B corp legislation expands to NY State

Will B Corps impact the sustainable market place?

Traditional corporate law requires corporations to prioritize the financial interests of shareholders over the interests of workers, communities, and the environment. Benefit corporations are a new kind of corporation legally required to:

1) have a corporate purpose to create a material positive impact on society and the environment

2) expand fiduciary duty to require consideration of the interests of workers, community and the environment

3) publicly report annually on its overall social and environmental performance using a comprehensive, credible, independent, and transparent third party standard.

Read more about B Corps and see if your state supports B Corp legislation at benefitcorp.net

It is not zero fat, but at least it is zero waste

Using recycling and waste-to-energy programs, Hershey has attaned "Zero-Waste-to-Landfill" (ZWL) at 4 of its facilities, inculding 3 manufacturing plants.

General Motors has nearly 80 landfill-free manufacturing facilities, Kraft has 36, and now the Hershey Company is building a portfolio of zero-waste-to-landfill sites. As of this month, the company has four zero-waste facilities in Pennsylvania.

Read more at GreenBiz

Read the press release at Hershey

Obama calls for manufacturers to be more efficient

Yes, he said it last night in the in State of the Union.

Of course, the easiest way to save money is to waste less energy.  So here’s a proposal:  Help manufacturers eliminate energy waste in their factories and give businesses incentives to upgrade their buildings.  Their energy bills will be $100 billion lower over the next decade, and America will have less pollution, more manufacturing, more jobs for construction workers who need them. 

Here is a link to the full speech

Getting the Most Out of Walmart's 15 questions

Walmart's 15 questions seem simple enough, but behind these easy questions lies a lot of deeper analysis and goal setting. From Green Biz, here are some tips: 

Walmart's 15 questions can be boiled down to 3 simple ones:

1. Do you measure and set goals for your environmental impacts?
2. If so, what impacts are you measuring, what are your goals, and are they consistent with recognized standards?
3. Do you know if your suppliers are doing the same?

Here's a simple, proven approach for getting started:

1. Set environmental impact baselines: Establish energy, carbon, water, and waste baselines against which progress can be measured.
2. Establish impact reduction goals: Align environmental impact data with broader business operations and set reduction goals that drive both cost and environmental outcomes.
3. Prioritize reduction initiatives: Choose and implement initiatives that will yield the greatest progress against your goals.
4. Track and report progress: Measure progress of reduction initiatives relative to baseline and goals using Greenhouse Gas Protocol or Global Reporting Initiative methodologies.
5. Publicize success: Convey your progress to external stakeholders through company sustainability reports and external venues such as the Carbon Disclosure Project or Ceres.

Read more at GreenBiz.com

Good News! Greener is Cheaper for Industry

Will green chemistry save the day? Well, according to Pike Research, they will at least save the industry $65 billion by 2020

Compared to conventional petroleum-derived feedstocks, these new materials offer greenhouse gas emissions and reduced toxicity. More importantly to the companies that use chemicals in their industrial processes, they offer significantly lower costs. In contrast to the consumer market, where choosing green products usually entails paying a premium, greener is cheaper in industry.

Read more at BusinessWire

Kohl's Goes for the Gold

Kohl's is giving Walmart a run for their money in the store design department. Kohl's has become the first US company to earn LEED Gold pre-certification for their new store design prototype. The company is not new to LEED, they have been using a LEED Silver store prototype since 2008 and have over 200 LEED certified stores. Further green kudos come form the EPA, who named them to the top of the 2010 list of green power purchasers.

Read more at Environmental Leader

Read Kohls sustainability report

What's in my product: Paper

So what really goes into the products we are designing and manufacturing? Today's edition of what's in my product looks at the paper making process. GreenBlue.org breaks it down for us and the answer is not: trees.

Certainly it starts with trees or other fibrous materials, but form there the fibers are broken down in a solution of water, sodium sulfide, and caustic soda, also know affectionate as "white liquor". Ok that sounds simple...but what exactly is caustic soda? Caustic soda is derived from running electricty through salt water (fresh water mixed with salt.) What about sodium sulfide?  Sodium sulfide begins with ground coal. Add to that "salt cake", which is a combination of the mineral marbelite and the byproduct of hydrochloric acid production. If the paper is white, then it has been treated with chlorine. I have to quote GreenBlue on this description: "Chlorine (is) also made from running electricity through salt water, chlorine dioxide, or an alternative combination of ozone (made from running electricity through air) and hydrogen peroxide (don’t even ask how hydrogen peroxide is made. I looked it up, and found phrases like “autoxidation of a 2-alkyl anthrahydroquinone”)".

Ok, lets try this again. So we have "trees, water, salt water, coal, mirabilite, limestone, maybe 2-alkyl anthrahydroquinone. It might contain calcium carbonate (more limestone), kaolinite (clay), talc, or titanium dioxide as a filler. Perhaps a wax emulsion is used as a sizing agent. Formaldehyde could be added to improve its strength when wetted. Some paper is treated with optical brighteners, dyes, pitch control chemicals, and slimicides."

OK, got it?

Read more at GreenBlue.org

LEED Designed Factories

The recent announcement of VW that their newest Passat factory in Chattanooga is Platinum LEED certified got us wondering...Are there any other LEED factories?  This is what we found:

There is the famous Ford River Rouge plant designed by William McDonough and Partners. Read about it at their website.

Steelcase has one for manufacturing their wood furniture. Read about it in Architecture Week

Here is a factory in China with Gold certification. They are a supply for power equipment, so it is a good sign that they are thinking about efficiency. Read about it in the trade publication Electrical Portal

P&G commits to building their next Chinese factory with LEED certification and pledges that all new factories will be LEED certified. Furthermore, P&G announced that it will:

• Power its plants with 100 percent renewable energy
• Use 100 percent renewable or recycled materials for all products and packaging
• Send zero consumer and manufacturing waste go to landfills
• Designing products "that delight consumers while maximizing the conservation of resources."

Read about P&G's plans at GreenBiz.com

Read more about the VW LEED factory at Reuters.com

Do you know of any others LEED or energy efficient factories? Post them in the comments.

Is manufacturing moving back to North America?

Rapid manufacturing proves to be a compelling reason to bring manufacturing to the US /Mexico border.

Meyers says being just south of the U.S. border gives his company an advantage in the fiercely competitive global market. His firm gets access to a low-wage workforce in Mexico, yet it can still deliver products rapidly to their customers in the United States. His company's lead-time is just seven days, he says.

"You're not going to get something from China in seven days unless you put it on an airplane," Meyers says. "Here, we put it on a truck, and it's in. We take an order, we custom build it, we ship it out, and it's out quickly."

By being close to its market, INFASA has also eliminated warehousing costs. The products leave the loading dock in Reynosa, clear customs a few miles away at the border, then are immediately shipped to the client.

If a customer needs a product quickly, Meyer's team can build it, move it across to McAllen and have it on a FedEx flight within 24 hours. Myers says this is a service that manufacturers in Asia simply can't offer.

Business leaders on both sides of the border say this is a model for how the region can revive manufacturing in North America.

Read more about it at NPR

A Few Interesting Facts from the Sustainability Consortium

• As a rule of thumb, about 10% of supply-chain links are responsible for over 80% of total supply-chain impact (Suh 2010).


• The carbon footprint of a product will increase by an average factor of 2.5 if it is produced in China, rather than being manufactured domestically (Peters & Hertwich 2006).


• More than 80% of a product’s environmental impact is determined in the design phase (Spangenberg & Lorek 2002).

Read more at the Sustainability Consortium

Puma Plans Compostable Shoes with Cradle to Cradle Technology

"We are confident that in the near future we will be able to bring the first shoes, T-shirts and bags, that are either compostable or recyclable, to the market," Puma boss Franz Koch told the German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche.

He explained that the company was working with partners on developing products on the principle of the "cradle-to-cradle" design. "It follows two circuits, the technical and the biological: I can use old shoes to make new ones or something completely different, such as car tyres. In the biological cycle, I can make shoes and shirts that are compostable so I can shred them and bury them in the back garden. We are working on products that meet these two criteria."

Read more at The Guardian

Read more about Puma's sustainability at the Triple Pundit

Read more about Puma's intiatives

William McDonough's TED Talk on Cradle to Cradle Design

The Problem with "Smart Textiles"

Although hybrid materials can be alluring to work with, they often come with sustainability challenges- namely problems with recyclability. This article, from the New York Times, details the problems with embeded electronics and also illustrates the disconnect between material innovation and end of life considerations... Wouldn't it be nice if the engineers inventing new materials also planned for their demise.

The growing practice of weaving electronics into the fiber of clothing could add to the already monumental challenge of e-waste disposal. Some fifty million tons of electronic waste already accumulate annually in “soaring mountains” of refuse, the United Nations says....“Smart” textiles have electronics in the very weave of their fabric, enabling clothing to respond in various ways to the environment and to function as electronic devices, like mobile phones or heart-rate monitors.

With their social and commercial promise, e-textiles, also known as smart textiles, are the focus of intense laboratory development and testing. Few laboratories, however, have designed prototypes with an eye toward safe disposal once the products have reached the end of their life cycle...A mass consumer market for e-textiles without an integrated understanding of safe disposal methods raises serious questions about the depletion of resources and effects on human human health, Mr. Köhler suggests...

Read more at the New York Times

Learn about the closed loop Cradle to Cradle certification

Buy the book- Cradle to Cradle

Learn more about e-waste

The Wasteland: 60 Minutes Segment on the problems of e-waste

Recycled Plastics Supply Chain Contaminated by E-waste, Study Says

E-waste is severly affecting the overseas supply chain. This recent study of Indian recycled plastics details some of the toxins that are getting into the recycled plastics market from recycled consumer electronics.

...Toxics Link in collaboration with Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA), State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO and Swiss Plastics Association is releasing an extensive study on plastic recycling across the city to measure one such widely used toxic chemical, brominated flame retardant (BFR) especially present in electronic products.

18 (41%) samples out of 44 samples collected from the recycling and moulding units were found positive for BFR and heavy metals like lead and cadmium. The observed concentration of BFR varied from 18.9ppm to 126.3ppm. Field study and lab research suggest that there is dispersion and dilution of these additives during recycling process.

BFRs in consumer products pose serious exposure risk particularly at the time of disposal. Although most plastics today, are recyclable, the recycled products become more hazardous than the virgin products. The study reveals that cross contamination by BFRs move into the environment and recycled products through recycling operations. Recycled plastic pellets used to manufacture new products contain these BFRs. There is a huge market for the products made of the recycled pellets that are used by low cost manufacturers...

Read more of the study at Toxics Link

Read a sumary in The Asian Age

Learn more about the problems of e-waste issues and global policy-making at the Basel Action Network

Is Your Client on the Newsweek Green 500 List?

Newsweek's annual ranking of the greenest companies is out. Is your clients on this list?

See the US 500

See the Global 500

Read more about the Green Rankings here

Health Executives Urge Colleagues to Develop Sustainable Operations

In a new video, health care executives discuss the importance of greening health care, to benefit patients,staff,and the community, both in improved health and financial savings generated through sustainable health care operations.

Read the Health Care Without Harm Press Release

 

PepsiCo Introduces Plant Based Plastic Bottle

PR NewswireAfter about a decade of study, in 2011 PepsiCo’s in-house Research and Development team figured out how to manipulate fermented plant material into the molecular structure of PET.

In the past, plant-based bottle initiatives faced an environmental challenge: they were impossible to recycle within the PET waste stream, confusing eco-conscious consumers and doing little to solve the problem of accumulating landfill waste. PepsiCo’s breakthrough material is 100 percent plant-based, except for the cap, and fully recyclable within the current PET stream.

Prototype plant-based bottles were made using switchgrass, pine bark and corn husks, among other plant-based materials. Eventually, PepsiCo expects to be able to incorporate wastes from its food businesses, including orange peels, potato peels and oat hulls. PepsiCo’s food portfolio includes the Frito-Lay line of potato and tortilla chips, the Tropicana juice line, and the Quaker brand of oatmeal, cereals, granola bars and rice snacks. The plant-based bottles are not currently manufactured using sustainably sourced organic materials.

Because the new plant-based bottles are identical to petroleum-derived PET bottles on the molecular level, the plant based bottles can be blown, filled and labeled the same way— avoiding the need for major capital investments on the factory floor. PepsiCo merged with its two major bottlers, The Pepsi Bottling Group and PepsiAmericas, Inc. in 2010, giving the company direct control over the manufacturing process.

PepsiCo plans to test a few hundred thousand of the plant-based bottles in 2012, in order to make sure it can mass-produce the bottles at scale. After pilot testing is complete, the company will decide which markets and brands will feature the new technology. As implementation moves forward, the company will also track the life-cycle environmental impacts of the bottles in order to account for environmental savings.

Read more at the NRDC's Smarter Business website

Read PepsiCo's full press release

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Puma Calculates Environmental Impacts... in Dollars

PUMA AG and parent company PPR HOME hired consulting firms PricewaterhouseCoopers and Trucost to calculate PUMA’s total global greenhouse gas emissions and total water use, respectively. As a global sporting goods and clothing company, PUMA AG sits atop an extensive network of suppliers, most of which operate outside PUMA’s direct control. The Environmental Profit and Loss study addressed everything from the extraction of raw materials to processing, manufacturing, and company logistics like design, warehousing, transportation and retail. The study did not address the environmental costs of waste and disposal....

PUMA AG’s Environmental Profit & Loss Account estimated the total economic value of PUMA’s carbon emissions and water use at €94.4 million ($136.95M) in 2010, with greenhouse gas emissions valued at €47 million ($68.18M) and water use at €47.4 million ($68.76M).

Read more at the NRDC's Smarter Business website

Find out about Trucost's methodology

Read PUMA AG’s press release

Inaugural World Design Impact Prize

The World Design Impact Prize is a biennial designation created to recognise, empower and stimulate socially responsible design projects and initiatives around the world. Presented by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid), the World Design Impact Prize will honour exceptional industrial design driven projects that are making a positive impact on our social, economic, cultural and/or environmental quality of life...

Read more at Icsid

See the finalists at WorldDesignImpact.org