The Triple Bottom Line Blog

As fate would have it, during 2007, my wife Mary-Jo and I visited two of the world's more unusual cities: Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and Venice, Italy.

In some ways, the cities are as different as can be. Dhaka is terribly poor, a city of 13 million that has experienced out-of-control growth in recent decades as impoverished farmers flee the South Asian countryside in search of work, filling hastily-built tenement apartments and straining the city's already overtaxed infrastructure past the breaking point. (There are obvious analogies to Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Jakarta, and many other cities in the developing world.)

By contrast, Venice is a little jewel of a city, a tourist mecca steeped in history and filled with museums, churches, palaces, and other mementos from an era when the city was one of the richest and most powerful in Europe. Visitors flock to Venice's luxury hotels, its world-class restaurants, its famous arts festivals (such as the Biennale, which Mary-Jo and I attended), and its narrow cobblestone streets lined with designer shops--Fendi, Gucci, Armani, etc. etc.

Yet Dhaka and Venice have one big thing in common: Both are low-lying coastal cities that have long suffered from periodic flooding and are now threatened with massive destruction due to rising sea levels associated with climate change. As such, they represent the bleeding edge of a problem that will ultimately impact billions of people. With over 60 percent of the world's population living within 100 km of its seacoasts, the problems faced by these two cities will eventually threaten most of us.

And it is sobering to see how difficult those problems are to solve--not only for the people of Dhaka, who live in one of the poorest and least-cared-for nations of the world, but even for the relatively wealthy citizens of Venice, recognized the world over as one of civilization's great cultural treasures.

You've probably heard about the so-called MOSE (Moses) system, an enormous series of mobile floodgates designed to protect Venice from the effects of higher-than-normal tides by sealing off the city's famous lagoon from the rising waters of the Adriatic Sea. (The system has been described and explained in a number of television documentaries that have been seen the world over.) One of history's most massive engineering projects, including 78 movable steel gates, each 65 feet wide, 60 to 90 feet long, and 15 feet thick, MOSE is actually under construction and is scheduled for completion in 2011.

Yet already, just four years after the launch of the costly, controversial project, many environmentalists--including the mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari--are saying that the plan may already have been rendered obsolete by the accelerating pace of global climate change:

Labels: Bangladesh, Climate and Carbon, Dhaka, MOSE, Venice, Water

Ever had the experience of reading a newspaper or magazine article dealing with a topic or an event you have intimate personal knowledge about? If so, I bet you've had the same reaction as me: Surprise and dismay over the number and seriousness of the mistakes and misunderstandings that even good journalists working for reputable publications commit. It's a sobering experience, one that leaves you wondering how many errors riddle all the other articles we read every day dealing with topics we don't happen to know about personally.

An interesting case in point is this story in the current Business Week about a green business skeptic named Auden Schendler. He gains credibility because of the fact that he is a self-proclaimed "convert" to this position, having been a long-time advocate of green business efforts. Schendler is getting a lot of press--including of course the BW article itself--for declaring that environmental initiatives by companies can rarely pay for themselves, let alone boost profits. In particular, Schendler takes a jaundiced view of renewable energy credits (RECs), and the BW article devotes a lot of space to "debunking" the use of such credits.

We don't have a lot of personal knowledge about the cases cited by Schendler (and by Ben Elgin, the author of the BW article), although we'd join some of those who commented online in expressing a bit of skepticism about an article that relies heavily on the experience of a single ski resort in broadly asserting that the eco-business movement is based largely on "little green lies."
More interesting is the reaction to the article from one of the businesses cited in the article, Johnson and Johnson, as expressed on their corporate blog. Here's what blogger Marc Monseau, who works in J and J's corporate communications department, had to say:

Johnson and Johnson wasn't a big part of this article, but having sat through the lengthy interviews that our folks did with Ben [Elgin] (at his urging), I was staggered by how he characterized the company's efforts and how little context he included about all that it has done over the past 30 years to conserve energy and--more recently--to reduce emissions.

Monseau describes some of the corporation's environmental initiatives dating back to the 1970s, then notes:

I was particularly peeved when Ben failed to mention any of this when he pointed out that:

Johnson and Johnson has proclaimed a 17% reduction in carbon emissions since 1990, based largely on RECs. Without the credits, the pharmaceutical giant has seen a 24% increase.

That's true . . . apart from the fact that Johnson and Johnson is not merely a "pharmaceutical" company . . . but it also fails to tell the whole story.

During that same time frame the company increased sales by 372%, bought new businesses and expanded operations throughout the world.

As a corporate PR specialist, Monseau is obviously disappointed that the whole positive story about his firm didn't turn up in the BW article. (By that standard, PR specialists find practically every magazine article disappointing.) But I think the context Monseau offers for the one statistic about J and J that BW chose to mention is really crucial.

At first blush, a 24 percent increase in carbon emissions since 1990 does sound significant. And contrasted with the company's claimed 17 percent reduction, it almost makes J and J sound dishonest or hypocritical. But in fact a mere 24 percent increase in emissions over a time period when the company grew more than threefold is extremely impressive and amounts to a notable reduction in emissions when measured on a per-revenue-dollar basis.

Ben Elgin's elision of that context strikes me as downright misleading. And while this one fact certainly doesn't demolish the article's entire argument, it leads one to question whether the author has a bias, conscious or unconscious, that led him to cut logical corners elsewhere in the piece.

(The bias needn't be an anti-environmental bias, although that would be the obvious assumption. It might just be the "bias" that most writers share for information that is striking, eye-opening, and controversial . . . even if the startling implications might not be quite so newsworthy on fuller examination.)

In this day and age, most people have learned to approach the media with a healthy degree of skepticism. Yet sometimes we let down our guard a bit with stories that take a "contrarian" or "counter-intuitive" perspective, as the Business Week story does, positioning itself as a challenge to the conventional wisdom about green biz.

Fair enough: Conventional wisdom should always be challenged. But even "contrarian" articles deserve skeptical scrutiny. In the months to come, we can expect to see more and more "backlash" articles that attempt to poke holes in the case for sustainable business. They should be tested against the facts just as rigorously as articles on the other side.

Labels: Auden Schendler, Ben Elgin, Climate and Carbon, Greenwashing, Johnson and Johnson, Marc Monseau

Main reason for the sparse blogging recently is that my wife and I have been traveling in Italy and suffering from a full-blown case of Stendahl Syndrome, the condition of psychological and emotional overload caused by exposure to too much beauty in too short a time.

Italy is especially dangerous for people who still remember the slides of Renaissance painting and sculpture they saw in their college History of Art course, since half of the drop-dead-gorgeous images from Janson are likely to be encountered in any whirlwind tour of Rome, Florence, and Venice, inducing the art-lover's equivalent of diabetic sugar shock.

Now that we are home, we are in recovery and beginning to sort out our impressions of the trip. Among other things it was fascinating to observe the environmental attitudes and behaviors of the Italians and compare them to those prevalent among Americans.

Italy is of course a haven for small cars adapted to narrow city streets and scarce parking, from little Fiats and Peugeots to the even tinier Smart car. This is a Daimler-Chrysler product that interestingly enough was originally created by Nicholas Hayek, the Lebanese/Swiss entrepreneur best known for developing the Swatch timepiece empire. (You can see an example on the left in the photo above.)

Equipped with a conventional (not hybrid or electrical) engine, the pint-sized Smart reportedly performs surprisingly well in safety tests, including crash tests. (Nonetheless it is not a good idea to drive a Smart car into a concrete barrier at 70 miles per hour. Click here for a fun comparative video replete with slow-motion images of crumpling metal and flying fragments of glass.) It gets better highway mileage than a Prius but does slightly less well in the city.

The Smart car is expected to be available in the USA starting early in 2008. (It has been sold in Canada since 2004 and is reportedly quite popular.) With a starting price around $12,000, it looks to us as if the Smart car occupies the same business niche once defined by the old Volkswagen Beetle--ultra-cheap, basic transportation (big enough to carry two people and a case of beer, as the saying goes), highly practical for specific applications (i.e. zipping around the city with one passenger and little cargo) while also being stylish and chic in a counter-intuitive way. It's an "environmental" choice not just in terms of fuel consumption and emissions but also in terms of reducing the vehicle footprint--the literal footprint, not the carbon footprint--in a setting where physical space is at a premium.

For my wife and me--dwellers in New York's northern suburbs who are continually depressed over being surrounded by lone drivers roaring through the village streets in giant SUVs and Hummers--the ubiquitous Smart cars bouncing over Rome's ancient cobblestones and tucking themselves neatly into almost nonexistent parking spaces were a cheery sight. Perhaps by this time next year we will begin to see whether enough Americans share our perspective to make the Smart car a viable business proposition in the US market.

In a day or two I'll post some recent news about environmental trends in the world's greatest auto-free city, the magnificent and imperiled Venice.

Labels: Climate and Carbon, Rome, Smart Car

In the aftermath of a conference on sustainable packaging, a group of us were presented with this question:

While Wal-Mart stil obviously lurks as a key driver of many sustainability goals, I'm wondering whether companies have progressed beyond Wal-Mart's directives. In other words, if Wal-Mart were to abandon its Scorecard tomorrow, would brand owners and packaging suppliers continue to move forward with their sustainability goals or would they jump off that bandwagon?

One of my fellow observers commented:

If Wal-Mart were to abandon its Scorecard tomorrow (which it won't), it would have little impact on the sustainability movement overall because manufacturers--large and small--are coming to realize that the principal driver of sustainability is economic.

I agree--with the following proviso. While there's a powerful economic logic behind less-wasteful, sustainable packaging, it is obviously the case that Wal-Mart's packaging edict has dramatically increased the interest in it and accelerated the progress being made on this front.

If Wal-Mart abandoned its initiative, or went in a different direction, it would have a huge impact on packaging simply due to its direct economic clout with its suppliers. When Wal-Mart sneezes, 60,000 suppliers catch cold.

Wal-Mart's packaging guidelines are like a private regulation, the issuance of which has something like the effect of law. It's one thing to acknowledge that pollution equals financial waste, but very few companies would move forward (at least to the degree they have) without the pressure exerted by regulation.

What's interesting to me about Wal-Mart's guidelines, and about the sustainable packaging movement in general, is that they require the active cooperation of the entire value chain, more so than most sustainability issues I have encountered. Wal-Mart is very far down the chain which, in addition to its size and clout, is why its action has the potential to be game-changing, not just for its direct suppliers, but for theirs and theirs and theirs.

Now if the Sustainable Packaging Coalition could figure out how to get Wal-Mart one step further down the chain--to consumers--that would truly change the game. The retailer has just announced that it reached its goal of selling 100 million low impact fluorescent bulbs, and ahead of schedule at that. Imagine if they could figure out how to get customers into the stores around recycling!

Labels: Packaging, Supply Chain, Wal-Mart