about how much I really need to stay alive, thus sustain my existence.  And couple this will how much food I want to eat.  I could eat and do eat a lot more than I need to stay alive.
The balance of calories is a micro example of a sustainable system.
First you have to determine how many calories you need.  There are all kinds of website that can help determine this.  It gets a bit complicated when you factor in your exercise and lifestyle.  But the average person needs about 2000 calories a day.  So if you break down your meals into 3 a day that is about 667 per meal.  And some of us eat snacks, so move some calories over to snacks and take them away from meals.

Well we all can attest to not eating enough, or eating too much and finding that balance.  Maybe you eat too many calories at one time because you know you are going to be with less at another time and you are planning.  Also what happens when the calories we need are not available - pretend you can't just go to the grocery store and buy apples from around the world?

This has been a neat exercise for me, because it made me think how much I rely on connivence and what kind of changes I would have to make to plan out my food in take and caloric burning if food was limited.  Ultimately this is the kind of level of detail we should know to truly incorporate sustainability into our daily living...

Metrics on less

The world of sustainability is deeply rooted in metrics.  There is the saying "you can't manage what you don't measure".  And the big push is what you are doing less of.  Because less means you are more efficient, you save more, you use less stuff or consumption of goods.  And all of this is about sustainability because we need to live with less in the future with a growing constraint on resources.  But that's not a bad thing - people do well with less.  Because less means - less things to stress about, less stuff to trip over and clean and put away, less means more time for the things you love.

When you have a baseline of one behavior it is relatively straight forward to show how you measure less of something.  For instance, your home uses 10 mega watts of energy a year.  You change some behavior, change out some light bulbs, unplug electronics and soon you are using less energy.  You can measure this and track it.  This is the core of so many sustainability programs across the world.  To take their existing business and keep producing, but with less.  And it is not just energy, but water, materials, chemicals, maybe even people.

What will be interesting for companies of the future is to show their commitment to sustainability, but are already starting out with less.  For instance, a new company builds their building with the latest in design and technology such that it doesn't use any energy off the grid - this company starts with less.  Maybe another company doesn't use any packaging for their products - they don't have less of anything because they started out smart and didn't need to reduce.

Your current business now, and especially new businesses can really set themselves up for a bumpy future if they are relying on less to still offer their products and services.  The idea here is to offer more if the things that have a positive impact, like trust, authenticity, care, and respect - this makes the customer happier.  And actions like these create a connection and build a story stronger than more stuff.