By Shel Horowitz

How many companies did their first environmental impact report in 1953?

That’s when the well-known office furniture company Herman Miller began reporting its environmental progress. The 100-year-old company came to my attention through an article by CEO Brian C. Walker in Harvard Business Review, on Greening the Supply Chain. And this is remarkable in itself; while most companies are just beginning to grapple with sustainable measures within their own confines, Herman Miller has not only made a huge effort to get its vendors –both domestic and international–in line, but is teaching other companies.

Going to the company’s website, I see good links on the home page:
What we believe (with eight subsections, some of which have another layer as well)
The environment (11 subsections, including Green buildings, cradle-to-cradle and LEED certification, and even a recommended reading list!), and diversity, among others.

The environmental section notes,

Our values are the basis for Herman Miller’s corporate community. One of the nine things that matter most to us is called “A Better World.” For us, contributing to a better world takes many forms–environmental advocacy, volunteering time and contributing to nonprofit groups, acting as a good corporate citizen.

It also lists nine separate corporate teams involved in Herman Miller’s environmental responsibility activities.

In his follow-up comments (same URL), Walker points out that he and several competitors have joined forces with the Michigan Department of Corrections to train inmates in a furniture component recycling pilot program, and is looking at technology to better monitor chemical content, and to replace more toxic materials like PVC with more environmentally friendly alternatives.

For more business ethics and sustainability success stories, please see Shels award-winning book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First

Well, this is certainly different! A Big Media (CBS) radio station that appears to break from the mold.

This station, 94.7 FM, is a long-established classic rock number serving the Washington, DC market. About a year ago, it rebranded–still a classic rock station, but with a very clear focus on environmental issues–and a promise to play music beyond the hits.

What does it mean to have an environmental focus? The station’s press release announcing the February 2,2007 changeover notes,

The Washington D.C. station will operate using renewable energy to power its 50,000 watt signal. This move will contribute to lowering the threat of global warming through the purchase of energy resources generated by wind.  Additionally, station vehicles will be replaced with hybrid models, and 94.7 The Globe will further its “green” focus by taking a number of steps on and off-air to consistently promote ways for listeners to live an eco-friendly lifestyle.

In keeping with this new focus, the station website offers quite a bit of Green content, including eco-tips compiled by station staff and also submitted by listeners.

The station’s mission statement doesn’t specifically address environmental issues, but it quite cogently promotes the station as an alternative to the sound-alike hitmakers around the country. It notes the importance of musical diversity, promises that DJs have a voice in the programming (a rarity at many corporate radio chains these days), and insists it will be receptive to listener ideas.

And I know, some may call this “greenwashing”–but I prefer to think that it ight be a laboratory for exporting new ideas into the very, very tired and bland commercial radio band.

There is, after all, quite a bit of precedent for large corporate entities developing product lines that offer more individuality and social consciousness, and integrating some of the best practices corporate-wide. Saturn, to name one example, is a unit of General Motors. And Saturn’s low-pressure buying experience has migrated not just to other units within GM, but across the entire industry.

And like most stations these days, you can listen to it on streaming audio.

November, 2007: GreenDisk, review of Javatrekker

Positive Power Spotlight: GreenDisk.com
Electronic junk is jamming up our landfills. Here’s an innovative company that’s been doing something about that for over 14 years.

Another Recommended Book: Javatrekker, by Dean Cycon
Dean’s company, Dean’s Beans, was the Positive Power Spotlight for February 2006. His new book is a fascinating look at how business can create and leverage truly meaningful social change–as well as some great travel writing waaay off the beaten track.

Interesting no-charge report: The Internet Marketing Myth, by Russell Brunson

Want to boost your graphic arts skills? This e-book by Karen Saunders, “Turn Eye Appeal Into Buy Appeal,” is unusual because not only does it clearly explain and demonstrate graphic design concepts, but it’s written with a clear and on-target sense of graphic design *as a marketing ingredient*–something that’s entirely lacking in the minds of most designers. I’ve been working with designers for decades and I still learned quite a bit. Lifetime satisfaction guarantee, too.

Which of Shel’s Books is Right for You?
Shel’s books on frugal, effective, and ethical marketing–and his very inexpensive e-book on having fun cheaply–make great gifts, too.

Hear and Meet Shel
In person in South Hadley, MA, Hartford, CT, online, on-air, and over the phone:

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Published monthly since September, 2003 by Shel Horowitz
16 Barstow Lane, Hadley, MA 01035 USA
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Reasonably priced, environmentally responsible, data-secure service for getting rid of techno-junk. I’d try Freecycle.org first, since my junk may be someone else’s treasure–but this looks like a good fallback.

The FAQ page notes,

We refurbish what we can and recycle the rest. Inkjet cartridges get remanufactured and, when possible, cell phones and some computers get refurbished. Material that has no further operating life is broken down to its smallest components (metals, plastics, etc.) and used in the manufacturing of new products. Unlike some recycling companies, all of the material that GreenDisk collects is reused or recycled. No hazardous materials or obsolete components go overseas to be processed or disposed of.

It also discusses the risks of improperly-disposed, insecure data, and the steps it takes to eliminate that risk.

And this is a socially responsible company that chases away business if there’s a more eco-friendly solution available:

You should not use GreenDisk if there is a local drop-off that legitimately recycles your equipment. We believe this service should be offered in your local area to conserve energy and be more cost effective. Unfortunately, businesses in most local areas have not stepped forward. So, we started this service at the request of those who had no local vehicle to recycle their equipment.

I find the information on GreenDisk’s About page very cool: the firm was founded on Earth Day, 1993, originally to help software companies dispose of unsold software. With its commitment to sustainability, GreenDisk went around forming partnerships with existing recyclers–and with nonprofit agencies that employ workers with disabilities–around the country, rather than building new capacity.

Materials that Greendisk recycles are turned into Green office products: Diskettes and CD-RWs, CD packaging, technotrash collection stations (how’s that for a closed loop!). I had to wonder, though–who’s actually still buying diskettes?

In fact, I wondered enough that I picked up the phone. It was answered on the first ring by none other than David Beschen, President and Founder; he says all six employees answer the phone. I asked who buys floppies these days. It turns out the military and other government agencies still buy them–and NASA even still buys 5-1/4 inchers.

For up to 30 pounds of non-computer “technotrash,” e.g., CDs, cords, mice, cell phones, and printer cartridges, just $6.95. Disposal of entire computers, including wiping the data beyond recovery and recycling what components can be recycled, starts at $19.95. The largest job the company handled filled 26 railroad freight cars; the smallest was a single DVD. Rechargeable batteries are acceptable; alkaline, unfortunately, are not–but the company is working on it. “It isn’t that they can’t be recycled, but that it’s extremely expensive,” Beschen told me. “But we’re working on that.”

Since I had him on the phone, I conducted a brief interview:

SH: How do you get people not to just throw electronic parts away.

DB: There’s a huge segment that does want to recycle, and we make it more convenient. They just don’t know what to do with the stuff. We’re not missionary with people who don’t want to recycle, but the general conversations are starting to bring more people to realize [that proper disposal is important]. If you go back in our culture, we didn’t throw stuff away. Planned obsolescence is a relatively recent, and that mentality is changing. We have cars now that don’t need a tune-up for 100,000 miles, instead of rusting hulks in a junkyard.

SH: How are you different?

DB: One of the key rules of environmentalism is don’t make it [if you can use something already in existence]. We use resources already in existence, including postal trucks that would otherwise come back empty. We’ve asked nonprofits that employ people with disabilities [to do the work]; they have 70 percent unemployment: those are two huge resources. Now we’ve integrated FedEx, and less-than-load tactics with all the trucking companies, so we can move stuff without making a special trip. And we can get work done without taking it offshore. To make the diskettes, we bought down-time from people who make the software. And companies will pay a premium for recycled materials.

SH: Is this type of cooperation unusual?

DB: I’m the former head of corporate communications for Microsoft. The software producers were doing all kinds of joint ventures, sharing information that marketing people would have killed each other for disclosing. I said, “do your marketing people know?” It wasn’t a conspiracy, for once. I come from the marketing world. When you create a soluton for people, you’re marketing. Companies that think only of themselves don’t tend to perform well over time.

You might remember fair-trade organic coffee roaster Dean Cycon of Dean’s Beans from my profile of his company in the February, 2006 Positive Power Spotlight.

Dean’s just come out with a fascinating book: Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee.

Most Americans and Europeans in the coffee industry have never met a coffee farmer, and certainly haven’t traveled to the remote indigenous communities where coffee is grown. Dean has traveled the world, meeting growers, processors, shamans, government ministers, bouncing his way down rutted goat trails, learning a few phrases of the local language (or what he thinks is the local language), getting stomach-sick on a regular basis–and having a great deal of fun. He often finds that not only is he the first coffee buyer to visit these isolated places, but often the first white man.

In the U.S., he spends a lot of time hectoring coffee executives at Starbucks and elsewhere to commit more to fair trade and to fund development projects–which he’s able to accomplish for a tiny fraction of the money a large bureaucracy would need, by using methods initiated and designed by local communities using local resources to meet local needs, in the spirit of E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful.

He leaves a trail not only of Dean’s Beans t-shirts and “Make Coffee Not War” bumper stickers, but a legacy of vast improvement in the lives of the villages he visits. Clean-water wells, education centers, community-owned coffee processing plants, simple hand-operated depulpers that allow coffee farmers to capture much more of the value of their crop…some of these are projects he funds directly, and others come out of the cooperatives’ share of coffee profits, made possible by the fair-trade price he pays, sometimes three times as much as the “going rate.”

Dean sums up his philosophy in the closing words of the book:

I have never been fully comfortable with what I, when I know in my heart that things can be better, more respectful, more loving, and frankly, more exciting. It pains me deeply to see cultures crumble and blow away under global pressures (or simply for lack of water), or kids’ lives go unfulfilled for want of a pencil or notebook. Javatrekking allows me the vehicle to explore my own relationship to these things and to take responsibility where I can. These may be small contributions in the greater scheme of things, but as an old Indonesian farmer advised me…”Add your light to the sum of lights.”

Dean has clearly taken that advice seriously. His many initiatives include forming the Coffeelands Landmine Victims Trust, which works in Central America and Vietnam, co-founding Cooperative Coffees, an association of 23 local coffee roasters around the U.S. and Canada who offer fair trade organic coffee, and simply funding scholarships for individual children of coffee growers in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea.

Dean Cycon is living proof that it is more than possible to use business as a force for positive social change, while at the same time see the world and have a terrific time.

Published sustainably on recycled paper by Chelsea Green (publisher of my own book Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World), Javatrekker is full of well-told stories and includes some great color photos. It’s available from Dean’s Beans or from the publisher.

Dean Cycon, who happens to be a signer of the Business Ethics Pledge, has pledged to donate 100% of the profits to coffee farmers.

I’ve known about inkjet and toner cartridge recycling businesses for more than a decade, and never paid them much mind. But when I met Karl Tur, of Inkjet Solutions, at a Chamber of Commerce mixer, I was impressed that the first thing this young man said to me, before he knew anything about my background, was about the positive environmental impact we could all have by recycling our cartridges–before he even mentioned the price benefits. His reasons for starting this business, with locations in Amherst and Northampton, Massachusetts, are all about doing something right for the earth.When I walked into the store he’s just opened in Northampton, I was once again impressed with this small company’s commitment to the environment, as that was the key message of many of the posters and other point-of-sale marketing materials. Also, the website not only has a page about the environment as its third link, but devotes most of the space on the who-we-are page to its environmental mission as well.

And again, when I had him as a guest on my one-hour radio show, he spent at least half the time talking about the environment.

At my current age of 50, I find it very exciting to find 20-somethings who are starting businesses with a wider social agenda, and not just to get rich. I’d expect him, as the old Quaker saying goes, to “do well by doing good.”

September is back to school time–and a good time to look at lowering your transportation costs, in both time and money.

Think creatively!

Here are three examples from my own life that allowed me to use my car less and helped give me “karma credits” on the global warming issue:

1. A few years ago, we organized a carpool to our kids’ school 12 miles away–which doesn’t sound unusual until you realize that the four families didn’t live anywhere near each other–but it was still less gas and driving to meet at a central point and carpool the last six miles.

2. Recently, I had errands in town (7 miles), and then a doctor’s appointment in a community three miles farther. I threw the bike rack on the car, drove to town, did all my errands including the doctor by bicycle, then picked the car up on my way home.

3. I used the bike rack again when I had to visit four stores and one office, all in half-mile increments. I drove to the only store where I’d have a lot to carry, then biked around to all the others.

As an alternative, I could have walked to the different stores. In the center of town, I often walk. The stores are closely concentrated, I only have to park once, and its healthier and not much slower.

Incidentally, if you live in an urban area (I don’t), it will not only be cheaper to use a bike, but if the distances are 3 to 5 miles or under (which account for the vast majority of trips), the bike will be faster. Rail transit will also be faster than a car. A bus will probably be slower, but when you factor in the costs of parking, gas, maintenance, etc., it’s likely to be cheaper than driving alone–especially if you buy discounted monthly passes. As an added bonus, when you take a bus or train, you can read, use your computer, play a game, whatever.

If you live in a more rural area, at the very least, look at combining several errands on a single trip.

For more frugal fun hints, get your own copy of The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook, all 280 pages, for just $8.50 as an instant download–just click here.