Tag Archives: water

GreenBiz

Sports sustainability gurus share their all-star plays | GreenBiz

Back in 2008, when the US Tennis Association launched an ambitious effort to lower the environmental impact of its mammoth US Open event, it turned out to be nearly impossible to find a vendor to supply enough recycled paper napkins, greener plates, cups and flatware. Niche suppliers existed, to be sure, but few were big enough to handle the two-week long event’s 700,000 guests.

In the world of greener sports events, those take-what-you-can-get early days are long gone. At the Green Sports Alliance’s third annual summit in Brooklyn this week, visitors could sample a dizzying array of recycled, recyclable, carbon neutral or compostable alternatives from vendors on hand, including bamboo plates, plant starch utensils, sugar-cane clamshells and even bioplastic sushi containers.

Tennis ball recycling at the US Open (Credit: US Open)

After holding its previous two summits in the green-friendly Pacific Northwest, the GSA shifted its summit to New York City this year.

“This is where the big leagues are,” Darby Hoover, NRDC senior resource specialist, told me. She meant that literally. The four largest pro leagues are headquartered within a few blocks of each other in midtown Manhattan: Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Football League (NFL) and the National Hockey League (NHL).

From 11 teams and venues in 2011, when it debuted nationally, the alliance now boasts 180 from 16 pro and college leagues, along with concert-promoter and venue-giant AEG.“Competition absolutely raises the bar,” said Bob Nutting, Pittsburgh Pirates‘ chairman of the board. “There are a lot of competitive personalities in sports. Say you’re No. 3 in [recycling] diversion rates in the Major League. You can be sure we want to move to No. 2 or No. 1.”

The growing cadre of green-focused teams means that it’s rare these days to run into shortages of eco-supplies or services. Venue-focused efforts are de rigueur. Building LEED certified facilities, deploying aggressive recycling and food waste composting, installing low water bathrooms and high-efficiency lighting retrofits, along with renewable energy commitments and on-site installations, have all become standard operating procedure.

Job done? Hardly. That’s the easy stuff. It saves money by cutting waste, energy and resource use, said a senior sustainability executive who oversees scores of sporting venues and asked not to be named. But deep skepticism persists. There’s still an assumption that these are costly steps, although the industry has overcome the assumption that such options are impossible.

That’s mirrored in the share of teams that haven’t yet come on board. In baseball, for instance, 17 of 30 teams are GSA members. Just 12 of 32 NFL teams and a mere seven of 32 NBA teams are on board. Penetration into college level sports remains even thinner.

Click for full image (Credit: EPA)

To help the eco-laggards get with the game, here are seven tips from team owners and sustainability gurus.

Play the long game. “Everyone loves sustainability when it goes perfectly,” said Nutting. “In Pittsburgh, when I took over the team, it was in a losing cycle. So I got some unpleasant letters saying that we were valuing green priorities more than on-field experience.” The team fixed that in two ways. First, by winning: the Pirates are neck-and-neck with the St. Louis Cardinals to win their first divisional title in 21 years. And second, “by sticking to the priority through thick and thin.”

Moderate the message. Now in its sixth year of promoting green programs, the USTA is finding that less messaging can be more effective. “In the first year, we used the PA system with constant announcements and signage everywhere to remind visitors to recycle,” said Lauren Kittelstad Tracy, USTA’s senior manager of strategic initiatives. A survey revealed that it was too much. “Our guests know that recycling is important,” she said. “It’s more important to make it easy for them to do so than to remind them to do it.”

Tap into “jewel” events. Playoffs, championships and all-star games are emerging as high-visibility stages that leagues can use to extend the visibility of their green efforts into communities, the media and other franchises. Baseball has made its All-Star Games a prime focus for these efforts in recent years. At the 2013 game, the MLB deployed green teams to roam up and down the stadium, like vendors, to collect cups, cans and plastic. The effort helped achieve record rates of waste diverted from land fills, said Paul Hanlon, director of facility operations, MLB. To cut food waste, the event pushed beyond composting, by donating unsold foods to a charity.

Localize efforts, geographically and digitally. Asked if a fear of offending conservative voters might slow green initiatives in conservative areas, panels agreed hesitatingly. “If we put those messages [about carbon reduction] on Chevy’s Facebook [page], we get a ton of negative messages from deniers,” said David Tulauskas, director of sustainability at General Motors, which sponsors IndyCar driver Simona de Silvestro. “On Twitter, there’s not so much of a problem, though.” Meanwhile, at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) racetrack near Austin, Tex., Formula One and other race events must be conducted under strict carbon emission and other eco rules set out as city law, explained Edgar Farrera, COTA’s director of sustainability.

Solar panel installation at St. Louis Cardinals’ Busch Stadium (Credit: Microgrid Solar)

Do more with sponsorship. Progress is slow in linking sponsorships to sustainability goals, said Justin Zeulner, senior director of sustainability and public affairs for the Portland Trail Blazers. Globally, some $14 billion in sponsorship funding is poured into sports deals, ranging from players’ shoe contracts to venue-naming rights. Yet while venues are working hard to green their operations, the link with sponsors is weak at best. There’s a disconnect between the strategic decision to sponsor a venue which is made at a very high level, GM’s Tulauskas explained, based on a given market age, gender mix, ethnicity, geography and other demographic factors. But the sustainability messaging happens locally, only once the agreement has been set, he added.

Put an (athlete’s) face on green goals. As yet, there is no Michael Jordan of sports sustainability. This is a problem, said Greg Busch, executive vice president of GMR Marketing, an event promotional agency, because as successful as any team may be in pushing greener practices, a celebrity athlete can reach a broader audience. “The athletes give you a face and a voice. That allows you to really communicate with kids, moms, fans in general,” he explained. Athletes remain apprehensive because green is such a broad platform, unlike many products or charities they commonly back.

Resources. As part of the event, the EPA announced its Green Sports Resource Directory, thick with advice on greening efforts, as well as a scorecard of leading efforts. NRDC debuted a guide focused on college efforts. The report, “Collegiate Game Changer,” complements the NRDC’s reference work for pro teams, “Game Changer,” published in November.

Image of astroturf by narokzaad via Shutterstock. Photo of solar panels atop the St. Louis Cardinals’ Busch Stadium via Microgrid Solar.

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Check out the original story at:
http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/08/29/pro-sports-sustainability-gurus-share-their-all-star-plays

Corporate Knights

Ford Motor Company looks high and low to save water | Corporate Knights

In the race to go green, it’s fair to say that Ford has looked high and low – literally – to help its automotive plants cut their impact on the environment.

One of Ford’s highest profile eco-efforts can best be seen by looking down on the roof of its River Rouge factory in Dearborn, Michigan. Originally constructed starting in 1917 by Henry Ford, the complex debuted as an industrial pioneer, among the first fully-integrated industrial complexes, where steel mills, glass works and chemical plants were built side by side to speed the flow of raw materials into Ford’s burgeoning Model T plants.

It was there in 2000 that company chairman William Clay “Bill” Ford Jr., the founder’s great-grandson, unveiled another pioneering effort, of a greener hue. He announced plans to build the largest “living” roof ever installed on an industrial building, comprising 10 acres of hearty, green sedum plants.

Green roofs have since become a favourite of building designers. But at the time, Ford’s plan, part of a broader $2-billion site renovation, ran counter to energy-guzzling conventions in the auto biz. U.S. auto sales hit an all-time high that same year, buoyed by record sales of high-margin SUVs and sub-$2 per gallon gas.

Against this backdrop, and even though the roof was estimated to cost about the same as a conventional design, critics carped that Ford was risking money on greenwashing efforts. Yet when the roof was completed in 2002, Bill Ford stood firm. “This is not environmental philanthropy,” he said at the time. “It is sound business.”

Since then, much has changed. Gas prices have nearly doubled, endangering SUVs, and Ford’s green roof gamble continues to pay back by passively lowering the factory’s energy use for cooling, displacing electric illumination with skylights and reducing costs to filter stormwater runoff.

Elsewhere throughout Ford’s global operations, eco-roof features pioneered at River Rouge – such as day-lighting, rain water capture and cool-white materials that reflect sunlight – have become standard design features. Though the most visible, the River Rouge roof wasn’t the only water-focused effort Ford rolled out in 2002. That same year, the company began a long process to radically reduce the amount of water, energy and other resources used in its manufacturing operations.

From the start, metal-cutting machines were a top target. These computer-controlled devices shape hunks of steel and aluminum into precision auto parts, everything from big engine blocks to fine-toothed gears.

The problem? “It can be a messy process,” explains Sue Rokosz, principal environmental engineer at Ford.

Flood machining, as the conventional process is known, uses a steady stream of oil and water to cool cutting tools. This slurps up huge inflows of fresh water, requiring a lot of energy and plumbing infrastructure to keep flowing. And at the back end, it yields a slurry of oil, water and metal particles that are costly to dispose of and difficult to recycle.

As a fix, Ford turned to a process known as near-dry machining, or minimum quantity lubrication (MQL). The process replaces the stream of oily water with micro-spritzes of atomized oil delivered via articulated arms or hollow drill bits to precisely the point of contact where friction and heat build up.

It’s a small improvement that delivers outsized benefits. By making the switch, a typical manufacturing line – capable of machining roughly half a million parts every year – can lower annual water use by about 280,000 gallons and avoid the consumption of more than 28,000 gallons of lubricants.

What’s more, oily wastewater is all but eliminated and the metal shavings are relatively dry and clean, ensuring a higher share is recycled. Line workers benefit too, with drier, safer work areas, says Rokosz.

Though dry-machining systems cost slightly more upfront, their overall lifetime costs pencil out at 17 per cent less than old-style wet machines, according to Ford data.

While the technology has become Ford’s de facto standard, it can be set up only as fast as new manufacturing lines are built or old ones are replaced. So far, it’s been installed in more than a third of Ford’s 28 powertrain plants, with more on deck to make the switch.

Drop by drop, Ford’s water-savings efforts are adding up. According to its sustainability report, Ford has cut water consumption, per vehicle produced, by about half in the past decade. It is on track to cut per-vehicle consumption to around 900 gallons by 2015, compared with over 2,500 gallons in 2000. That’s roughly equivalent to taking 100 fewer five-minutes showers.

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Check out the original story online, here:
http://www.corporateknights.com/article/tech-savvy-ford-motor-company

 

Corporate Knights

How recovering water from fresh potatoes helps a PepsiCo chips factory turn off the taps | Corporate Knights

For PepsiCo, one of the world’s biggest makers of potato chips, the key to producing the crispiest chips possible is all about driving moisture out of raw potatoes. Paradoxically, though, potatoes are made up mostly of water.

At a Walkers Crisps factory in Leicester, England, PepsiCo is turning this soggy challenge into a water-saving innovation. The goal: to extract so much water from inbound spuds that the factory can go “off grid,” drawing little or no water from public taps. Doing so, PepsiCo hopes, will help save the plant roughly $1 million a year in avoided water costs.

“The idea for taking factories off the water grid came from a simple observation by our front-line teams that potatoes are 80 per cent water,” says Martyn Seal, PepsiCo’s European director of sustainability.

PepsiCo’s efforts to turn off the taps at its Walkers plant in the U.K. is one sliver of a bigger batch of initiatives to make its global operations run with less water. In 2010, the food-and-drink giant, which turned over $66.5 billion (U.S.) in sales last year, released its first comprehensive water report. The effort, similar to initiatives out of rival Coca-Cola, set out details of its water consumption alongside plans on how to use that water more productively.

One of its headline goals is to improve the efficiency of water use – measured by water consumed per unit of production – by 20 per cent by 2015, using 2006 as a baseline. PepsiCo hit this target last year, four years ahead of schedule. Another goal is to strive for “positive water balance” in water-distressed areas. This means for every unit of water PepsiCo uses, it strives to restore, replenish or prevent loss of the same amount or more in the same region. It also aims to provide access to safe water for three million people in developing countries before 2016.

Early on, potato-chip plants emerged as a juicy target for these goals. Making chips is surprisingly water intensive. In a normal year, some 350,000 metric tons of fresh tubers is shipped to the Leicester factory – the equivalent of some 13,000 tractor-trailer loads.

In the plant, potatoes are washed, peeled and sliced. A steady flow of H2O is used at each of these steps. In Leicester, this process demands roughly 700 million litres of water annually, the equivalent of roughly 280 Olympic-sized pools. Yet as crucial as water is while preparing the raw spuds, it’s an unwanted troublemaker thereafter. The thin slices are plunged for a few minutes into oversized fryers filled with oil boiling at 190°C (375°F). Water trapped in the potato slices vapourizes instantly, turning the otherwise inedible starch into an addictively crunchy treat.

In a conventional set-up, the cloud of steam that rises from these vats is vented out into the air. PepsiCo engineers recognized that the vapour represents a huge waste of both water and energy. To recover these wisps of moisture, PepsiCo fit a contraption onto the plant’s exhaust towers. Inside, the hot steam passes over a network of thin, cooled tubes. Moisture from the potato vapour condenses on the cooler tubes for easy collection. The process also recaptures traces of cooking oil from the exhaust. Both the oil and water can be reused. About four-fifths of the moisture that is normally lost is recovered.

Together with systems that recycle about two-thirds of the plant’s wastewater, the steam-recapture project is on track to supply enough water to hit PepsiCo’s goal of drawing zero freshwater in Leicester. The company is already testing the technology at similar sites in Holland and Belgium, part of a plan to extend these practices to other large European operations and, later, worldwide.

A successful pilot in the Leicester plant “will provide us with a technology suite that we will be able to reapply at other PepsiCo plants, particularly in areas of severe water scarcity,” Seal says. “This is an opportunity to realize meaningful cost savings while reducing our impact on the environment.”

Combined with other projects across PepsiCo’s operations, the steam-recapture efforts contributed to savings of $45 million in water and related energy costs last year, compared with the 2006 base when the company began these efforts. By volume, in 2011 it used 16 billion fewer litres of water, compared with 2006.

As much as PepsiCo execs crow about the bottom-line impact of these efforts, they point to strategic benefits too: The company must plan for operating risks that droughts pose to future operations. By 2030, global demand for freshwater could exceed supplies by 40 per cent, explains Dan Bena, PepsiCo’s senior director of sustainable development.

“If this gap is not closed, there will be no business as we know it today,” he says.

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See the original story here: http://www.corporateknights.com/article/tech-savvy-pepsico

Corporate Knights

American Water: How energy shifting earns profits for a water utility | Corporate Knights

If they ever think of water works, most people imagine pipes and pumps – more Victorian age than high tech. After all, in most cities, the big facilities that filter our drinking water and process our waste are out of sight, out of mind. But ask Ron Dizy, president and chief executive of Enbala Power Networks, about North America’s thousands of water works, and he’ll tell you they represent an enormous reservoir of untapped, low-cost energy services potential.

Connected to Enbala’s smart-grid systems, water works is just the first category of big energy consumers that, by rapidly shifting when and how they use electricity, have the ability to help smooth out micro-fluctuations in the grid’s energy flows, displacing the fossil-fuelled generators that now perform this service. What’s more, Enbala’s software could boost renewable energy, too. It provides the kind of grid stabilization needed to help manage the variability of solar and wind energy as these sources make up more of the power mix.

Dizy’s vision is taking shape at a pumping station in Shire Oaks, south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That’s where American Water, the largest publicly-traded water and wastewater utility in the United States, is collaborating with Toronto-based Enbala. American Water has connected the pumps and compressors at its facility to Enbala’s smart-grid software, which can remotely turn the machines up or down to help keep supply and demand of electricity on the regional grid in constant balance. In the industry, this is called frequency regulation.

“Think of frequency regulation as a cruise control for the electric system,” explains Scott Baker, an analyst at PJM Interconnection, which manages a section of the U.S. grid spanning 13 states, plus the nation’s capital. To go a steady 60 mph, your cruise control imperceptibly adjusts gas and brakes to keep your speed constant. “Regulation services do the same thing, adding or reducing power on the grid to keep its frequency in balance,” says Baker. And like cruise control, which adds only spurts of gas or taps the brakes to control speed, regulation services require relatively small adjustments to do their job, with tiny doses of power added or consumed to stabilize frequency.

Conventionally, grid operators such as PJM have paid specialized generators to provide these balancing services. Because frequency regulation must be supplied in real time, all the time, these plants must be designed to be extra rugged, able to ramp up or down very quickly.

To be clear, regulation services are different from the so-called demand response. “You might call them distant cousins,” says Dizy. Demand response works when big energy consumers agree to switch off big users of power, with advance notice, for a few hours, a few times a year, when demand on the grid is greatest. On the other hand, regulation services are delivered on smaller scales, but are required 24 hours a day, every day, for minutes rather than hours, he explains.

Enbala’s solution turns the conventional approach on its head. Its software eliminates the need to generate electricity to balance the grid. It performs the same trick by managing electricity demand in real time. As such, the process can behave like a battery, Dizy notes. Rather than store energy in chemical form, as in a battery, Enbala describes its approach as “process storage,” where mechanical processes – such as filtering water – can be banked in advance of their use.

When, for instance, PJM needs a tiny increase in power use, Enbala requests that the pumps at American Water’s facility boost the flow of water into a holding tank by a few per cent. Or, if PJM needs power use to fall by a fraction, massive air pumps at the facility used to aerate wastewater treatment can be turned down. The adjustments are small – a few per cent up or down, for only a few minutes.

Enbala’s remote tweaking is designed to have no net effect on the water works’ processes. “At the end of the day, we’re just shifting when we use the power,” says Paul Gagliardo, manager of innovation development at American Water. Yet both companies earn a steady stream of payments from PJM for supplying the frequency regulation service.

The benefits for American Water have tallied up quickly. After less than a year working with Enbala, the water company reports that its total energy bill at the facility has fallen by two to three per cent. Happy with the outcome, it is now rolling out the system to 20 or so of its facilities.

Dizy’s company has identified many other industries that can provide regulation services by turning their processes up or down on the fly. “We’re just beginning to scratch the surface,” PJM’s Baker says.

See the original story here: http://www.corporateknights.com/article/american-water?page=show

GreenBiz

Starbucks’ green scorecard: A few full cups, two half empty | GreenBiz

Starbucks' green scorecard: A few full cups, two half empty

Starbucks’ latest self-assessment of the impact of its operations on the globe — measured in terms of energy, the environment, communities and agriculture — reflects healthy progress, moderated by a dash of frustration on some challenging fronts.

Call it: A few full cups and a couple half empty.

The good news is big gains on renewables, energy efficiency and cup recycling. Water consumption rose, however, and use of reusable cups has barely budged.

At its annual shareholders meeting today, Starbucks released its 11th annual Global Responsibility Report, detailing the coffee giant’s performance in 2011. Check out the report at www.starbucks.com/GRreport. I got an advance look at the report, along with the opportunity to speak with Ben Packard, Starbucks’ vice president of global responsibility.

Here’s my take on what’s full, half full, or half empty in the 2011 report.

Full cups

Front-of-store recycling. Starbucks has been chiseling away at a commitment to boost the recyclability of its cold and hot beverage cups for many years. It has set interlinked goals of developing “comprehensive recycling solutions for our paper and plastic cups by 2012” and implementing “front-of-store recycling in our company owned stores by 2015.” (Starbucks has nearly complete recycling rates for cardboard packaging from its receiving, replenishment and other back-of-store operations.)

The goals are daunting: About 80 percent of the Starbucks’ containers leave its stores and, of the share that can be re-captured on site, recyclers have shown little love for the hard-to-reprocess plastic-lined paper cups. (The chain’s plastic cups, made of No.1 plastic, are proving somewhat easier to sell into recycling flows.)

Boosting recycling of paper cups, in particular, has required near herculean efforts — not just putting out a bin in the front of a store, but ensuring that haulers and recyclers in a given market will take the cups and process them into new materials. The chain has piloted recycling in a variety of cities, including New York in 2010, an effort profiled by Jonathan Bardelline in GreenBiz here.

As one of a series of city-by-city trials, Starbucks has run a pilot in Chicago area stores, for example, to take used cups, and remake them into napkins that come back to the store. To lick this problem, the coffee chain has instigated three industry wide Cup Summits, inviting competitors, peers and service providers to collaborate on recycling solutions.

The efforts are showing progress. In 2011, Starbucks saw a big gain in the share of its stores with front-of-store recycling, to 18 percent of company-owned stores in US and Canada, up from 5 percent in 2010. The number of sites where you can drop your white and green cup into a recycling bin now exceeds 1,000.

The fastest progress, Packard said, has been in “big markets where conditions were right in terms of hauling, recycling infrastructure and demand for end products.” These include most of Canada, Chicago, and parts of Southern California.

Energy per store and LEED. After resetting its energy efficiency targets in 2010, the chain made big gains over the past year. Working towards a goal of cutting its energy intensity by 25 percent by 2015 against a 2008 baseline, the coffee giant’s progress is gaining momentum.

It notched an improvement of 7.5 percent, bringing down to 6.29 kwh the average electricity used per square foot per store per month in company-owned stores in the U.S. and Canada. In 2008, that figure started out at 6.8 kwh

The biggest slice of those gains, Packard explained, came from replacing in-store lighting with LEDs.

.The next frontier of efficiency, he explained is wiring up stores to enable real time remote monitoring and control of HVACs, ice makers and other big energy users.

In a related development, Starbucks reported that three quarters of its newly built company-owned stores (121 of 161) have achieved LEED certification. That share is constrained, Packard explained, in part because Starbucks has limited control over the environment of some its buildings it leases space in.“

Renewable energy. Towards a 2015 goal of buying all of its electric power from renewable sources, the coffee chain reported a big increase in the total volume of green power it bought in 2011: 873 megawatt hours (mwh), up from 580 mwh last year.

Yet despite that big uptick, the share of renewables of total power the company reported appears to have retreated to 50 percent, from 58 percent last year.

What gives? Previous data covered U.S. and Canada only, while for 2011 the coffee chain tallied up its global purchase of renewables — a good move.

Half full

Water. In past years, Starbucks has made laudable gains cutting the volume of water used in its outlets by, for example, by shutting off the all-day flow of water through “dippers,” used to rinse kitchenware.

From 2008 through 2010, those efforts cut water use by nearly a fifth, to less than 20 gallons per square foot of retail space per month.

But in 2011, that figure edged back up by 5 percent. While some of the culprit was higher sales of beverages, the main culprit, Packard told me, are revisions to the way pitchers are cleaned.

That’s under close scrutiny for next year. Plus, “We’re working with equipment vendors to see what we can squeeze out there — from water filtration, to ice makers, it all adds up,” said Packard.

Half empty

Re-useable cups. One of the biggest steps Starbucks could take to lower the impact of its operations would be to get its customers to switch to reusable tumblers. Even though its cups are made of 10 percent recycled pulp, the billions of hot beverages it serves annually translate into virgin trees being cut, pulped, cooked and formed into paper — a very energy intensive process.

Yet breaking customer’s cup-to-go habit remains one of the most stubborn tasks on Starbuck’s eco-punch list. GreenBiz first highlighted the slow progress in 2010.

The chain served just 1.9 percent of total beverage sales in reusable containers last year. That figure has barely budged since 2009, when it debuted at 1.5 percent. That same year, the chain set out a goal of serving 25 percent of beverages in “reusable serverware or tumblers” by 2015.

With this report, Starbucks has revised that target: To serve 5 percent of beverages in “personal tumblers” by 2015.

Packard explained that the goal has proven elusive for a number of reasons. Given that about a fifth of sales are consumed on the premises, “We thought we could effectively boost the use of in-store ceramics,” he said, to make up the bulk of that 25 percent goal. Yet that’s proven challenging: Shrinkage from breakage and theft of the mugs is another barrier.

Spurring the use of tumblers isn’t much easier. Starbucks trialed some behavioral incentives to boost tumbler use in Seattle test sites, but found the response lower than it hoped for. Starbucks currently offers customers a dime discount if they bring their own mug.

For 2012, Packard said, the chain is rebooting efforts to encourage the use of ceramic-ware in store. The latest store designs position reusable mugs in plain sight behind baristas, cuing customers to opt for ceramic and accelerating order processing.

Increasing the value of the 10-cent cup discount isn’t something Starbucks is likely to tinker with. “I don’t think it’s the amount, necessarily” said Packard, “Charging 5 cents for plastic bags wasn’t what triggered the big switch there. It was part of a larger behavioral shift.”

Fair point. But I’m not sure Starbucks should let go of that lever. In the case of plastic bag fees, the value of that nickel charge was probably less important than the repetition of the message that the bag comes at a cost.

Makes me wonder: Perhaps a similar tact could drive greater change at Starbucks? Rather than only reward the virtuous behavior of bringing in a tumbler, why not also identify more clearly the cost of each paper cup in an order.

Without changing prices, the chain could, for instance, simply break out a nickel “cup cost” charge on every receipt. It’d be critical to communicate to consumers that this isn’t an extra fee, but an existing cost they can avoid — and then some — by bringing in a tumbler. It’s worth a shot, or two.

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I’ve focused mostly on resource use and recycling here. Starbucks has also reported progress in its coffee farming and processing program, labor and community issues. Here’s the company’s summary of its work:

Youth Action Grants: Starbucks exceeded its 2015 community goal to engage 50,000 young people in community activities by engaging more than 50,000 in 2011.

Coffee Purchasing: Increased purchases of coffee sourced under C.A.F.E. Practices from 84 percent to 86 percent in 2011.

Farmer Support: Starbucks provided $14.7 million to organizations that make loans to coffee farmers, working toward a goal of $20 million by 2015.

Forest Carbon Programs: Continued work in coffee-growing communities in Chiapas, Mexico, and Sumatra, Indonesia, through Starbucks partnership with Conservation International, demonstrating how coffee farmers can adapt to and address climate change while increasing their income.

Community Service: Starbucks put a special focus on community service for its 40th anniversary celebration. In 2011, Starbucks more than doubled the number of hours from the year before with 442,000 hours contributed. Starbucks is working toward its goal of generating one million hours annually by 2015.
Photo of a latte via Shutterstock.com. Infographics courtesy of Starbucks.

NRDC OnEarth

Meet the Change Makers: Tiffany’s Diamonds and Gold Get Greenish Sparkle With Stance Against Pebble Mine | OnEarth

Most businesses hungrily pursue new sources of vital raw materials. Tiffany & Co., by contrast, has begun to forge a different path. In the last several years, the company has taken an increasingly public and vocal stand against an enormous gold mine that has been proposed at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, Alaska. Pebble Mine, as the project is known, is estimated to hold more than $300 billion worth of gold ore and other precious metals.

Publicly listed Tiffany & Co. traces its roots back to 1837, when Charles Lewis Tiffany and John Young set up a “stationery and fancy goods emporium” in New York City. Today, with $3.1 billion in sales last year, the storied jeweler has a very big appetite for gold, diamonds, and similar earth-borne treasures. Yet Tiffany CEO and chairman Michael J. Kowalski sees the near-term costs of squelching a new gold supply as far outweighed by Pebble Mine’s potential risk to the environmental, and in turn, to Tiffany’s brand.

The proposed mine lies within a 40,000-square-mile watershed, filigreed by dozens of pristine rivers and tributaries, that is home to beavers, moose, and caribou, which feed off summertime plant growth. A huge population of bears, as well as the native Yupik people, relies on the annual return of spawning sockeye salmon, a flood of wild fish that ranks among of the world’s largest such runs. Opponents argue the fishery — worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year — and the broader ecosystem could be imperiled by mine construction and runoff of acids and dissolved metals. “I can’t think of a mine that threatens more ecological value in North America than Pebble,” Kowalski said.

Tiffany’s take on mining issues has evolved over a two-decade span that roughly coincides with Kowalski’s tenure, during which time the company has faced the overlapping crises of blood diamonds and conflict gold. Mining practices in strife- and famine-torn regions have led to grievous human rights abuses, as warring factions fight for access to mineral wealth, as well as environmental damage, such as mercury pollution from small-scale gold-mining operations. Today, the company states flatly that, with respect to mining: “We recognize that some public lands are simply not suitable for mining, and that their value for recreation and conservation is far greater than their value as a source of minerals.”

Michael J. Kowalski

Tiffany’s increasingly visible commitment to sustainability is documented in its first corporate sustainability report, released last month. In addition to advocating for responsible mining, the company has also focused on its retail operations — manufacturing its iconic blue boxes and bags, for instance, exclusively from materials certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Efficiency upgrades and solar panels in its stores have lowered greenhouse gas emissions by more than nine percent per square foot since 2006.

OnEarth contributor Adam Aston recently discussed Tiffany’s evolving approach to sustainability with Kowalski at his office — decorated with photographs of family travels to national parks in the United States and overseas — at the company’s Fifth Avenue headquarters in midtown Manhattan.

Tiffany & Co. depends on mining, yet mining is destructive by nature. How do you decide one proposed project is promising, but another, like Pebble, is not?

It’s difficult for us to make definitive statements about what constitutes responsible mining today. But in a simplistic sense, we’re clear that it’s better to extract minerals from a legacy mine than to threaten a pristine ecosystem. That led us to Rio Tinto’s Bingham Canyon Mineoutside of Salt Lake City. The precious metals used in our U.S. manufacturing come from there as well as from recycled sources.

The mine has been there for 100 years. There are legacy issues, certainly, but today the mine is being managed responsibly. I know Mr. Redford would disagree [Ed. note: Writing for OnEarth’s Community Blog, NRDC Trustee Robert Redford has compared the threat of the proposed Pebble Mine to the environmental damage done by Bingham Canyon Mine]. But it is a worthwhile debate.

Look, we all may not be pleased with the standard of U.S. environmental regulations for mining, but they are pretty good in a global context. The greater concern is mines in less-regulated areas. Isn’t the more positive thing to source from a nearby mine that is monitored than from one that is far away, where we have no influence, and regulations are practically nonexistent, such as in, say, Papua New Guinea?

For those reasons, some have suggested that Pebble Mine would operate using the world’s best practices, including regulation and monitoring.

The argument has been made: “Well, if you really care about responsible mining, you should be a supporter of Pebble because it will be the most responsibly built and managed mine in the history of mining, and it is unfair to tar Pebble with the abuses of past mining practices.” In fairness to the Pebble Partnership (a joint venture between a subsidiary of Anglo Americanand Northern Dynasty Minerals), I want to make this clear: We have no doubt that they would do everything possible to develop that mine as responsibly as they possibly can. And I’m going to presume that the state of Alaska will do everything possible to make certain that happens if the mine goes forward.

That said, we have reached the conclusion — as have many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local Alaska residents — that the risk is simply too great. Despite the best of intentions, the location of this mine is so inherently problematic that it is simply not worth the risk of a catastrophic event. Other jewelers have come to the same conclusion and, like us, signed The Bristol Bay Protection pledge.

Is this is first such position you’ve taken on gold mining?

No. Starting back around 1994, we began receiving a fair amount of unsolicited mail asking us to oppose the New World gold mine that was planned right outside of Yellowstone National Park. At that point, we didn’t have the ability to see into our gold or silver supply chain, nor had our company policy on these issues been developed.

We began making inquiries, and as we learned more we thought, “If the New World mine is built, and there’s a catastrophic failure of the tailings dam, the flood would destroy a good part of Yellowstone National Park. That’s not a good thing for the jewelry industry.” It was that simple. We drew the conclusion that, as leaders of the jewelry industry — not necessarily by size but certainly by reputation — it was appropriate for us to speak out in opposition.

When did you begin to formalize your mining policies?

About 10 years ago, we began to see concerns about gold mining enter the mainstream media. So around 2001, we started making inquiries to the NGO community, saying, “We’re very interested in responsibly mined metals, but what should we do?” The response shocked us because, back then, a lot of NGOs said, “There are no standards of responsible mining yet. We really can’t tell you where to go.”

In 2002, we began working with NGOs like Earthworks to move forward on this issue. Today we abide by a set of core principles around responsible development and operation of large-scale mines.

Tiffany is synonymous with diamonds. How did the crisis of blood diamonds influence your position on mining?

Our experience with blood diamonds certainly raised our awareness about the environmental and human rights risks connected to metal mining. They weren’t remotely on our radar screen when the stories first surfaced. That’s because, back in in the early ’80s, we did not manufacture the majority of our jewelry. We bought it from manufacturers around the world, primarily from Europe, and some from the U.S. We would also buy polished diamonds — not rough unfinished diamonds — from diamantaires* in historic diamond centers such as New York, Tel Aviv, or Antwerp. Because of this arrangement, we had little insight into the supply chain beyond those levels, and quite frankly, little incentive to make needed improvements to our supply practices. [*Ed. note: Diamantaire is an industry term, describing buyers, traders, and artisans who work in the middle layer of the supply chain. Diamantaires buy, cut and polish raw diamonds before they’re set into jewelry to sell to larger wholesalers or retail jewelers.]

So dependency on diamantaires left you with little control over the origin of the gems?

Yes. Then, in essence, we became our own diamantaires. We had also undertaken a separate effort to vertically integrate our supply chain, beginning some years before the blood diamond problem first surfaced. The company was growing rapidly, and we needed to assure the flow of supply of manufactured goods, and later raw materials. We committed to cutting and polishing our own diamonds so that we could buy rough diamonds at the mine head. That gave us better knowledge of where a particular diamond came from.

The horrors of Sierra Leone crystallized this part of the strategy. We knew we absolutely had to be able to identify the country of origin and, ultimately, the mine of origin of as much of our raw materials as we could.

It’s an ongoing process. We’re not all the way there, even today. But we’re confident that over time, for diamonds, we can identify the mine of origin, and attest to the social and environmental conditions at those mine sites.

Many industries have abandoned such vertical integration, arguing that high-volume specialists can be more efficient. How has taking control over your manufacturing process affected your bottom line?

By streamlining the supply chain, we have been able to capture a greater share of the profits typically taken at each step, from mine to trader, from trader to polisher, and so on. The vertical integration has been a strong profit-driver, and it’s also allowed us to try to exercise some leadership on corporate social responsibility issues around the supply chain. For example, we have invested heavily in places like Botswana and Namibia to train diamond setters and polishers. By investing in those communities, we’ve helped create industries that deliver more income than the simple extraction of gems could alone.

We’re probably rather unique, I think, for a retailer. We are without a doubt the most vertically integrated retail jeweler in the world. We make about 65 percent of all our jewelry at facilities here in the U.S., at a site in Westchester County, New York, and another in Providence, Rhode Island. This includes the jewelry we sell around the world — in fact, we’re a net exporter, even to China.

Other industries have established standards — I’m thinking of industry-created definitions of “organic” in the food business. Tiffany has been outspoken about the need for third-party standards for responsible mining. What progress are you making?

We very much believe that if there are to be standards for human rights and environmental practices in the jewelry industry, there must be genuine third-party certification, where NGOs and other stakeholders participate in the establishment of those standards. You saw this with blood diamonds. I think the industry rallied dramatically to correct the problem by creating theKimberley Process [to certify rough diamonds as conflict-free], which I think has largely been a success.

We have every control in place to be certain that diamonds from Tiffany only have Kimberley certificates. Can I make a 100 percent affirmative claim that nothing here has every come through? No one can. And that is, I think, where some of the biggest challenges are, in trying to assure supply chain integrity.

Does this position create tension with the mining industry?

We take great umbrage at criticisms we’ve faced. Some of the pro-mining folks have said of our efforts, “This is all about public relations.” In response, I say, “Hold on. We’ve been concerned about this for almost 20 years. This is not about greenwashing. This is something we’ve been committed to. It’s what our customers want. It’s about the business imperative.”

In fact, we’re pro-responsible mining because we think that’s what is essential for the growth and long-term economic health of the jewelry industry.

TRUTH SQUAD — Checking industry claims with NRDC’s sustainability experts

The prestige of Tiffany’s brand means there is real force behind the company’s efforts to reshape the way jewelry retailers and the broader mining industry are approaching sustainability, says Joel Reynolds of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who directs its urban west program and the marine mammal protection and Southern California ecosystem projects. He also leads the Save Bristol Bay campaign, bringing together a broad coalition of interests opposing the proposed Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, Alaska. In particular, he says, “Tiffany has a unique ability to draw attention to [Pebble Mine].”

As Tiffany turned up the volume on the issue, other major retailers such as Walmart and Target — which sell high volumes of lower-cost gems, gold and other jewelry — have taken notice, says Reynolds. This is leading to a process that he believes will improve industry practices and lead other major jewelry retailers to sign on to the The Bristol Bay Protection pledge, as Tiffany has done. At the core of the issue, Reynolds said, is the question of whether the mine can be built and operated without significant risk. “Under comparable hydrological circumstances, 93 percent of similar mines in the U.S. have failed to meet the standards they commit to in their original environmental impact assessments,” he notes, pointing to a 2006 study of water-quality problems at hard-rock mines.

Key state and federal deadlines for Pebble’s developers to submit permit applications for the mine were originally set for this year, but have been pushed back to 2012 and 2013. This suggests opposition to the project is getting traction, Reynolds says. Outside Alaska, the mining reform organization EarthWorks has successfully lobbied more than 60 jewelers to take the “No Dirty Gold” pledge, which would apply to the Pebble Mine. Tiffany & Co. is a long-time signatory. Target is the most recent retailer to sign on, in March of this year.

By taking this voluntary pledge, jewelers agree to abide by The Golden Rules of responsible mining: to ensure that toxins, such as sulfuric acid, don’t contaminate the land, water, and air, and that workers rights and labor standards are respected. Still, critics charge that until a third-party certification system for gold mining exists, efforts to clean up the industry will remain piecemeal and difficult to verify. — Adam Aston

Please view and comment on the original story here — the clicks help my freelancing goals. http://www.onearth.org/article/meet-the-change-makers-tiffany-jewelry

NRDC OnEarth

Meet the Change Makers: Steering Ford Toward Sustainability | OnEarth

A focus on efficiency helps Ford pull away from the Detroit pack. Executive Sue Cischke explains how.

In the long history of U.S. automakers, green strategy and profitability have rarely gone hand in hand –until, that is, Henry Ford’s great-grandson made them a centerpiece of his tenure as the company’s president and CEO. But by 2006, in the face of larger woes in the U.S. auto sector, Bill Ford had to step down from day-to-day management of the company (he now holds the title of executive chairman). Just two years later, in 2006, Bill Ford’s green vision looked cannily prescient. With gas prices spiraling skyward that summer, U.S. drivers stampeded away from gas-guzzlers. Soon after, the financial crisis leveled the economy, and car sales collapsed. Unlike its Motown rivals, Ford was able to steer clear of bankruptcy, thanks in large part to savvy financial moves by Bill Ford’s successor, Alan Mulally.

Today, with auto sales looking up again, Sue Cischke (pronounced SIS-key) believes that extending Ford’s commitment to green corporate practices and energy-efficient vehicles will help it outpace global rivals. Cischke entered the auto biz as a mechanical engineer at Chrysler in 1976, in the aftermath of the Arab oil embargo and as high-mileage Japanese imports began to fundamentally reshape the business. These days, she is Ford’s senior-most executive focused on environmental strategy, reporting to CEO Mulally as group vice president, sustainability, environment and safety engineering. One of her top responsibilities is steering Ford’s long-term vehicle development, a vital part of helping the company meet its commitment, unique among its peers, to cut the greenhouse gas emissions of all new Ford vehicles by 30 percent by 2020 (based on a 2006 baseline).

OnEarth contributor Adam Aston recently caught up with Cischke in Detroit to hear how Ford’s green push is unfolding.

Discussions about automakers going green tend to focus on vehicles. But Ford’s been pushing sustainability in its internal operations, too. How do you measure that?

We recognize that our manufacturing operations, in terms of energy use and the materials we consume, have an environmental impact. So our strategy includes increased energy efficiency in both our products and our manufacturing.

Since 2003, we’ve seen energy consumption at Ford’s factories around the globe fall by 29 percent. We’ve won a series of Energy Star awards from the EPA recognizing these efforts. We’ve undertaken countless steps, from small to big, to make these savings. On our assembly lines, for example, thepneumatic tools used to assemble cars have been made smarter, so that they power down quickly when not in use. We’ve also upgraded factory heating and lighting systems. And at some of our paint shops, we’re also converting fumes into fuel to make electricity.

Water is another concern. From 2000 to 2008, we have reduced our water usage by 56 percent. At our Cleveland plant, for example, a program to lower the amount of water used in the casting process, together with efforts to filter and reuse water thoroughly, cut fresh water use by 35 percent in 2009, on top of a 27 percent reduction the prior year. Each year, that’s saving the plant more than $1.2 million in city water costs alone. Worldwide, those kinds of efforts have saved more than 9.5 billion gallons of water at our factories. And we work aggressively to recycle the water in our plants for reuse in manufacturing.

And what about your vehicles?

Ford’s largest environmental impact comes from our products, which is why we have made the commitment to increase fuel efficiency and cut CO2 emissions in every new vehicle we produce. Ford now offers 12 cars, trucks and utility vehicles that lead their segments in fuel economy, including four with certified ratings of 40 mpg or more.

At the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, Ford announced an ambitious range of electrified vehicles. What green technology do you see as having the greatest impact?

In a car, to eke out mileage improvements, it’s about much more than the engine. It’s looking at every component as well as overall design, looking for ways to improve efficiencies. We call it paying attention in exquisite detail. It’s like going on a diet: to lose weight, you can’t just cut down on desserts. You’ve got to exercise more. The change needs to be comprehensive to last.

In the near term, I think Ford’s EcoBoost technology will have the biggest impact because it is an affordable fuel-economy technology that we will offer across most of our lineup. The centerpiece is a four-cylinder engine that delivers the power of a six-cylinder design, boosting gas mileage by up to 20 percent and reducing CO2 by as much as 15 percent. We use turbochargers and direct injection of the gasoline at higher pressures to help achieve these gains.

The approach makes other improvements possible, too. A smaller engine is lighter, so we can downsize other parts on the car — smaller brakes, lighter power-steering motors, and less rugged transmissions, for example — without sacrificing performance.

You’ve said that improving the efficiency of Ford’s entire product line with steps like EcoBoost — rather than the development of a particular advanced hybrid or electric technology — will be the company’s biggest impact. Why?

Because we developed EcoBoost and related design enhancements at a time when the industry was throwing out attention-getting, high-tech prototypes like EVs and plug-in hybrids. Those are important technologies, but will sell in small numbers for some while. We wanted a solution that was more holistic and mainstream.

It doesn’t have the same pizzazz, but because this [EcoBoost] technology will make its way into nine out of 10 of our models within a few years, most of the cars we sell will have the option to be up to 20 percent more fuel-efficient. We are adding more EVs and hybrids too.

In the near term, selling larger numbers of more efficient, affordable gasoline engines will have a bigger impact in reducing CO2 than the much smaller volume of electric vehicles.

In July, President Obama announced a landmark agreement with the auto industry to boost average fuel efficiency to 54.5 miles per gallon, for the model year 2025. In talks with lawmakers, car manufacturers have long fought to stop, delay or reduce such an increase, as they did during recent negotiations. For all the talk about greening cars, why has it been so hard for industry to change its tactics?

We look at affordability and higher mileage goals and realize we can’t just force certain technology onto consumers. When we started the first serious push for fuel economy back in the ’70s, consumers were disappointed with cars that were so underpowered they could barely get out of their own way.

That said, much has changed. In the past, the government would throw out a new mileage number and the industry would say, “No,” and the relationship was much more adversarial.

Today, we recognize efficiency as a strong reason for consumers to buy a Ford. It’s a competitive advantage for us. We are committed to improving the fuel efficiency of every new product we bring to market, but in terms of regulations, we still believe the agencies setting standards need to understand there is not a single technology solution, and that the technology advances we employ must remain affordable for car buyers.

In your role, how do you make sure that the company isn’t just paying lip service to sustainability but is getting actual, measurable results?

The thing is, the company that figures this all out is going to be the most successful. That’s a powerful incentive to get the strategy right. It’s easy for a company to project a vision and talk about the future. We’ve found it more useful to do what we need to do, and then talk about it.

Frankly, with all the noise out there about the financial troubles in the auto sector in recent years, it’s been hard for our green offerings to get the attention I think they deserve.

Our momentum is building. We’ve had a highly successful launch of our EcoBoost technology. The Escape Hybrid SUV has been on the market since 2004. The Fusion Hybrid joined the line up in 2008. And we recently announced we are bringing a new hybrid, a plug-in hybrid, and two all-electric vehicles to market within the next two years.

What does the future hold for Ford’s lineup — will it be all-electric?

It’s important to recognize that there is room for an entire range of technologies, but in terms of electrified vehicles (EVs), we see a stronger future for hybrids and plug-in hybrids. A plug-in hybrid can be charged overnight and run on batteries until they’re depleted, before switching over to a gas engine.

If I look into a crystal ball, we’re looking for two breakthroughs: battery costs have to come down as more EVs are sold, and we’re looking for new, better battery technology that will help increase driving range. Without both of those, I’m not certain whether drivers’ concerns about running out of battery power can be overcome for EVs that don’t have a traditional engine as a backup.

That’s why we’ve also focused on charging infrastructure, improving both charging speed and encouraging the development of more sites where drivers can re-charge outside their homes. We expect most people will charge at home, but we also believe consumers will become more comfortable with the concept of electric vehicles when there are a lot more places to plug them in.

In a company with some 160,000 employees around the world, simply delivering the message that sustainability is a priority seems daunting. How has Ford done that?

Our CEO Alan Mulally saw my background and appointed me to head up sustainability. Given that I started out as an engineer, his decision reinforced that the sustainability factors are woven into the earliest stages of our design process all the way through manufacturing.

Day to day, one of the ways we keep the organization’s many moving parts in sync is via a sustainability mobility governance group, which includes senior executives in charge of developing new products, R&D, marketers and others. The issues we evaluate and prioritize there help guide Ford’s highest, board-level discussions of automotive strategy.

Sidebar: Truth Squad

Checking industry claims with NRDC’s sustainability experts

Alone among its Motown rivals, Ford outran bankruptcy during the fiscal crisis. For this and for developing a genuinely greener lineup of hybrids, electric vehicles and higher mileage cars, Ford deserves praise, said Roland Hwang, NRDC’s transportation program director in San Francisco. For example, under CEO Alan Mulally, Ford has re-geared its product offering to emphasize fuel-saving options across more of its offerings. In mid-September, it ended production of the Crown Victoria sedan, a fuel-economy laggard that averaged just 16 mpg in the city.

The broad shift has proven Ford can make money selling more efficient, in some cases smaller, vehicles, said Hwang. “Ford’s return to profitably this year has been impressive,” he said, and unlike past years, “earnings weren’t driven by pickups or SUVs.” Yet this fiscal resilience cast the company in a peculiar role: as de facto leader of the automotive industry’s opposition to the White House’s push for higher mileage standards. With the federal government holding about one-third of GM stock, and nearly a tenth of Chrysler’s, Ford emerged as the industry’s flag carrier.

In May, Mulally personally lobbied Washington lawmakers to bar California from setting higher standards independent from federal rules. And behind the scenes, Ford’s top lobbyists led a push to soften the new standard, known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE). “These lobbying efforts run counter to its progress with greener vehicles,” said Hwang. In early July, the auto industry and the Obama Administration settled on a figure of 54.5 mpg by 2025, up from around 30 mpg today. A month later, Ford responded to the tougher rules with a plan to join forces with Toyota, its top international rival, to co-develop gas-electric hybrid systems for SUVs, pickups and other light trucks. Under past mileage rules, this so-called light truck category has been granted loopholes that tighten under the new standard.

There are competitive reasons for the tie-up too. The world’s other two top auto markets — China and Europe — are pushing towards mileage standards more stringent than proposed U.S. rules.  Adds Hwang: “Ford knows there’s a solid business reason to be ready sooner than later with high mileage solutions.” — Adam Aston

URL for the original story: http://www.onearth.org/article/change-makers-ford-sustainability

GreenBiz

Why a Former GE CSO Is Taking the Plunge to a Water Startup | GreenBiz

After more than two decades working his way up the ranks at GE, Jeff Fulgham took a hard look at his past achievements in the water business, and looked out ahead its future prospects. Worsening water shortages and rising water prices in ever more regions, he concluded, all meant that the typically sleepy world of water was about to start roiling.

As Chief Sustainability Officer at GE Power & Water, there were plenty of ways to tap into the opportunity. But Fulgham, 52, saw another option. In mid September, he started as employee No. 3 at Banyan Water, a San Francisco-based startup that is barely a year old. He enters as the company’s chief sales officer.

A well-connected industry insider, Fulgham is tasked with scaling up a young business and guiding a team of decades-younger MBAs to build a new kind of water business. The move comes as a surprise to many in the business — it’s only the second time Fulgham has left a company. And with retirement on the horizon, staying at GE promised a future of steady compensation, healthy options and a comfortable pension.

“It’s a challenge to walk away: GE’s been fantastic. And I’m not much of a job jumper,” Fulgham reflected last week, when I caught up with him in New York City. In town for Climate Week NYC, Fulgham spoke on a panel titled “The Energy-Water Nexus” which I moderated.

In the end, the challenges of building a business from scratch won out. Compared with the pipes, pumps and chemicals approach that Fulgham knew at GE Power & Water, Banyan’s model is more 21st century, more Silicon Valley. Founded by CEO Tamin Pechet and backed by Catamount Ventures — where Pechet was until recently a principal — the company isn’t focused on developing its own technology. Instead, Banyan is buying up specialist companies already at work in the market.

Banyan then will scale up and customize those services into a comprehensive suite it can offer to big enterprises — such as universities and corporate real estate managers — looking to cut their water use, streamline billing, and lower costs.

“The idea is that we can pull in great little companies, and bring them together into one larger, more efficient, durable company, making them the part of a much stronger whole,” said Fulgham.

Typically, the experienced companies Banyan is evaluating have great technology but are hamstrung by a lack of capital, said Fulgham, and thus face a hurdle moving beyond their home markets. Banyan hopes to help, with capital, plus sophisticated sales and support systems.

“It’s a business model combining technologies and services in a field that, five years ago, probably wouldn’t have worked,” he said. “The market is ready now, though.”

“In drought-stricken areas like Atlanta, in Texas, and in California, water prices have risen by five or even ten times in the past decade. This makes new business models possible,” Fulgham said.

Not surprisingly, Banyan’s initial focus will be water-starved stretches of the southern half of the United States. Fulgham is understandably cautious to say too much about Banyan’s strategy just now, given that it is about to unveil its first acquisitions.

He offered the example of a hypothetical Texas university, facing diverse water challenges, including scores of bills for different sites, aggregate water fees in the million-dollar range, and scant knowledge of just how much water was flowing to which facilities.

To help this university get a handle on its water use, one of Banyan’s first offerings — there are more in the pipeline — will install a smart-grid style network of sensors and controllers that deliver real-time data on how much water is going where and when, notifying managers if flow rates spike at a given sensor, indicating a leak.

For the university grounds, Banyan could install state-of–the art irrigation management software that knows when to delay watering – by knowing not just when its raining, but able to use weather forecasts to delay today’s watering if rain is due tomorrow.

To finance these retrofits, Banyan aims to adapt a model used in the power sector by energy services companies, or ESCOs. The approach pays for efficiency upgrades by using the savings freed up by the retrofits to finance their purchase. This allows a client to pay for improvement from operating budgets, rather than as a capital expenditure.

But why “Banyan,” I wondered? Banyan trees, Fulgham reminded me, have adapted to thrive even in arid climates by sending out aerial roots penetrate the round, vastly extending the tree’s reach to soak up moisture. “We’re hoping to do the same thing: reach out to small companies, and connect them into a stronger, more successful whole,” he explained.

Photo CC-licensed by Jeff Howard.

NRDC OnEarth

Meet the Change Makers: The New Pepsi Challenge | OnEarth


Can a company making sugary drinks and salty snacks for more than a century modernize for an era when health and sustainability matter? Image by Tom Kelley

Bringing sustainability to the soda and snack food aisles

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of OnEarth Q&As with business leaders who are transforming their industries.

Since the days when Pepsi challenged Coke to a long-running public taste-off, the cola wars have receded to a quaint memory. PepsiCo has since grown to nearly twice the size of Coke, selling a more diverse line of products. The company based in Purchase, New York, posted sales of $57.8 billion in 2010, but just half of its revenue comes from beverages: Pepsi Cola, Mountain Dew, and Gatorade are its top-sellers. The rest? Those salty snack foods common at picnics and lunch tables, including Lay’s potato chips, Doritos tortilla chips, and Fritos corn chips.

In recent years, PepsiCo has also worked to distinguish itself from its archrival with a more prominent focus on corporate sustainability. Under CEO Indra K. Nooyi, the company has defined its five-year mission, dubbed Performance with Purpose, as “delivering sustainable growth by investing in a healthier future for people and our planet.” On the ground, this has translated into investments in renewable energy, packaging reductions, and company-wide efforts to cut the use of energy, food commodities, and water. Those initiatives have already saved nearly 20 billion liters of water since 2006, according to PepsiCo’s most recent assessment. Pumping and treating less water has helped trim energy use substantially, too, because moving less water means using less electricity and fuel to power factories. While PepsiCo won’t reveal a dollar value on these savings, they run into the hundreds of millions.

The successes haven’t insulated PepsiCo from environmental controversy, however. The trash flow from billions of plastic bottles and the private sale of public water resources ignited public ire a few years ago and continues today. In March, PepsiCo unveiled the first fully recyclable disposable beverage bottle made from plant-based materials that don’t compete with food crops. The news won praise from green groups, including NRDC. It came just a few months after the company’s Aquafina brand was given a “D” for transparency by the Environmental Working Group in its Bottled Water Scorecard.

OnEarth contributor Adam Aston recently spoke to Dan Bena, senior director of sustainable development at PepsiCo. A 27-year veteran of the company, he is active in international water issues, having worked with the United Nations CEO Water Mandate and the World Economic Forum, among others, to chart a course toward worldwide water sustainability and security. He opened up about the environmental challenges the snack food giant faces.

Daniel Bena

You’re trying to curb water use across the company. How is PepsiCo changing the way it operates to meet that goal?

In 2009 PepsiCo became one of the first large companies to publish public guidelines recognizing water as a human right. This was just before the United Nations General Assembly did likewise. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback, even from non-governmental organizations that wouldn’t have had much time for PepsiCo before then, praising that step as an important line in the sand to draw.

 

The challenge we face now is to embed those values in our day-to-day operations, and to push them out to our suppliers and customers. To do so, we set out a few specific goals focused on water. Within our own beverage and food factories, we aim to improve our water-use efficiency by 20 percent by 2015, from a 2006 baseline. In fact, we’re already at 19 percent, so we hope to hit that goal very soon, four years early.

Second, we’re aiming to have positive water balance in water-distressed areas. Last month during World Water Week, an annual global summit of water experts in Stockholm, we published a joint report with The Nature Conservancy assessing the benefits of watershed preservation and restoration in five global communities, to help us and others learn better practices for protecting watersheds.

Lastly, we set a goal to provide three million people in water-distressed areas with access to safe water, also by 2015.

How do you define and improve “water-use efficiency?”

It’s a measure of the total water used to make a single unit of our product. For example, as a rough global average, it takes PepsiCo about 2.5 liters of water to produce a liter of beverage. It’s really variable though. At our best plants, it’s probably half that, and a few facilities use twice that amount. That’s the opportunity we face: to lower water use at our least efficient plants.

We track our internal water use for drinks by liters per liter of beverage, or for snacks as liters per kilogram of food. Using an analytical method we developed in house, called Resource Conservation, or ReCon for short, our plants around the world have gone through and meticulously mapped streams of water use.

When you do this, you see how water costs add up. Incoming fresh water is expensive to bring into a factory. On top of that, every liter that enters a factory must be treated, processed, and discharged. Each of these steps carries costs. So by reducing the amount of water entering a plant, you reduce those extra steps, too, and the savings compound. Factory managers used to the idea that “water is cheap” suddenly start paying attention. There’s no better way to get their attention than saying: “This can save you money.”

Since its launch in 2009, ReCon water has prevented the use of 2.2 billion liters of water, with a corresponding cost savings of nearly $2.7 million. We’ve also begun extending ReCon water-saving practices to our key suppliers. So far, those partners have scored a collective 22 percent improvement in water-use efficiency, compared with a 2007 baseline.

What else is water used for in the factories other than the actual beverages and food?

Believe it or not, in a beverage plant, one of the largest users of water is the room where the water is filtered. There, frequent backwashing of filters and advanced membranes consume really high volumes of water. Another of the biggest users is what we call “clean in place” or “sanitize in place,” where water is used to douse conveyers, equipment, floors, and rooms, ensuring they’re sanitary before producing beverage. Sometimes, it’s even used as a lubricant to keep conveyor belts flowing.

Are similar water-saving steps underway at PepsiCo’s food plants?

Yes. Few people realize this but producing food is also highly water-intensive. Making potato chips uses as much water as making beverages. There’s a lot of rinsing as potatoes are processed: to remove dirt when they’re peeled; to take off an outer layer of starch so they fry better. Companies talk about taking factories or buildings off the electric grid, but no one talks about taking plants off the water grid. That’s something we’re exploring at our Walkers potato chip plants in the United Kingdom.

As they arrive from the farm, potatoes are 80 percent water. Frying drives out most of that moisture as steam. The Walkers team is developing a process to capture that steam before it goes out a stack and bring it back into the process. It’s enough water, we think, that the plant could operate without taking fresh water from public supplies.

These efficiencies improve PepsiCo’s internal water usage. But what steps are you taking to help the communities you operate in where water is scarce?

I mentioned before that we’re aiming to achieve a “positive water balance” in water-stressed regions. An example can help explain our approach. One of the easiest areas in which to achieve big water savings is agriculture. Globally, farming accounts for about three-quarters of water use. In India, it’s more — about 85 percent. We make a variety of beverages there, and water supplies are widely at risk. To help lower farms’ water use, PepsiCo developed and patented a relatively simple piece of equipment that automates the direct seeding of rice.

Conventionally, rice is planted in a flooded field, where young shoots sit in three or four inches of water for up to six months. Direct seeding shortens this period and cuts water use by about one-third. We estimate that developing and promoting direct seeding lets us give back 5.5 billion liters of fresh water each year that would have otherwise been drawn from wells or surface streams and lakes.

Critics have cried foul over the idea of selling bottled water in low-income countries. You’ve argued that they’re missing the point — that water is sold anyhow, often at unfair rates in those markets.

There’s a misconception that poor people cannot and should not pay for water. The reality is that in many cases they do pay for water: the trouble is they often pay high prices for poor-quality water. Delivering safe, clean water at a fair price is something that can help close the health and poverty gap between consumers at the “base of the pyramid” — the poorest half of the world’s population — and the developed world.

This relates to PepsiCo’s third goal I mentioned: improving access to fresh water for three million people by 2015. To hit this goal, we’re working with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and Water.org — which is the merger of Water Partners International and Matt Damon’s H2OAfrica.

The PepsiCo Foundation provides funding to assist a variety of Water.org projects. Under the WaterCredit Program, the money is distributed in microloans, on the order of $120 per loan, and used to build household sanitary facilities or to improve access to fresh water. The loans go almost entirely to women, and repayment has been close to 100 percent. Any global bank would be envious of those kinds of returns.

Earlier this year, we became the first private sector donor to the Inter-American Development Bank’s Aquafund. With our $5 million donation, the plan is to “lift and shift” the WaterCredit model from India to Latin America, and to deliver safe water to 500,000 people there by 2015.

Our third partner is the Safe Water Network, a not-for-profit that PepsiCo founded with Paul Newman’s charity and others who saw the need to bring people safe water. This work is focused on Ghana, India, and Kenya.

Some argue that the nature of the water crisis — its very scale and stubbornness — make it a poor match for corporate efforts. How do you reconcile PepsiCo’s reach with the scope of the challenge?

It’s true that water crises are enormous — so much so that no single entity can solve them alone. That’s why all the key players — governments, NGOs, academia, individuals and, yes, industry — must collaborate on the solutions. Recognition is the start of a long journey to help improve the situation. Commitments are the next step.

At PepsiCo our challenge now is to formalize those efforts, test their success and nurture the best of those practices across our business units around the world. It is a daunting process. But our efforts together with those of others — I think of it as a divide-and-conquer approach — can help achieve steady, small steps.

So, do companies have a role in protecting water? Not just a role, but an absolute obligation.

Sidebar: TRUTH SQUAD

Checking industry claims with NRDC’s sustainability experts

PepsiCo has been in the middle of more environmental and health controversies over the past decade than at any time in the century since it patented the recipe for Pepsi-Cola. In recent years, its Aquafina brand of bottled water came under fire. Today, the waste caused by the beverage industry, as well as questions about the commoditization of a public resource, persist as lighting-rod issues. Health is another knotty challenge. Concerns continue to mount over the role of sugary drinks as childhood obesity and diabetes rates skyrocket.

While some companies have shied away from acknowledging such problems, PepsiCo has responded with a range of industry-leading efforts. “Does one praise a company making an unsustainable product such as bottled water? I don’t know,” says Jonathan Kaplan, an NRDC senior policy specialist in San Francisco. “But there’s no question that they’re forward thinking on these issues relative to their competitors.”

For example, in 2009, the company conducted a life-cycle assessment  to gauge the environmental impact of its Tropicana orange juice line and published the results in the New York Times. “Many companies spend time doing LCAs, but they rarely make the findings public,” says Kaplan. Likewise, its public focus on developing plant-based plastic bottles, recycling, and greener operations boost the pressure on its competitors to follow suit, Kaplan adds.

Water use is another area where PepsiCo is leading its peers, Kaplan says. “Food manufacturers, in general, are closer to recognizing that we’re headed toward a future with finite resources, where water, grain, and other inputs are less available and more expensive.” By this measure, the company’s efforts to curb water use at its plants gives it an edge — and just might drive competitors to do likewise. “Companies that figure out how to become part of the solution will have an advantage.” — Adam Aston

URL for the original story: http://www.onearth.org/article/change-makers-new-pepsi-challenge