Conservation or Corporate Environmentalism - who's sexier?

So I spent the weekend back up in Canada hanging out with my environmentalist dad and his friends.

Guess what we talked about...
How to save the world.


Their approach - conversation.  They are activists fighting the man, stopping evil corporations from polluting rivers, killing plants and animals.  It was interesting to hear how they are using the grassroots organizing tactics, leveraging laws and government agencies and processes to slow process and engaging residents to take action and use their voices.  It was very inspiring, a great reminder that we all have the opportunity to fight for justice.  But is it also a long and hard fought road, it is painfully slow and tiring to be fighting all the time.

I believe I have similar goals of protecting the environment in my work, but rather than fighting the man, I am the man and I am working within to make change. Companies have the opportunity to make positive impacts with every decision they make.  And that has been something I have been able to help steer.  It does not happen every time and there are often trade offs, it moves slow and gets frustrating, but when change does happen it gets pretty exciting.

I suffer from the grass is always greener on the other side syndrome and get really excited by activism.  This was very evident in talking this weekend. Creating petitions, buttons, creative ideas on how to bring awareness to an issue. I think I just need to reframe my work - creating policies, procedures, excel files and guidance documents... and maybe a button just for the fun of it!

I have come to realize that we need both a activist and an internal change approach towards shifting our world towards more sustainable behaviors.  They feed upon each other, driving change and showing examples of that change shows that good can be done. So to everyone inside or on the outside, continue your great work.

Outsourcing the impact on our poor

A couple of days ago two of my girlfriends suggested I come to this talk being put on at the opening of the River Rally in Portland Oregon.
I got the chance to hear from Robert Kennedy Jr. environmental lawyer, activist and President of the Waterkeeper Alliance and Lisa Jackson the EPA's Administrator.

I am embarrassed to say I have never heard either of these leaders speak before, so I was really along for the evening of some food, maybe a glass of wine and a chance to hang out with my friends.

As soon as Mr. Kennedy took the microphone and started talking about the issues going on in this country and the history of the Waterkeeper Alliance my jaw dropped and I was held captivated.
One issue he touched on briefly struck a cord and brought me to tears; as it is something I see continuously in my work. This is the environmental burden we are shifting onto the poor of this country and the world.
Communities of affluence usually have the education, skills and money to push back on environmental pollution.  The poor do not. Places tend to be cheap for a reason, are they near agricultural run off, polluted lands, industrial areas.
I also see the poor of this country being denied access to environmental innovation - I am often told poor people can't buy organic food, solar panels for their homes, cars with good gas mileage. We have a system now that is makes environmentalism elitist.

I wrote about this in a recent blog post on why we need to support organic agriculture as the workers in the fields are being exposed to chemicals in the form of pesticides or insecticides with conventional farming. What are the long term affects of this?  Why should cheap food or clothing be cheap when it is putting people's lives at risk.  And the people who are working in the fields especially here in the United States are doing so out of necessity - most are immigrant labor. And this is where the social piece falls in place - are these people able to defend their rights?

I then was inspired to hear Lisa Jackson speak about the continued need to fight the environmental battle - "just because the lakes aren't on fire, doesn't mean we have saved the environment."  She spoke with such passion and vision for a country that can make the changes we want to see.

The tie of environmental and social justice is so intertwined it speaks to the same battle. I  was inspired and energized to do my part.  Because really it will happen as we each take on a piece and fight the fight for those who do not have the ability to do so - this is our responsibility.
Take one your "I should's" and make it an "I did". You know what to do. This is a values system - all of us living it creates change. 

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.

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.

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.