"Hurrah!", shouted the green world, as the neonicotinoid pesticides blamed by everybody (except their producers and their political allies) for the worrying decline in bee numbers.
Bans work. Some major environmental problems have been pretty much fixed by banning the substances involved:
The Montreal Protocol banned the use of CFC refrigerants, leading to a stabilisation and slight closure in the hole in the ozone level.
The ban in leaded petrol has been credited for great improvements in local air quality - and even for the steady reduction in violent crime which has occurred since the ban.
Restrictions on DDT use have been attributed to the rebound in Bald Eagle numbers in the US (although eggs shells remain thin). A ban in lead shot fishing weights led to a massive increase in swan numbers in the UK.
What is inevitable, however, is that those threatened by a ban (and those who are against any environmental protection as a 'cost' to business) will resist, producing their own research to prove that, in the memorable title of a book on the subject, "toxic waste is good for you." This happened in response to the call to phase out DDT in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and it is happening in the neonicotinoid ban now.
This economic barrier is bunk as bans lead to innovation which is good for the economy. We still have fridges despite the CFC ban. Non-toxic 'sharkskin' anti-fouling paint was developed in response to a ban on toxic TBTs. So we shouldn't listen to the voices of 'no change'.
You don't have to wait until international authorities act, of course. Many organisations run black and grey lists of undesirable chemicals and other materials. Black listed substances must never be used, and whoever proposes a grey list chemical must make the case why it should be used over alternatives. This pre-empts legislation and makes sure the company is ahead of the curve. Some companies have added green lists of preferred chemicals too.
InterfaceFLOR deleted quite a number of carpet tile lines because of the flame retardants required by the other raw materials. The company sees ruling out toxic materials as a drive to innovate and maintain competitive advantage, so they're quite gung-ho about it.
So, over to you. What would you ban, if you could?
Years and years ago I was doing some consultancy work for the producer of a really good green product - one which managed to substitute benign natural materials for a highly aggressive and dangerous chemical. Our project was largely technical, but my main contact, the Business Development Manager, was constantly complaining about his difficulty in selling the product beyond 'The Green Niche'.
The product was sold in bog standard white plastic bottles adorned with a black and white label which looked as if it had just come out of a cheap inkjet printer, because it just had. Across the label were the words "ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY" in crude bold lettering with the actual function of the product in a smaller font underneath.
I ruminated on this for a while and put together a presentation for him (for free = mistake) based on some academic work about the development of green markets and the barriers to the mainstream. The conclusion was that mainstream customers saw 'green' as the third or fourth 'button' when making buying decisions, usually after performance and price. I recommended they promote the health & safety benefits of the product above the 'environmentally friendly' tagline as their target customers take their employees' safety very seriously - and get them printed properly.
The BDM nodded his way through my talk and said "I couldn't agree more. That's what we've been doing for years."
In my naiveté, I didn't yell "No it isn't! That's your problem! Your product might be great, but it looks like complete crap!"
It would have cost peanuts to get the labels redesigned and professionally printed, but the BDM preferred to keep blaming the buyers at his prospective customers for 'not getting it'. Nothing changed and the product failed to break into the mainstream.
The lesson here is the same one I preach about using Green Jujitsu to engage with employees - you MUST take the blinkers off and put yourself in the other guy's shoes. You may be massively proud of your green product or service, but outside the green niche, 'green' is seen as one of a number of attributes rather than the prime one.
If you want to break into the mainstream, you've got to compete on performance, price AND planet. If you find yourself blaming the people you expect to buy the product, you're on a hiding to nothing.
Last Friday I popped into a high street stationers to pick up some printer paper. They only had two packs of recycled paper and both had split crumpling some of the paper inside. None of the non-recycled paper had suffered the same, being in waxier wrapping. I asked an assistant whether they had any other packs and she said no, but that the packing on these was completely inadequate. She offered me a discount, which I took.
But this really annoys me. Green must not mean being offered inferior goods or services - especially from a big brand such as Xerox. There is no point whatsoever in lightweighting packaging if it doesn't protect the contents properly. A complete waste of time, effort and resources.
My dad often tells a story about a senior manager he used to work with who had three trays on his desk "In", "Out" and "Too Difficult". I am always reminded of this when I see sustainability staff dance around issues that they know they should really be addressing, but seem too difficult. There's always an excuse for ignoring these elephants in the room - outside our control, something for the next iteration of the strategy, we're too small to influence that etc, etc. At least my dad's colleague was being honest (if tongue in cheek).
The guys who get do sustainability properly - say InterfaceFLOR, P&G or Marks & Spencer - do it properly. They deliberately identify what the big issues are and attack them head on - no excuses. Washing powder's biggest impact is the heating of water in washing machines, so P&G formulated a product, Ariel Excel Gel, which washes in virtually cold water. InterfaceFLOR have started to build a circular economy around carpets as this is the only way they can make their supply chain sustainable, and M&S have built a supply chain for recovered polyester fibre because there wasn't one before.
If there's an elephant in the room, these guys reach for their elephant guns.
Yesterday I was delivering workshops at the Get It Sussed event in Gateshead. While for some the highlight was hanging around in the foyer with a rather sullen looking Little Mix showing no X Factor whatsoever during a fire alarm (their dark lord, Simon Cowell, was said to have been spotted as well), I was rather more starstruck by the keynote speech from Craig Sams, founder of Whole Earth Foods and Green & Black.
Sams tells a great story - from his parents growing up in the dust bowl in the 30s (flour companies started producing prettily decorated sacks as a form of marketing as it was standard practice for desperately poor farmers to upcycle them into clothes for their children) through the hippy entrepreneur days at Whole Earth to his more recent work on Green & Blacks and biochar. I took the following points away:
We are (or should be) all pioneers in this game. This takes resilience, guile and, above all, unrelenting optimism;
The product is paramount - Whole Earth peanut butter is very popular because it has a great taste, Green & Blacks because it is very rich chocolate AND they are both very sustainable;
Branding should be bold - they chose the name Green & Blacks because it was strong, easy to remember and had the hint of environment (green) and dark chocolate (black). Names with "eco" or the like in them were considered but quickly ditched;
Storytelling is a very powerful form of communication - and Sams is a master;
If you are not failing, you are not trying hard enough - he told us how at one point he had bailiffs evaluating how much his bakery was worth, but he managed to pay his tax bill just in time.
It was great stuff and very inspiring - I've heard him tell most of this story before but it was still worth sitting through again.
I love getting away from it all. Leaving all the pressures of modern living behind and getting out on the hills, travelling under my own steam, sleeping under the stars and carrying everything I need - ergonomically designed rucksack, super-lightweight tent, Polartac fleece and hat, Goretex jacket and trousers, vibram-soled boots, laminated maps, LED headlamp torch, iPhone with GPS etc.
Hardly back to nature is it, with all those hi-tech fabrics and gizmos? Of course I could choose to go wearing 'traditional' outdoor clothing (tweed, animal skins?), take nothing with a battery, and try and hunt and gather my own food, but frankly I'd rather be comfortable.
When people ask why environmental concerns are not taken more seriously by the general public, at least part of the answer is that many environmental 'solutions' presented to them are in the form of pious hairshirt austerity, or are presented as such. And the vast majority of people simply don't want to give up the comforts of modern life - can you blame them? Have you ever seen an advert that says "buy our shoes, they're less comfortable, uglier and more expensive than our competitors!"? For good reason...
Unfortunately many of the spokespeople for the 'green movement' doesn't understand this - they simply rant about how people "don't get it". The spiritual benefits of austerity may appeal to a minority, but asking people to give up on the joys of modern living is never going to get traction with the masses.
That's not to say certain 'austerity' measures can't be sold in a positive way:
Insulate your house: lower bills, fewer draughts, more comfort!
Cycle to work: get your exercise en route, save on parking, gym membership and time!
Low energy lightbulbs: lower bills, longer lasting than incandescent!
Second hand books/music/clothes: indulge in the pleasure of hunting for an obscure gem!
But what really works is products and services which are eco-friendly AND highly desirable. Buying MP3 music, ebooks and using movies on demand are all much greener than their physical equivalents - and much more convenient. When I interviewed Peter White, Global Sustainability Director of Procter & Gamble, for The Green Executive, he told me that P&G weren't interested in the green niche, they wanted to sell green to the mainstream consumer - so they had to compete on performance, price AND planet - no compromises. Wise words.
I have always been sceptical of the argument that multi-function devices like smart phones are eco-friendly by avoiding the need for a stack of equivalent individual devices (in this case MP3 players, digital cameras, wrist watches etc). I have an iPhone which did stop me purchasing a voice recorder for the interviews for The Green Executive (there was an app for that), but I already had an iPod, a digital compact camera, a watch etc, etc so the phone hasn't offset the purchases of those devices (although I am less likely to upgrade them in future).
But, for the younger generations at least, this now seems to be changing. They are increasingly living their lives around a single device. To take one example of the commercial impact of this, sales of point and click cameras were down a staggering 30% last year - a fall attributed to the use of camera phones, and no wonder - you take the picture, edit it and upload it to Facebook with just a few taps on that slick touchscreen. Even my dad has started reading the morning news on his phone, and smart phones are said to be the guitar tuner of choice amongst the younger bands.
It is probably just old fogeys like me who have spent long enough in the analogue age to have accumulated so much electronic baggage. The younger generations do not need to have as much physical stuff as we did - whether cameras, magazines or stacks of CDs - and that can only be a good thing. It is also a trend which business needs to take cognisance of - or they could end up in the same dire straits as Kodak.
There's disappointing news from the world of low emission vehicles (LEVs) - while sales of all cars were up 10% last year in the US, alternatively fuelled vehicles (incl hybrids) only rose 2.3%. In the UK, however, road fuel sales were down. This broadly suggests that people are simply driving less rather than investing a premium in a vehicle which would cost less to run overall. But it may also be fear of the new - will that electric car run out of charge half way down the M1?
The relationship between green products of any type and consumers has always been complicated - for example organic food dominates baby food sales but not 'adult food' - we're happy to eat cheap crap ourselves but won't feed it to our kids. There are many reasons for consumers being lukewarm on green products:
Habit/comfort zone
Costs - perceived or otherwise
Perceived low quality
Lack of understanding/fear that a new system will be complicated
I've argued for a long time that it is retail which is acting as a gatekeeper for fast moving consumer goods. Their huge buying power can both drive innovation, ensure quality and keep costs reasonable. The consumer can then trust the retailer to get it right on their behalf.
But what for other sectors? The golden rule is to put yourself in your customers' shoes. If you are aiming for a green niche then you can compromise on performance or price for a very green product. However if you want to go mainstream, you must compete on performance, price and planet.
Of course the ultimate goal is a green product that people deeply desire. MP3s and e-Books aren't marketed as green, but they are - and they sell in their millions. It may be that the auto industry needs to go through another couple of iterations before they hit that level of customer pull for LEVs - after all one technology has dominated the industry for 120 years and that it take some shifting.
When James Dyson invented the bagless vacuum cleaner, the idea didn't come out of thin air. Famously he saw a vortex system for capturing dust at a sawmill and realised it could revolutionise the vacuum cleaner market. From wood cutting to domestic cleaning - the same basic principle could be applied to both.
Most innovation is like this - very few ideas are 'new', but are 'borrowed' from other applications. Sustainability is no exception - ideas cross sectoral boundaries and there is the whole fascinating field of biomimicry which borrows from nature (why use poisonous ship anti-fouling if you can copy how shark skin does it?).
This is one reason why I don't specialise in a particular market - my clients cover transport, chemicals, defence, broadcasting, construction, engineering, health, waste, nature conservation and local government to name a few - because much of the value I bring to those clients is cross-pollinating ideas.
So, if you're looking for inspiration, don't just look inside your company, or what your competitors are doing, but be curious and look further afield. You never know where the next idea might come from.
A week or so ago my other half proudly presented me with a new kettle. "Look!" she said "It's an eco-friendly one!" And sure enough it was slathered in claims it would save 66% energy.
"Mmm", I thought, putting on my electrical engineer's hat (which is admittedly a bit dusty), "A heating element is 100% efficient, the heat capacity of water is constant, the heating time is so quick you won't get significant losses through the sides, so what could possibly be 66% more efficient?"
The answer is, with a flat element and a gauge that lets you see if you have a single cup of water inside, you can save energy by only boiling the amount if water you need. When I explained this to her, she felt she had been conned. We ended up having a long conversation about greenwash.
Here's the evidence as I see it:
For the prosecution:
An intelligent, but busy person (she has a PhD and two small kids) assumed that the kettle itself was 66% more efficient, because she's not enough of a green geek to pore over the details;
The savings are almost entirely dependent on the user (and the user frequently making single cups of tea/coffee);
The kettle hasn't changed much - probably the most significant thing was the sticker on it about energy - now gone;
As flat element kettles are getting more common, anyone could measure out a cup of water. Even with a traditional element kettle, you can use less water with a bit of care.
For the defence:
The labels clearly said that the savings would be down to you being able to use less water;
The nature of a kettle is such that the amount of water is the key factor in energy consumption;
Philips are bringing the water factor to the attention of the user;
The 66% figure came from a DEFRA study, so has third party validation.
So, you, the jury, what verdict would you give? Guilty, or not guilty?
What's the worst mistake you can make when greening your business? The fastest way to bring it to a grinding halt? Kill it for good?
Answer: make your customers take the pain.
Only a small minority of customers will compromise on the quality or price of your product or service in return for green credentials. Most will expect to to deliver on performance, price AND planet. If you can't do all three, they'll find someone who can.
So, if you can't do all three, go back to the drawing board. A dead green business helps no-one.
For years those of us in the green consumer niche have been conscientiously buying eco-products from Ecover, Bodyshop, Natural Collection etc etc - and feeling very self-righteous for doing so. Only problem is, we only represent 5-15% of consumers - the rest are either oblivious to green products or are actively suspicious of them, believing that they'll be expensive and won't work.
To achieve sustainability, we need every company to be a green company and every product to be a green product. There are two routes to this goal. The first is to try to persuade the 85-95% majority of consumers to 'see the light' and start buying green(er) products. Just one problem - go and stand in the middle of your high street or local megamarket, even in these economically straightened times, and watch how much and what people buy - how on earth are you going to change all their minds?
The second approach is to green mainstream products without asking the consumer's permission. Take Procter & Gamble, owners of the Ariel (UK) and Tide (US) brands. They launched a green range of household products in the 1990s but they didn't sell so they withdrew the products. Now P&G are re-engineering mainstream products to deliver on performance, price AND planet. Look at Ariel Excel Gel (aka Tide Coldwater) above - the packaging barely mentions the environment but check out that 15°C on the front - that makes it arguably much greener than the Ecover equivalent. Oh, and it was rated best clothes washing product ever by Which? magazine.
Or take Marks & Spencer who are producing mainstream products made of recycled PET like my umbrella (right). Again, I could have bought this without realising it was an 'eco-product' - it's just an M&S brolly and it does the job as well as any other.
This mainstreaming strategy is clearly the best way to get most people buying greener products. From the consumer's point of view it has a great additional benefit - it forces the producers of such products to deliver on price and performance too as they can't rely on the niche paying a premium price or tolerating mediocre performance. This banishes complacency, drives innovation and brings sustainable products to everyone - whether they want a 'green' product or not.
So, I would argue, the eco-product is dead, long live the eco-product!
From July, Green Academy splits into two streams so there will be two sessions on 6 July:
11:00 BST An Introduction to Green Business - a free taster session covering the business case for sustainability, business and sustainability, a selection of inspiring case studies and some information on The Green Academy. E-mail us to register for the session.
14:00 BST Advanced: Green Products and Services - the sixth in the series covers the power of redesign of products and services. Contents include:
Benign by design - the case for changing products and services;
Understanding the market.
Practical techniques to green your product or service;
Advanced innovations (product service systems, virtual products etc);
Finding green market niches for your business in the emerging low carbon economy.
Inspirational case studies.
The advanced session costs just £45.00 + VAT per person to participate - use the button below to pay by card or Paypal. Contact us to make a BACS payment.
"Gareth's webinars are smart, punchy and thought provoking. His approach shows how sustainability is about achieving commercial advantage and not simply an altruistic gesture. Highly recommended." Graeme Mills, GPM Network Ltd.
"[The webinars] are great value and I would recommend them to both CSR professionals and SME owners." Louise Bateman, GreenWise
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From an environmental point of view, the highlight of my trip to Gaucin has been walking in the oak forests that cloak the steep hillsides of the Sierrana de Ronda. These are of incredible ecological value as the cork and gall oaks support a huge number of species. You can see this most visibly in the number and diversity of butterflies - the most I've seen outside the tropics - as butterflies are a good indicator of biodiversity.
What I particularly like is how integrated agriculture is with this eco-system. The landscape is too steep for agri-business; instead a large number of small farmers have small-holdings where the traditional way still dominates. Pig rearing and cork production work in symbiosis - the oak trees having their bark harvested every nine years and in the meantime the pigs live off the acorns, producing the tastiest meat - which gets a premium price. Periodically the oaks are cleared for fuel - leaving a smattering of trees to prevent erosion - and the land regenerates.
Most eco-systems are under threat from over-use of resources, but the cork oak forests are under threat of falling demand - the shift to plastic corks and screw tops are putting this way of life at risk. I've been trying to think of other examples where falling demand could lead to ecological damage - recycled materials is the obvious answer, followed by finding uses for industrial by-products, but poles from hazel coppice was the only virgin material I could come up with.
Going back to cork, the question is how do we stimulate demand and keep this eco-friendly tradition in business? There are two obvious answers:
Stimulate interest in traditional uses: unfortunately asking consumers to go back to a less convenient product (those screw caps are very handy) or less fashionable uses (cork tile revival anyone?) are only likely to be partially successful at best;
Find new uses for cork: this is a huge opportunity for a business wanting to source a sustainable material. Not only would they be using a natural, low embodied energy material, but they'd also be supporting an important eco-system. There must by myriad opportunities too - anything that requires a shock-absorbing or insulating material.
So, material buyers, designers and product developers, get your thinking hats on and help these fantastic habitats and this traditional way of life.
When I speak in public, I like waving tangible objects (aka 'realia') around to break up the dreaded monotony of Powerpoint slides. At the LloydsTSB event last week I used two different clothes washing products to illustrate some points. The thinking behind the two products, Ecover washing liquid (the picture shows fabric conditioner, but humour me) and Ariel Excel Gel, comes from two completely different perspectives, so I thought it would interesting to share.
Ecover is the archetypal 'green product' and is branded as such with all those trees and blue skies. It is made completely from natural, biodegradable materials in a solar powered factory in Belgium. It is branded green and does its job pretty well, but not as good as a mainstream product in my experience. So effectively Ecover is asking the consumer to accept a compromise on performance in return for a lower environmental impact. The caveat is that it contains palm oil so there are question marks over how sustainable the sourcing of the raw materials is in reality.
Procter & Gamble, who own the Ariel brand, tried the Ecover approach in the 1990s, producing a range of branded green products, but they failed in the marketplace. So instead they adopted a 'no-trade offs' rule - their products had to compete on price, performance and sustainability. They also took a life cycle assessment approach, identifying the energy used in the washing process and the extraction of raw materials as the key issues. The result is Ariel Excel Gel, recently named the best clothes washing product Which magazine had ever tested. Its gel nature means it is compact (ie it uses fewer raw materials) and that the user is more likely measure out the correct amount compared to a powder or liquid. But the big breakthrough is that it can work at 15°C, halving the amount of energy used in washing clothes. It is not branded green - just the 15°C on the front and a web URL for more info on the back.
Which is better? That's a difficult question to answer. Apart from the palm oil issue, Ecover is probably more green (being almost solar, cyclic, safe*), but the user takes the hit in performance, meaning that it is unlikely ever to escape its green consumer market niche. The Ariel product takes an eco-efficiency approach* and it gives the user the opportunity to use less material and a lower wash temperature, but its green credentials are dependent on that consumer behaviour (the temperature dial on my washing machine creeps magically upwards over time). Its excellent performance and mainstream branding means that it is a mass market product, so if that shift in consumer behaviour does happen in practice, Ariel will probably have a bigger positive impact.
* If you want to know the difference between solar, cyclic, safe and eco-efficiency, check this video out.
I started my professional sustainability career in eco-design - making the world greener from the drawing board. This remains the greatest opportunity for a business to go green as the designer has a huge amount of control over the whole lifecycle of the product from materials extraction right through to disposal.
During my two and a bit year investigation into eco-design techniques, I became fascinated by the Russian Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, or TRIZ to give it its Russian acronym. The concept behind TRIZ is that innovation does not come from sudden flashes of genius, but through the application of a number of fundamental principles. These can either be stumbled upon, or, by following TRIZ, worked through methodically until one generic solution fits the particular case. But what got me really excited about TRIZ was the concept of the ideal final result:
The ideal final result delivers the required function while consuming no resources.
Which would, by definition be the ultimate green product, as the product has been reduced to pure wieghtless function. Obviously this is impossible - even telling a joke requires some resources - but to me it is one of those intellectual concepts that provokes ambition and step changes. It is certainly behind the whole idea of servicisation - delivering the required function (eg travel via public transport and/or a car club) rather than a product (owning a car) and the whole digitisation movement (eg replacing travel with teleconferencing, or replacing CDs with MP3 downloads).
Unfortunately I never did secure the funding to develop a 'Green TRIZ' research project, but it would have been fascinating to either filter or generate a set of fundamental green design principles to be applied to get as close as possible to that ideal final result.
It was no surprise to me that Waitrose's "eco-friendly" bags of milk have not sold and, ironically, led to lots of wasted milk. Simple question for Waitrose "Who on earth would buy milk in a bag?". How do you open them without spurting milk over your kitchen floor? Why would someone put up with this to go a tiny bit greener? Just "why"?
Simon Daniel of Moixa Energy, an old college compatriot of mine, has invented these cool USB rechargeable batteries. Moixa's viral video gives you a flavour...
Warning: don't be fooled by the cute sunflower on the cover, or the modest page count, John Ehrenfeld's Sustainability by Designis the most intellectually rigorous treatment of sustainability that I have ever come across.
Ehrenfeld's diagnosis of the earth's problems is that we have become addicted to Having. The addiction analogy is a great one - we want more and more stuff even though we know that getting any of it will not satisfy us for long and only make us crave more. He then uses systems theory to argue that eco-efficiency, corporate social responsibility and (the standard view* of) sustainable development won't get us out of this addiction.
Instead he proffers and deconstructs a new definition of sustainability as "the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on the Earth forever". In particular the word 'flourish' is included to force home the idea that sustainability is not just a lack of unsustainability, but much more ambitious and positive than that. Drawing on the work of thinkers such as Heidegger, Fromm and Maturana, he argues we must move from our addiction to Having to a state of Being. To this we need to disrupt our current patterns of behaviour and he gives a range of examples of how that might be achieved.
The simplest of these is the two button toilet flush. By providing a decision point (high volume or low volume flush?) this product makes us stop and question why would we want to use more or less water and therefore links us (however briefly) to the natural world and the pressures upon it. He calls this disruption of our habits and routine by products 'presencing'. The disruption principle is also applied to the design of organisations and governance structures. Of course Ehrenfeld cannot provide all the answers within a 215 page book, but this work provides a context and springboard for the next generation of sustainable solutions.
Despite the approachable and open writing style, this a challenging read as it covers a lot of ground very quickly and the philosophical and linguistic concepts behind the arguments can be hard to grasp if you are coming to them for the first time as I was. It certainly disrupted my thinking on sustainability and has given me a deeper understanding of the principles - particularly on the consumption side of the coin.
In short: quite brilliant, but be prepared for an intensive intellectual workout!
* I define sustainable development as the process of achieving sustainability (so this work would be part of that process), but Ehrenfeld uses the standard definitions (eg meeting today's needs without compromising the needs of future generations).
There are still places left on my Low Carbon Products & Services Seminar, Harrogate UK, 22 October 2008. Click on the link to see the fantastic deal we are offering in conjunction with the Low Carbon Innovation Network.
"Hurrah!", shouted the green world, as the neonicotinoid pesticides blamed by everybody (except their producers and their political allies) for the worrying decline in bee numbers.
is the most intellectually rigorous treatment of sustainability that I have ever come across.
