As I mentioned at the end of last week, I had a chance to sit down in briefings with a number of companies while at Sustainable Brands ’08.
The following is an overview of several of those I spoke with (I’m breaking this up into two blogs, incidentally, so look for the rest of the story later this week), and their companies.
Happy reading…
~ L
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DOMANI
I had a chance to talk to Will Sarni, DOMANI’s Founder & Chief Executive Officer, at SB ‘08. Sarni is a member of the Environmental Compliance Committee of the Chicago Climate Exchange, active with the Conference Board, authors a green business colum for Venture Magazine and provides editorial comments for the Sustainable Life Media Climate Change Management Weekly newsletter. And over a glass of water on a hot day, Sarni is mellow, down-to-earth, and humble. I ask him who’s on his wish list of clients. The oil and gas sector needs an opportunity focused climate strategy, says Sarni. There are also a few private equity firms out there who could use a hand in developing their sustainability investment strategies, too, he says. Already among the firm’s client list? Cherokee Fund, http://www.cherokeefund.com/, a fascinating company, as well as Alcoa, BASF, The Coca-Cola Company, Grosvenor, Wrigley and several confidential Fortune 500 clients. Denver-based DOMANI, in case you didn’t know, is a wholly owned subsidiary of ENR 200 environmental consulting firm Roux Associates [http://www.rouxinc.com/clients.asp], a company not without it’s own impressive list of clients.
DOMANI’s own track record speaks to things like educating senior executives in Moscow on the Equator Principles on how environmental and social performance would potentially impact their business operations, and providing advisory and technical solutions to companies such as Cisco Systems. It’s obvious DOMANI is one of the sustainability strategy companies that companies are listening to these days. For a company started only 10 years ago, focused initially on climate change and educating executives about the fact that climate change was going to be a risk (or opportunity) to their businesses, the company is today, not surprisingly, working on much more: sustainable development and planning (brownfield redevelopment and sustainable remediation, for example) as well as resource reduction (energy, water, materials), and green strategies, products and markets opportunities for its clients.
DOMANI’s approach identifies and creates opportunities to decrease costs and risk in resource consumption, land, air and water impacts, as well as waste management. Areas of opportunity for clients include climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, energy and resource efficiency, and sustainable building & development, so the company today provides a range of services to address client needs, from straight forward advisory services, education and training, to strategy development around compliance/environmental management systems & their implementation, sustainability brand planning and communications, corporate social responsibility programs & reporting, to sustainable building development & design.
Under the company’s Climate Change & Greenhouse Gas practice area, for example, DOMANI provides clients with a carbon footprint evaluation, carves out for those who need it retail offset strategies as well as emissions mitigation planning, including GHG inventory management support. So let’s say I’m a client; that means I can request support for supply chain GHG Data Management as well as how to green my supply chain. I can also get an energy audit, in addition to an entire range of services to help me plan and design a sustainable development.
You should know that Sarni’s busy working on a book, entitled “Greening Brownfields: Remediation through Sustainable Development”. I’d expect to see it on a few companies’ bookshelves once published. Make sure you look for it. And if you’d like to talk to Will about your company’s sustainability strategy, email him at wsarni@domani.com.
Steelcase
Steelcase’s story is one that demonstrates well the kind of process ‘best in class’ performers in the trenches of sustainability are undertaking. Angela Nahikian, Director of Global Environmental Sustainability at Steelcase, calls the process they’ve been through “the house of seven doors”, and rightly so – the learning process just keeps going. And she’s told her team “Our job is to work ourselves out of a job – because the minute no one calls with a question or needs clarification, we’ve done our job.” It seems though that their work is never done. For a firm that deals primarily with the F500, Nahikian has seen RFPs requesting information on sustainability go from being 30% of the pile a couple of years ago to 80 and 90% of the pile. And Nahikian is quick to point out how much more sophisticated the RFPs are that are coming through the door. “We’ve gone from questions like ‘do you have an environmental statement’? to progressive companies asking us ‘can you tell us if you have any of these chemicals in your products’?”
Steelcase embraces a Designing for Environment program composed of three legs – Materials Chemistry, Lifecycle Assessment, and Recycling & Reuse otherwise known as [MC + LCA + R(squared)]. Ultimately these platforms have allowed Steelcase to Cradle to Cradle (C2C) certify their products. Materials Chemistry is the foundation of the work. To date Steelcase has gone back and assessed over 400 categories of materials in North America. The company is now working on assessing its international portfolio of materials, exiting any materials of concern, like PVC, internationally, as it has done with its domestic portfolio. To give you a feel of what that kind of undertaking has been like, Nahikian told me that about 30 suppliers and about 1500 parts are involved just to get rid of PVC, which will be phased out of the company’s product lines by 2012. Something as simple as eliminating an edgeband can involve changing 12 different profiles offered on various work surface shapes and finishes. Every one had to be color matched, and laminates and edges had to be redone and coordinated concurrently – and that’s just to take the PVC out of each part of the wood product. The entire process includes research, testing, and then proof of concept — performance testing to make sure that material changes could run at large scale in the manufacturing process. Steelcase started with PVC because it is not allowed in C2C certifications. How is Steelcase getting it out? “It’s really an opportunistic and strategic approach we’re using – what doesn’t need to be fit and finished is where we started first,” says Nahikian. So, for example, PVC will be replaced by propylene. The company’s C2C process is accepted as a LEED innovation point currently, and Steelcase has also gone so far as to develop a C2C tool that is being piloted with the University of Michigan as an upfront tool for developers and designers who are inhouse, designing and developing products.
One thing I bet you didn’t know: 15 years ago the firm developed a compost-able DesignTex fabric. That probably wasn’t news you recall hearing 15 years ago, but today you would. The company’s most requested product line today is, not surprisingly, Answer Think (Answer is a Steelcase system that received the first C2C certification and Think is a chair in Steelcase’s seating line that is comprised of 99% recycled content.)
Nahikian’s advice to companies seeking to improve their sustainable performance? “Think big.”
Umbria
Umbria’s a really interesting little company. Unlike custom-developed research polls, Umbria’s technology monitors the spontaneous, unsolicited input that one finds in the blogsphere. Started in 2004, Umbria’s been mining data from the blogsphere – collecting, cleansing and analyzing the results, clustering consumer segments around topics of conversation, using algorithms to help predict age range, sex, and sentiment of bloggers. Why is this interesting? Why wouldn’t it be? Uncovering drivers of intent, sentiment or purchase behavior is of course of interest to big companies with products to sell to consumers. Today Umbria’s processing millions of blogs per week, and it doesn’t collect and keep blogger identities. Consider the numbers (from Umbria): a quarter of adults blog frequently or occasionally today. 60% read blogs in the U.S., while 75% do worldwide. 34% of bloggers opine on products. And half of bloggers are older than 30. Sustainability continues to be a very hot topic amongst bloggers, (75%) with more than 70% talking about energy and fuel, an increasing number talking about autos (42%) in one form or another, and food and beverage showing a 10 point + jump, comparing ‘07 conversations to ‘08 conversations 37%). Transportation and travel comes about 24% of conversations between bloggers. And, not surprisingly, news travels: 64% of bloggers are talking about news topics, while conversation in general has shifted from bloggers simply debating the issue of climate change and global warming to debating the solutions for change. 63% of authors are female, with 33% of those being Gen-Y. For more information contact Umbria at www.umbrialistens.com.
The Designers Accord – “The Kyoto Treaty of Design”
I didn’t have a chance to talk to Valerie Casey about the Designers Accord but wanted to blog about it anyway. Perhaps singularly indicative of the level of buzz on sustainability and green design, this “Kyoto Treaty of Design”, the Designers Accord, has seen its membership skyrocket globally, in very short order. From an idea conceived by Valerie Casey (who heads the global sustainability practice for IDEO) the Designers Accord today has seen its membership go from few to many, from 3500 designers from various disciplines around the world joining in by January ‘08, to seeing 100,000 designers from 100 countries around the world, representing all design disciplines, joining as members by June ‘08. 3500 to 100,000. That is something. Btw – 70% of the 100,000 designers are from OUTside the U.S. The guidelines set by the Accord, and adopted by these 100,000 members are as follows: http://www.designersaccord.org/da_guidelines.html. If you don’t know about it – it’s worth reading up on and familiarizing yourself. The Design Accord commits corporations, educational institutions and designers to – instead of project by project commitments to sustainability – to general principles of sustainability. Members must publicly declare participation in the Designers Accord; initiate a dialogue about environmental impact and sustainable alternatives with each and every client; rework client contracts to favor environmentally responsible design and work processes; provide strategic and material alternatives for sustainable design; undertake a program to educate their teams about sustainability and sustainable design; measure the carbon/greenhouse gas footprint of your firm (includes operations and client engagements), and pledge to reduce their footprint annually; and advance the understanding of environmental issues from a design perspective by contributing actively to the communal knowledge base for sustainable design.
