It’s [NOT] Easy Being GREEN
Green-Collar Workforce Gains Legitimacy and Momentum
by Pam Losefsky
CSR at Work
Wilcoxon has been working on the issue since 2001, initially as part of ConocoPhillips’ Health, Safety and Environment division and now as a member of the Corporate Strategic Planning group. He remembers when his team first talked about the concept of climate change and sustainable development to company management.“We got everything from blank stares to yawns to serious misgivings about some of the changes we were proposing. We became good at walking the line between boredom and fear,” says Wilcoxon, who concedes that, back then, many in the oil company were skeptical about the human contribution to global warming.
“But what I’m most proud of is the part I’ve played in getting the program from where it was when I first joined to where it is now,” he says. “In the very beginning, ConocoPhillips supported only voluntary measures to address the issue; in April 2007 we became the first U.S.-based oil and gas company to officially call for a mandatory national regulatory framework for greenhouse gas emissions.”
Wilcoxon says ConocoPhillips, like most large, well-established companies, is like a really big ship; turning it around is a slow and laborious process. “But it seems on climate change we’ve reached a tipping point within the last 12 months or so—we now view climate change as a significant strategic business issue, and the company intends to play a proactive role in addressing it both internally and externally.”
Dell’s Shari Carle remembers a similar lack of enthusiasm for creating a computer recycling program, a position for which Dell was vilified in the media. But it didn’t take long for the company to see the writing on the wall. “Our stakeholders asked us to help create that market and to build customer awareness.” When Dell first offered limited PC recycling, it was a cost item on the company’s books, and its establishment involved a lot of arm-twisting. “Originally, we didn’t understand the potential demand for it,” she admits. And today? “We now offer free consumer recycling around the globe and the recycling services we offer to business customers are profitable—it turns out the asset recovery business offsets the additional costs on the consumer side,” Carle reveals.
Sustainable Means
Conscientiously Profitable
And that’s really the whole point of sustainability—it’s not about outright
social giveaways that erode a company’s profits, and it’s not about doing good
just to get positive press. It’s more about ensuring that future needs of the
company and its stakeholders can be met (without unintended consequences of the
company’s actions) and aligning business incentives with broader social and
environmental goals.Ben & Jerry’s and Whole Foods are part of a core group of American companies that were founded on these principles. These trailblazers, along with a growing number of converts—like Dell, Gap, FedEx Kinko’s, Levi’s, Pepsi, Wells Fargo and Starbucks—recognize their role as economic engines with sweeping influence through their customer bases and supply chains. Their breadth can affect both human behavior and consumption patterns and can even create markets for things like recycled paper, renewable energy, organic food and fair trade products.
A player like Dell, for instance, which purchases more paper than one may initially think, especially for product packaging, can make a huge difference. “One company can change markets,” Carle points out. Today Dell has policies in place that prohibit the sourcing of paper from endangered forests and has dramatically increased the use of recycled content paper. The supply chains that do business with Dell have had to change their infrastructure as the result of the Electronics Industry Code of Conduct (EICC), which Dell co-founded. The EICC developed a common set of standards to simplify supply chain accountability across vendors.
In fact, not only can a solid corporate sustainability strategy grow profits and produce societal benefits, not adhering to the sustainability model can have significant consequences that go beyond public criticism.
“To me, if your business isn’t paying attention to the environment, you’re putting your shareholders at serious risk,” says Dan Lieberman, who’s held positions in every area of the renewable energy industry since gaining his green reputation at McCombs a decade ago. “For instance, regulations on greenhouse gas emissions are coming, and if you don’t anticipate those, you are going to have enormous expenses down the road,” he says.
Lieberman is now senior manager of utility partnerships at 3Degrees, a green energy marketing company. Formerly, he worked on energy policy for the city of San Jose, managed renewable energy products for startup Utility.com and ran the Green-e Energy program at the Center for Resource Solutions, the nonprofit that runs the Green-e certification program for renewable energy and carbon offsets.
Lieberman adds, “A lot of people have an interest in the environment, which is great, but this isn’t the CSR club. These are still businesses and they have to be profitable.”
Finding those win-wins, then, has become the job of the CSR function. “We’ve been careful about the kinds of initiatives we’ve championed,” confirms Carle. “They have to make business sense—we’re trying to move behavior without incurring alarming expense.” For instance, the company is single-handedly responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of trees because of its supply chain requirement for recycled content, but that hasn’t impacted its business.
Likewise, companies that have set goals for renewable energy use are moving mountains—spurring the development of fresh renewable resources. “It’s very rewarding to see renewable energy developing on this scale when it was previously so marginal,” says the vindicated Lieberman. Renewable energy still only accounts for a small fraction of the world’s total energy consumption, but it has finally grabbed a toehold.