Archive for the ‘Sustainability’ Category
Is a green Wal-Mart good enough?
By now you’re probably aware of Wal-Mart’s efforts to green its business practices and its image. If you haven’t, you probably will soon. The company that a business professor I recently met called the 13th largest economy in the world has launched an advertising onslaught tied to Earth Month. According to Wal-Mart’s news release, its national advertising campaign includes print, television, radio and online ads and a 16-page insert in May issues of several consumer magazines. Brandweek says the company calls it “the most comprehensive environmental sustainability campaign” in its history.
No less of an environmentalist than Paul Hawken, speaking at his book-tour event in Portland last year, said Wal-Mart was indeed serious and sincere about sustainability. The professor I mentioned supports Hawken’s assessment. She is among a group of academics taking part in Wal-Mart’s green initiatives and is a regular visitor to Wal-Mart’s home in Bentonville, Ark. The company’s new-found green zeal is apparent on its website:
Wal-Mart’s environmental goals are simple and straightforward: to be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain our natural resources and the environment.
What to make of all this? This is Wal-Mart we’re talking about, the company so many, including me, have good reasons to despise. I’m on the board of a Portland nonprofit that actively supports locally owned, independent businesses and encourages people within our community to do the same. This in the face of out-of-town big-box retailers — Wal-Mart being the poster child — that have decimated so many local independent businesses and left their communities poorer for it.
Still, if Wal-Mart — given its staggering size — is successful in using only renewable energy, producing zero waste and greening its supply chain and the products it sells, it would have an enormously positive impact on the global environment. Or so it would seem.
Something, however, doesn’t add up for me. Green or no, Wal-Mart hasn’t backed off using low prices to beat its competition (including the Mom & Pops in your town). The message it’s sending is you can have it all. “Save Money. Live Better.” — it’s new slogan promises. Wal-Mart will drive its suppliers to go greener, but it will still expect the lowest possible prices from them. That protects its profit margins and enables its customers (in theory) to save money. But someone or something has to pay for Wal-Mart’s margins and our low prices — as has always been the case.
What do you think? If Wal-Mart achieves its environmental sustainability goals, will it have earned your admiration, maybe even turned you into a customer? Is going green enough? Or do you, like me, view sustainability as far more than going green? What about the matters of social and economic equity? Wal-Mart’s lower prices and business practices mean lower wages, loss of independent businesses and the community diversity they bring and the leakage of dollars out of local communities and into the coffers of Wal-Mart headquarters. Should we just chalk that up to the free market doing its thing?
Tags: Brandweek, Earth Month, economic leakage, equity, Paul Hawken, Sustainability, Wal-Mart
Posted in Business & Economics, Consumerism, Marketing, Sustainability | 1 Comment »
Marketing for a sustainable future
Those of you who’ve visited this blog before may see a slight change in emphasis in future posts. I’ll be exploring more frequently the personal and professional interest I have in marketing’s role in a sustainable future. Some would say marketing is antithetical to sustainability. As a long-time marketer, I don’t believe that. However, I also know that marketers shoulder great responsibility for supporting companies, products and business practices that are fundamentally unsustainable.
I don’t believe marketing, by definition, is the problem. One marketing executive I know believes in the Peter Drucker objective of marketing: to create and keep a customer. Sounds simple enough. And non-controversial. It says nothing about creating demand for material products we don’t need and end up throwing away in gigantic landfills. Nor supporting businesses that indulge in wasteful and polluting manufacturing practices. Nor ignoring an economic system that places shareholder interests far above those of the environment and the larger human community.
As marketers, we have choices in who, what and how we market. We can create awareness, build preference and generate demand for organizations and products that do good, or at least no harm. Or we can put our talents in creativity and persuasion to work for the bad guys. I believe it’s time for marketers to awaken to our capacity to change the world for the better and to make conscious choices about how we are going to employ our skills and ourselves.
There are organizations and businesses trying to do the right thing for shareholders, customers, employees, communities and the environment. These are the employers and clients we need to be supporting. If that isn’t a practical option for you as a marketer (since you need a job and income), then do what you can to change the marketing — if not the behavior — of your employer or client. Stand for sustainability, even if you stand alone.
For better or worse, marketers are perhaps the most visible storytellers of our time. The stories we craft and publicize are meant to move people to act, and very often they do. The question we must face is whether the actions we instigate support or jeopardize a sustainable future. If you don’t know the answer, then consider the physician’s maxim: First, do no harm.
Tags: do no harm, Marketing, storytellers, Sustainability, sustainable future
Posted in Marketing, Sustainability | No Comments »
Spread of fashion undermines sustainability
One of America’s foremost critics of our consuming ways is Juliet Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College. I had the pleasure of hearing her speak this week in Portland.
Among the many observations that jumped out at me in her lecture was what she called “the aesthetization of American life.” Not sure that’s a word, but the point is fast-changing fashion, long the staple of the apparel industry, is now central to the selling of many retail products. In recent years, furniture, cellphone, home electronics and other manufacturers have joined clothing makers in emphasizing the design — or aesthetic appeal — of their products. A New York Times piece yesterday, appropriately headlined “Hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip,” helped make Schor’s point:
Like fashion or entertainment, the cellphone industry is increasingly hit-driven, and new models that do not fly off the shelves within weeks of their debut are considered duds.
I like attractive, well-designed products as much as the next person. However, when it becomes industry’s prevailing practice to change product designs with the season and encourage us to discard perfectly good items because they are no longer “fashionable,” then we have a problem. Making more of the products we buy fashion statements only encourages us to purchase more. This may bolster the financial bottom lines of producers and retailers. But it puts the world’s environmental bottom line further in the red.
To illustrate her point, Schor projected a graph from the World Wildlife Foundation’s Living Planet Report 2006. You can access the report here. According to the WWF:
The Living Planet Report 2006 confirms that we are using the planet’s resources faster than they can be renewed — the latest data available (for 2003) indicate that humanity’s Ecological Footprint, our impact on the planet, has more than tripled since 1961. Our footprint now exceeds the world’s ability to regenerate by about 25 per cent…This global trend suggests we are degrading natural ecosystems at a rate unprecedented in human history…Effectively, the Earth’s regenerative capacity can no longer keep up with demand — people are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste into resources.
WWF offers several alternatives to our unsustainable (and potentially catastrophic) “business as usual” course of human development. If you’re wondering what you can do, start by examining your consumption choices. Resist the urge to stay at fashion’s leading edge, no matter the product. Buy less stuff. When you do make purchases, reward producers and retailers who embrace sustainability.
And if it’s aesthetics you value, ask yourself this: What better designer than Mother Nature?
Tags: aesthetization, consumption, Ecological Footprint, Juliet Schor, Living Planet Report, Sustainability
Posted in Business & Economics, Consumerism, Marketing, Sustainability | No Comments »
Consuming our way out of poverty?
An economist and writer at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas tell us household consumption — not income — is the best measurement of “financial well-being.” The incomes of the top 20 percent of US households may be 15 times greater than the bottom 20 percent, but the top group’s consumer spending is only four times greater than the bottom group’s. And on a per person basis, the richest household only outspends the poorest by 2.1. to 1 (because richer households are larger on average). Writing in the Sunday New York Times, the bankers explain:
To understand why consumption is a better guideline of economic prosperity than income, it helps to consider how our lives have changed. Nearly all American families now have refrigerators, stoves, color TVs, telephones and radios. Air-conditioners, cars, VCRs or DVD players, microwave ovens, washing machines, clothes dryers and cellphones have reached more than 80 percent of households.
So there you have it. Because nearly all of the poorest households have all or most of the “conveniences we take for granted,” they really aren’t that poor. In fact, the bankers tell us, “the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society.” By their definition, the truly poor are those who don’t have the modern conveniences nearly everyone else has. In which case, that odd millionaire couple that opts out of a consumerist lifestyle would be poor. They say no to the so-called conveniences because they don’t want to add to the human and ecological toll our consumer economy extracts.
The bankers praise “a capitalist system that has for generations been lifting American living standards.” Yes, if you define standard of living by material things. We certainly do have more material things in the average rich and poor households. And I suppose that means all of us — rich and poor — are happier than generations before us? And Earth has infinite capacity to lift the world’s material living standards for generations to come? Just wondering.
Tags: economic prosperity, Federal Reserve Bank, household consumption, New York Times, poverty, standard of living
Posted in Business & Economics, Consumerism, Sustainability | No Comments »
Green innovations offer hope in an e-wasted world
I maintain an ongoing love-hate relationship with consumer electronics. I hate the constant promotional bombardment by electronics manufacturers for cellphones, flat-panel TVs, mp3 players, games and countless other digital distractions. I also hate the waste stream produced by household electronics. Last month, the New York Times Magazine published an excellent piece on this, “The Afterlife of Cellphones.”
While many of us try to recycle our phones, the reality is they too often eventually end up randomly disposed of in developing countries, exposing human and other life to dangerous materials. According to the Times:
In a study published last year, 34 recent-model cellphones were put through a standard E.P.A. test, simulating conditions inside a landfill. All of them leached hazardous amounts of lead — on average, more than 17 times the federal threshold for what constitutes hazardous waste. Under a stricter state of California test, they also leached four other metals above hazardous levels.
The E.P.A. says modern American landfills are designed to keep toxics stewing inside from leaking out, so they don’t contaminate surrounding soil or drinking water. But landfills do fail, says Oladele A. Ogunseitan, an environmental-health scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and an author of last year’s study. More important, he notes, such landfills don’t exist in the developing world. In many places, garbage is tossed into informal dumps or bodies of water or burned in the open air — all dangerous ways of liberating and spreading toxics.
The article doesn’t paint a completely hopeless picture. Industries are developing to reclaim precious metals from e-waste and to refurbish used cellphones and resell them to those who can’t afford new ones. The latter, in theory, reduces the need to make new phones and the energy and materials consumed to produce them.
Which brings me to what I love (I use the term very loosely) about consumer electronics: the innovation harnessed and applied in their design. The innovation I care about most is reducing the environmental impact of electronics. CNET gives coverage today to the Green Gadgets conference in New York. Check out some of the product innovations that promise to do less harm and in some cases improve the quality of life for some of the world’s poor.
My favorite is SunNight Solar’s solar flashlight. The company is also focusing on social issues by encouraging their customers to buy and give one of the flashlights to a person in a developing country for every one they buy for personal use. According to CNET, “The goal is to reduce the use of kerosene lamps, which are unhealthy and dangerous.”
Technical and social innovations like these from SunNight Solar are what give me hope.
Tags: consumer electronics, green, green gadgets, hazardous waste, innovation, The Afterlife of Cellphones
Posted in Business & Economics, Marketing, Sustainability | No Comments »
Making the wrong argument for sustainability
Call me a hopeless idealist, but I happen to believe we need no other motivation for living more sustainably than simply doing the right thing. I’m no fan of leading with competitive, economic or profit-based appeals when arguing for sustainability, as The Oregonian did earlier this week in their editorial, “Racing to stay ahead of the pack.”
The editors cautioned Portlanders that we can’t stop doing what has made us a world leader in sustainability because other cities worldwide are “hellbent on catching up”:
Daily we are reminded just how global, competitive and interconnected the modern economy has become. The consequence is clear: In this new world economic order, only the nimble will thrive. This fresh market reality places cities — not generally known for being light on their feet — in extreme peril. Those that have a clear sense of purpose and direction will flourish. Those lacking this trait will wilt.
Accompanying the written editorial was a cartoon of man in a meeting room pointing to a large poster of a dollar bill and telling his colleagues, “Actually there is one rather compelling ‘green argument’ for sustainability.”
The message was clear: There’s money to be made in sustainability, and if Portland loses its position as a global leader in sustainability, we will also lose out on the economic spoils that go to the victors in this race. Maybe so, but in looking at sustainability through the lens of economics we lose sight of the much greater social and moral imperatives for changing how we live.
The editors got it partially right when they concluded:
Current consumption patterns cannot endure. We all will have to use fewer resources, use them more wisely, reuse them, then recycle them. That is the core of sustainability. That is the manner of living Portland must role-model for the world.
The very fact that our global consumption patterns are unsustainable is all the motivation we need to live more sustainably. And Portland should be the role model for the world because the world desperately needs one. Period.
Let’s just keep doing the right thing. If our economy grows as a result, so be it.
Tags: consumption, doing the right thing, Portland Oregon, Sustainability, The Oregonian, world leader
Posted in Business & Economics, Oregon, Sustainability | No Comments »