9 Benefits Provided by Forests

Thailand is not the only country in the world losing forests. Deforestation is also happening in our backyard. The real estate booming back in the day is to blame.

According to a recent map released by World Resources Institute, the top 10 Counties Losing Forest to Development in the US South. These counties “converted approximately123,000 acres of forest to development over 5 years.”

The 10 counties that are mostly located in the South, are prone to drought and putting forest at risk: Harris (Houston), Gwinnett (Atlanta), Fulton (Atlanta), Wake (Raleigh), Montgomery (Houston), Meckleburg (Charlotte), Bexar (San Antonio), Duval (Jacksonville), Jefferson (Birmingham), Cobb (Atlanta).

Forests provide so many benefits to humanity.

Just to revisit some of the benefits provided by forests, here are the 9 benefits, via CBD: 

1. Forests provide food and a vast array of materials for medicinal, cultural and spiritual purposes, as well as building materials and firewood.

2. They store and purify drinking water.

3. Protect watershed.

4. Mitigate natural disasters.

5. Control erosion.

Flooding and Impact on Businesses

CLIMATE SKEPTICS need to pay attention here. This man, Richard Han, CEO of Hana Microelectronics talks to CNN how the floods impacting businesses. The water is 2 meter (about 2.18 yards) high and you have to get to the industrial park – by boat!

There’s a correlation between deforestation, climate, rainfall. When we talk about Thailand’s worst flooding in half a century, look at the impact on people and business.

Half a century ago, Thailand was not as populated as today. Probably few manufacturing companies set up shops here.

Now is a different story.

Down the chain line, since the beginning of this month Toyota, Nissan and Honda combined are losing 6,000 units/cars a day! If you add this to the overall Thailand’s exports. And calculate its impact deeper down the chain line – how it impacted their businesses around the world – the  number could be really huge!

Check this out.

Deforestation, Thailand Floods and Supply Chain

You think deforestation has something to do with “Thailand worst” floods? Because rainforests affect local weather conditions by creating rainfall.

Between 1945 and 1975 forest cover in Thailand declined from 61% to 34% of the country’s land area. Over the next 11 years, Thailand lost close to 28% of all of its remaining forests. This means that the country lost 3.1% of its forest cover each year over that period.

What happened now is Thailand going through the worst floods in half a century. The floods have disrupted the supply chain of some of the big names, i.e. Toyota, Apple, Ford, etc. For example, Toyota, Honda and Nissan – combined – they’re losing 6,000 units of car production daily since early this month.

Thailand is a big regional hub for the world’s car makers and most are suffering disruption, either because their plants are flooded or, more often, because parts makers have had to close and the supply chain has been disrupted.

The output of Japanese car makers has fallen by about 6,000 units a day because of the flooding. Germany’s Daimler AG said late on Thursday it had halted car production because of the threat of flooding. (emphasis added)

via Reuters

Moreover, Bloomberg reports that “Thailand is the world’s largest producer of hard-disk drives, the biggest exporter of rice and rubber and the second- largest supplier of sugar, according to government data.” So if you total domestic productivity, exports and its global impact down the supply chain – the impact from the floods could be huge. Really huge!

I remember when we were still a kid in Jakarta. Our house got flooded few times. When the city gets flooded, it is like snow days for us. It’s fun when it’s not too much and go on for days. Because we can play around in the thick of water! But things can get messy and people got sick after a few days of continuous rain. So enuf of it.

This flood should be a wake up call for everyone.  There is a price to everything (in life and business). That when you disrupt nature’s natural cycle of cooling system this is what could happen.

Sure by now the Japanese conglomerates may already have learned the lessons from this experience. That there’s correlation between deforestation, climate and rain fall. They do learn pretty quick. It’s about risk management and Kaizen!

The chain is disrupted (in pictures)

Pictures worth a thousands words. My friend sent me pictures of Rojana industrial park, where Toyota and other manufacturers have their plants under water siege – that you can see below the fold..

DuPont Packaging Awards Show Sustainability Drives Innovation

DuPont made the announcement of the winners for their 23rd packaging awards yesterday. DuPont packaging awards dates back to 1986. “The awards is the industry’s longest running, global, independently judged celebration of innovation and collaboration throughout the value chain.”

And welcome to social media! Because I learned about it via @DuPont_ability (their witter account for their sustainability news) and the winners was announced through a global webcast.

BW: Subaru’s Sustainable Drive

via images.businessweek.com

Who knew? All these years, we heard the success of Toyota. But Subaru we hardly hear anything about their success and how they embrace (more like embedded) sustainability to their core of their business.

In a nutshell, Subaru has zero layoffs (despite recession), zero paycuts and zero waste. Practicing sustainability must be good for their business!

Guangzhou’s (China) Innovative Transportation System

Check out this city of Guangzhou, the economic hub of China’s eastern coast, for its transit systems. In a country that have more than 1 billion people, even a city the size of Guangzhou has population in the 10 to 15 million range that equal population of probably some of the big cities in Asia. It is “the fastest growing city in the fastest growing province in the fastest growing country.”

With the kind of population like they have, the city have to offer an integrated transportation system. They’ve got too. Traffic jams is common problems in many of cities in Asia. The streets there are not like here, which is wide and have 4-6 lanes. Over there, you’ll be lucky to find cities that have more than 4 lanes.

4 Ways the Cleaning Product Industry Measured Sustainability and Lessons Learned

The American Cleaning Institute (formerly soap and detergent Association) recently published its first, 2011 Sustainability Report. Didn’t know much about the organization and the work they do. So I interview Brian Sansoni, Vice President of Communication and Membership, for Ecotwist.

In our conversation, we chat about variety of topics related to the industry’s sustainability efforts. We also touched on the history of the organization, lessons learned, product/design/packaging innovation, consumer education and outreach. (We’ll talk more about their consumer education and outreach in another post. Their programs deserve an in-depth look).

According to Brian, the Soap and Detergent Association became “The American Cleaning Institute,” in 2010. Because they want to expand their reach to include ingredient suppliers. In short, ACI is a trade industry association representing producers of household, industrial, and institutional cleaning products, their ingredients and finished packaging, oleochemical producers and chemical distributors to the cleaning product industry.

Many of us might not know that this organization was founded in 1926. They’ve been working on advancing public understanding of the safety and benefits of cleaning products, and protecting the the ability of its members to formulate products that best meet consumer needs – since then. In fact, sustainability has already been at the core (of the Institute) long before “the term” became popular and corporate social responsibility was invented.

In addition, ACI do a lot of work on regulatory, technical, advocacy and outreach work.

Some the household names members, include Amway, BASF, the Clorox Company, Colgate-Palmolive Company, Unilever, SC Johnson, Seventh Generation and more.

Sustainability metrics

ACI realized as there are more groups of people, government interested on how industries operate sustainability, they realized as an organization they needed to put a spotlight on what their industry is doing on sustainability front. Many of the members have been putting up their sustainability operations in and around the companies.

So in 2009, ACI and its members started a pilot project to report on a common set of sustainability-related metrics relevant to the industry for both its consumer packaged goods and raw material supplier members.

Over the course of three years, 20 companies supply data that includes not only companies that make the end products (detergent, household cleaning products) but also companies that supply them with cleaning agents (chemical, enzymes, fragances) – the supply chain. They worked with Environmental Resources Management to device an initial system so companies can track metrics in four different areas that are associated with the U.S. production of cleaning products.

The project was an initial effort to see how they’re doing and to develop some ways for companies large and small to be able to track this kind of data. It was not an easy thing to do because a lot of companies produce and supply products besides cleaning products. So they have to separate out data – just data associated with cleaning products. It was a learning process.

The cleaning product industry measured its sustainability efforts in 4 different areas:

1. Energy use (electricity, steam, and on-site operations).

2. Greenhouse gas emission (CO2 equivalent) from all sources owned or controlled by the company.

3. Water use and conservation.

4. Waste generation.

1. Energy use

The energy metric data includes electricity use, generated offsite; purchase steam use, coal use, kerosene use, fuel oil use, gasoline use, natural gas (liquid and gas form) use, biogas/ landfill gas used as fuel, other ‘green’ energy sources, and energy use from distribution.

>> Result: The total energy use (in gigajoules) for participating members decreased from ’07 to ’09 by approximately 18% per ton of production.

2. Greenhouse gas emissions

Member companies reported on greenhouse gas emissions from all sources owned or controlled by the company, including indirect GHG emissions resulting from the off-site generation of purchased electricity, heat or steam; on-site generation of electricity, heat or steam; other combustion process; physical or chemical processing; venting and fugitive emissions.

>> Result: The greenhouse gas emissions for participating members also decreased by 25% in ’07 to ’09.

3. Water use and conservation

Water is one of the key resources used across in the full-cycle of production from the water used upstream for raw material production to the manufacturing process to consumers when they use their products. The water metric tracks not only the water amount use but also water saved through conservation measures.

The water use data includes: water in product, purchased water, withdrawn from wells, surface water at plants, collected rain water, gray or reused water, steam.

>> Result: Water use decreased by 10% for participating members from ’07 to ’09.

4. Waste generation

Members of the Institute generates both hazardous and non-hazardous waste. The waste metric tracks the amount of solid waste generated, reused, recycled and disposed by each company.

>> Result: Waste generation decreased between ’08 and ’09, but increased by approximately by 2% from ’07 to ’09.

Lessons learned

Learning is part of the process, afterall sustainability is a journey:

– The data helps them understand industry’s environmental performance and the effectiveness of the policies that these companies have in place as well as other programs and their manufacturing process.

– Overtime as companies look to see where the trend is going for their particular line of business, they would put new practices or improved practices in place so they can certainly cut down on energy use and water use.

– For companies during this time of economic challenge the past couple of years, that’s a big expense when you’re paying for fuel, energy to keep the processes moving to formulate products.

– Companies are taking a number of different steps to decrease energy use, make it more efficient that varies per company depending on what they make.

– More and more companies are looking at the practices certainly to get to a point because they are responsible to their stakeholders, customers and employees to put all of these processes in place, make sure that they’re safe and effective as possible.

Innovation.. in the process 

In many cases, through R&D innovation, companies tested and put out products that require less water. For example, liquid laundry detergent. If you go a store right now, you’ll find that liquid laundry detergent are all concentrated. By concentrating and compacting this liquid laundry detergent, consumers could still wash the same number of loads, but the package doesn’t need to be as big. For companies, they don’t need as many fleet of trucks to deliver to the store. So it saves money on transportation. Less packaging means you’re not using much water anymore. And less space needed at the retail level.

You can listen to the full interview here.

Enjoy!

Check Out Environment Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Dewita Soeharjono on BlogTalkRadio

Ecological Non-Toxic Raw Materials

Few days ago, I blog about reverse innovation as one of the trends that can have an impact on any-size of business. Reverse innovation is innovation adapted from emerging markets (developing world), first. This company’s products fit that description.

It just so happen that the other week, I had the opportunity to interview Alex Khan, who is the Operations Assistant at Compo Clay, a company that manufacture green raw materials for the homes and building industries.

This company is an example of how you don’t have to be a big business to do a reverse innovation. A small business can do it.

The story

Compo Clay was founded by a guy named Eric Man, who’s the Managing Partner of Compo Clay, 7 years ago. Eric found that there’s a lot of ineffiencies in the market for building products, home decor, architectural designs and a lot of stuff that he said that he wasn’t comfortable with for his family. You either have to give up a lot of quality or you’d be bring in toxic products that are harmful to the environment into your home. So that’s how he set out to do things differently. He wanted to solve all of these problems and come up with a product that would be beautiful, aesthetically pleasing product while also being a good quality and healthy for both for the human and earth.

They have been in R&D (research and development) for 7 years and now ready to bring to market.

Innovation is at the core working with team of engineers, they’re constantly working to improve their products and breaking barriers.

The niche market and its competitive advantage

Their niche are products are environmentally safe. These products consists of 6 ingredients that make up all of their products: 50% mineral composition, sea salt, sand, water, recycle fly ash, reinforcing fibers, which is glass-based fibers. All of these ingredients are sourced from the earth crust so there’s no mining, no deforestation and no chemical use. Alex says that their “products are totally non-hazardous, so there is no there is no lead, formaldehyde, no VOCs (volatile organic compound) and totally non-combustible. So you have no problem associated with fire toxic.”

Sample of some of their products include home decor, building products, mantel pieces, planters, statues, and different things targeted for the residential market.

Strategy: when it comes to selling their supposedly “green” products, they put “green” aspect secondary. What’s important for them is for customers to realize that their products are aesthetically beautiful, light in weight, thus save money on packaging, shipping, etc.

It’s important for any business to have a mission, purpose. This is how they intend to change the world.

1. Green products – provide products that are affordable to many.

2. Green operations – concious of their actions they way they run the company operations through continuous development and implementation of green technology and practices. They use variable energy in the operations and there is no heat is use in the molding process.

3. Green society – to educate consumers and communities on sustainable awareness.

Distribution channels

They use grassroots approach. Using a network of specialty stores. Products are sold through Amazon, Ebay, small boutiques throughout the U.S. They have storefront in Alameda, CA with soon to be opened flagship store in San Fransisco. Their long-term view includes helping bigger companies to go green.

Dig deeper. I break the interview into 3 parts: about the company, line of products and distribution channel. It’s something that everyone can learn. 

Part 1: the story

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Part 2: line of products

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Part 3: distribution channel

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Related reading: 20 Global Trends that can have an Impact on Your Business

 

How to Attract Different Shades of Green Customers

Last week I interviewed Jason Holstine, who is the founder and owner of a local one-stop green hardware and design store here in Kensington, suburb of Maryland, called “Amicus Green.” Amicus Green is a triple-bottom line company. 

Because Jason has more than 14 years of helping consumers, businesses, governments, NGOs implement sustainability goals and projects. Jason currently sits on the Maryland Commission on Climate Change and the board of directors for the Metropolitan Washington Council Of Governments Clean Air Partners program. We asked Jason the things that can help people and businesses to go green.

“What Does it Take to Go Green?” conversation, touches not only on greening houses and offices, but also building the business itself. By combining his depth of knowledge in green building, figuring out the supply and demand, and offering a mix of products and services that meet customers’ expectations, Amicus Green have created “a space” for the business. They’ve attracted and grown its customer base from the moment they opened their door for business!

One of the things he mentioned is, that it is very important to provide on-going support for companies’ green teams that can help them set meaningful goals and achieved them. He also talk briefly about the challenges for consumers to pick the right green products.

TRANSCRIPT from randomly selected topics. (to listen for full episode, visit Ecotwist here, or scroll all the way down).

Dewita: It seems that you’ve been trekking the sustainability world or green world for sometime now. Share with us a little bit about your background, and how did you get started a green hardware store?

Jason: Well, my background way back is at college I’ve got a business degree but I majored in environmental science as a program that I put together. 15 years later you started to see programs actually off-the-shelves at a lot of leading schools. So I figured I should’ve patented the concept.. I missed that boat. But, 20 years later it was just kind of one of these things that one thing went to another, I started getting into various levels or types of environmental consulting for various audiences and started to working with folks more and more on green building efforts. And people come to me and asked me to help them work on various little project or remodeling project here and there to try to make it green. Whether necessary called green back in the late ’90s, it might have been just make it healthier or more environmentally sustainable or cutting energy use or something. Around that time, the term green haven’t started to pick up. But one of the things that we found is “hey, here’s that great product, this is neat, people said it’s fantastic.. where can I get it? Well, you can’t.” You have to ordered it from Seattle or from very far away and you can’t see any samples, and you can’t color matching, just do the general stuff you’d need to do when making getting a product into a project and putting projects together. So it’s pretty clear to us that there was certainly need for a resource where people could go and shop, research and do what you want to do for any kind of project. And having another one source having a lot expertise on the right products and providing the wrong products and understanding the background of sustainability as such was important. The main thing there is to find out that whether – because we knew there’s a need – was there be a demand then? Through some research found out we thought it would be with our demographic in the area. It took about a year and a half doing a business plan to plan the whole business and such. It took us almost a year to find a reasonably good space to locate the business. Found a place, fired it up and we’re on our six year now.

Dewita: You’ve been in business for 6 years, but you’ve been around in that industry for a long time. From the time you opened the door at Amicus – by the way why did you choose the name, Amicus, it’s hard to pronounce – what do you see changed in consumer behavior, especially from your customers.

>> First he explained the meaning of Amicus and why he chose the name. Then followed with this conversation..

Jason: From our perspective, it’s probably more skewed. I meant from day one, we’ve had customers. Our customers have been those who’s very interested in being green and we have more and more customers trying to do that now. So we’re saying from a little bit of that early adopter’s stage to more of the mainstream or maturing of the audience as any marketing person would tell you as a product matures as it goes along. What is constantly has always been and – still very much – one tug of war is that people have different definition to what they mean by green. For some people is about health and avoiding chemicals to protect themselves or their kids. Other people it’s about Al Gore, climate change, protecting the polar bears or rain forest. Other people about energy independence, getting ourselves out of fossil fuels or of Middle East issues. We take very much a holistic point of view. We very strongly argue that it’s all the above. Getting people to understand that being green is a matter of several different features and it’s very not particularly appropriate analogy but, basically killing a lot of birds with one stone. And being able to achieve a lot of different goals of a healthier place, more energy responsive place, more environmentally appropriate place, and it will make a lot people happier that way. Also in the long term and in some cases in the short term, too. These are absolutely things that pay off that financially they are very beneficial for the occupants. You just have to configure the numbers and the math from where people used to.

Dewita: I read something in your website about LINX, is that a software? What is it?

Jason: SWEET LINX is an umbrella program that we have. It’s got a number of different programs underneath it that basically help different people to learn and to incentivize them to be as green as possible. For example, we have a program called “Sweet Benefits,” that we work with employers, companies, NGOs, whatever. It’s almost like a wellness program. Like a wellness benefits package. We give them some education, tools, help their green teams out. Just count another incentive internally to help their employees be sustainable as possible. It’s very much a lot of companies now will have like green teams to help teach each other about things to green both internally and at home. Just kind of encourage good behaviour. That’s a program we have to help people along with that and to make it more interesting, more lively. You know one of the things that happens a lot is people talk about green, they learn about this great tips as such. But if they can’t figure out the right products, the right tools to use for on-going kind of more detailed advice for their case. If they really can’t get that kind of on-going kind of support. Then, the efforts may be well-meaning but they probably won’t go very far. And so that’s the kind of idea that people can really get things, schemes rolling personally and across an organization to really get set some meaningful goals to actually achieve them. We have another program for schools. With schools, which help let say, schools fundraising or in creating their own operations or doing curriculum or efforts about green, or ecological or climate change issues. And we have a program for real estate agents to help them with their clients with both selling and buying. So things like that. That’s what the SWEET LINX program is.

Dewita: Your company is a triple-bottom line company (the three pillars of sustainable business: people, planet, profit for measuring success from economical, ecological and social values). What are some of the challenges that you have to overcome to become a triple-bottom line company?

Jason: I don’t know that I have necessarily any specific extra challenges. It’s kind of native and embedded in what we do and how we operate it that I don’t know if there’s any specific isolated challenges that I can think of off the top of my head. There will be just the natural stuff that certain things, where some of our costs or overhead, are not as low as they could be. And we just have to kinda implement that in our management. But I don’t at all consider to be extraordinarily high costs. It’s just a matter of cost of doing business, anyway. So if anything the additional elements, just limiting ourselves into products choice. And in terms of going extra miles to make sure that things are done right. To say “no” to products because we didn’t get the right information or enough information. It just make more administrative efforts on our part. A lot of it, is more time than it is cost.

There’s more to the conversation. Including tips for wannabe green business owners.

Check it out. 

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20 Sustainability Learning Resources

FOOD FOR YOUR BRAIN. These are some of the sites where you can learn and dig deeper on sustainability. Whether you’re an employee, business owner, professional, or even executive and career changer, the information available through these sites is priceless. The best part is, most of the resources it’s either available for free or for a small subscription fee.

The resources below provide you with the knowledge, the kind of information that includes things that would affect the sustainability of your business, i.e. climate change, energy efficiency, nature conservation, biodiversity, water efficiency, and more.  It is by no means they are the only twenty sources out there. There are literally more than hundreds (probably thousands) sources globally! However, for the purpose of learning, we’re going to start one chunk at a time. It’s good enough to spin your head.