The Bounce Factory is a classic example. If inhaling the intensified aroma of a factory full of Bounce is your idea of olefactory heaven then their facility in eastern Ontario is perfect for you.

It's hard to undersatand how Len Sauers said what he did with a straight face.

No doubt Proctor and Gamble employees will never think to look on this site to see what their company would have to say about anything regarding eco-friendly practices. How could they think the unthinkable?

Just imagine how bad their sites must have been before they got eco-religion.

As of right now, Proctor and Gamble does not make one single product or have one single facility that a person with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS) could use or even be near without suffering serious to fatal consequences. Sorry, P&G, you have a long and winding road to go before I'm convinced your spots have faded, never mind changed.

Don't be surprised when your employees start showing signs of MCS due to exposure to excessive amounts of caustic chemicals that make up the ambient air in your sites.

You should know that MCS victims are untreatable in Ontario by the provincial medical system. So when these patients start presenting, P&G will be paying the full expense to house and treat these people. At that point, your company will be forced to reinvent clean air and non-toxic housing.

http://thegreenmarket.blogspot.com/2009/04/silencing-earth-day-critics.html

But it hasn’t “evolved for all of us”. It’s part of your job – so you are way ahead of the curve.

By my math less well less than half a millionAmericans know their carbon footprint. To me, that is where you start. McKinsey has pointed out that getting below 500 ppmv isn’t really expensive (around 1% of GDP). I can afford 1%. So what gives? A recent global survey by Accenture found that 37% of companies have “no awareness of the level of supply chain emissions”. This is not the progress we need.

Here is the consumer problem as I see it. I’ve got 364 other things to worry about. Why do I buy organic milk (and pay more for it)? Because it’s in my face. I can’t avoid the comparison – drink hormones or not. Why did I buy ClimateSmart carbon offsets from PG&E? Because they put it right in my face (in the online bill pay setup). I was forced to think about what I was doing to the environment.

I understand that rebuilding P&G supply chains and manufacturing processes will take considerable time. We can’t wait for that however. Why doesn’t P&G put it right in my face? You can relatively easily figure out the footprint of each of your products. Work with Safeway and put that along the product price in the database. Give me the option right at checkout to offset that product. That way you have a cyber equivalent “zero” product. As I am sure you know Safeway is having success putting other good causes in the checkout process (e.g. donating to MS).

I think carbon awareness on consumer products is critical. Most people grocery shop at least once/week. With this type of a program, they would be potentially choosing a zero product every week (or at least be forced to consider it). This makes the carbon decision part of their regular thought process. Not only would the actual offsets help, but there would be tremendous spillover.

Maybe this is one good first step in the journey.

Greg

An average household of four in North America is responsible for or has enough emissions created on their behalf to require the pollution gobbling activities of 9,000 mature trees to offset their emissions in within the same year they were created. That translates into 2,250 trees per individual. Do you have that many trees on your lot?

Every manufacturing company is part of that process as is the individual household. 

As good a job as you think you're doing; if your house is heated with natural gas you are contributing in another significant way that there is no solution to. Natural Gas is one of the major Global Warming/Climate Change/Chemical Winter components. When we use electricity we have the same problem one step removed. There is no free lunch so far.

Until there is a way to stop burning Natural Gas and all other fossil fuels, there will be no end to the destruction of the planet's atmosphere until such times as our economy collapses to the point where the oil companies are put out of business. There are simply too many sources of fossil fuel emissions and too much demand.

To make matters worse, companies that use chemicals as part of their production process, which is nearly all companies, emit a certain amount of those chemicals. Proctor and Gamble for example makes all sorts of consumer products and most of them contain lethal chemicals in minute amounts. The air in their buildings however is highly contaminated. That means every time someone goes in or out, significant emissions are released.

It would be interesting to see their employee health records made public. I'll bet they are shocking.

On the other hand, this is a huge business opportunity for P&G. The packaged goods industry is stagnate. Most of the cost has been squeezed out of the supply chain and the industry has been competing for market share based on packaging and flavor. The industry is at the part of the innovation S-curve where innovation is incremental at best. We need to jump to a new S-curve. (Note that packaging and flavor inherently add carbon to a base product.)

I think the new basis of competition will be “impact on the planet”. Over 25 years ago, Michael Lanning (while at McKinsey) defined a powerful business concept and coined a wonderful phrase - the “value proposition”.  It said that a consumer of a product will associate a value to a product based on the delivery of a set of perceived benefits.

It’s time for an update - value proposition 2.0 (VP2.0). VP2.0 says that value is now benefits plus impact (lack thereof really). Impact itself is not a benefit because the consumer doesn’t get the benefit of a zero-carbon product, we all do. Impact forms a new powerful differentiating factor in the marketplace. A 2006 survey of U.K. consumers by Carbon Trust found that 67% of consumers are more likely to buy a product with a low-carbon footprint. People want zero!

I have to crunch some macro numbers, but zero packaged goods would not be much more expensive. It didn’t take me long to find an example. Clifbar just announced a new sports drink called Quench. Working with Native Energy, Clif offset all the CO2 emissions created in the manufacturing and supply chain for Quench. I don’t know for sure, but I think Quench hits the same price point as their carbon-rich competitors. I suspect that Clif may have made changes in the product that made it cheaper to make. They may have been able to do this (e.g. change the packaging) because they could be a little different than their competition, as one of their main points of differential is now zero-impact.

I am hoping that this is just the start of a huge trend. That we will start to see more and more and more, zero products. If all the folks at P&G start working in this direction … they could plant a lot of those trees you point of we need.

PepsiCo working with Carbon Trust worked out that a ½ gallon of Tropicana orange juice emits 3.75 lbs of CO2 in its complete lifecycle (field to consumer use and disposal). Based on the cost of carbon offsets from Native Energy (at $14/ton of 0.7 cents/lb), offsetting a ½ gallon of OJ would cost 2.6 cents. Compared to an on-deal price of $2.39 and a full price of $5.99, offsetting carbon emissions would mean a 0.44% and 1.1% increase in the ½ gallon of OJ. I can afford that!