Ray Anderson set out to make his business sustainable long before green was the flavor of the month.  Reading Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce in 1994 literally changed his life, inspiring him to overhaul his carpet company, Interface, and aim for zero waste and zero environmental impact.  Now, with his new book Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, he wants to spur other business leaders to "climb Mount Sustainability." 

Anderson recently dropped by the Grist office and we asked him how his own ascent is going so far. 

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Q. You've been working for the last 15 years to make your company sustainable. What do you know that other companies need to know?

A. Well, it's hard. It's the work of a lifetime. It takes an awful lot of patience and stick-to-itiveness.

We're 15 years into a 26-year journey -- that's how long we calculate it will take us to get to a zero footprint, taking nothing from the earth that's not naturally, rampantly renewable and doing no harm to the biosphere.

Q. How long did it take your company to recoup the investment that you initially made?

A. No time. From day one, we were ahead of the game. Tackling waste -- that's where the low-hanging fruit is. We declared war on waste: only zero is acceptable. Doing everything right the first time, every time, including making no scrap and no off-quality. When we measured ourselves against that kind of perfection, we found 10 percent of the sales dollar going down the drain as waste, most of it considered allowable, expected.

Fifteen years later, we're only halfway there. But we've saved over $400 million, which has more than financed everything else that we've done -- the R&D, the capital expenditures, the process changes, employee training, the whole ball of wax.

Q. Is that a technique that's replicable?

A. Yes. We ought to be doing this anyway in business. When you set that bar at zero, that's a stretch, but it's easy to understand.

Q. Are there things you thought would be easy to do that have turned out to be really difficult?

A. The technologies didn't exist and we didn't know what it was going to take to create them. We couldn't have done it by ourselves. We didn't know how long it would take to get suppliers involved, or get new inventors inventing things that we'd never heard of. So there was a big mystery about it all.

But we had a clear vision and that was the main thing. Climb that mountain clear to the top.

Ray Anderson. 

Q. In the whole lifecycle of your products, what was the hardest aspect to get within that sustainable margin? Transportation?

A. No, transportation is miniscule in the grand scheme. The important thing is the technologies for recycling. Today they have been invented and we're increasing recycled content. Like 35 percent now of our raw material comes from used products, post-consumer recycling. At the time I wrote the book, I think it was 28 percent, so it's moved up since.

Q. You're not turning plastic bottles into carpet -- you're turning old carpet into new carpet, right?

A. Yeah, the ideal product is our own product from 20 years ago. And we're also recycling other carpet manufacturers' carpets too.

Q. As a business leader, what do you want to see Congress do about climate change?

A. Put a price on carbon. I'd prefer to see it done through tax shifts, taxing bad things instead of good things. A shift in those taxes even in a revenue-neutral way that just puts a price on carbon so that an honest market can then work. Today it's a dishonest market, blind as a bat, just stumbling around ignoring the externalities.

Q. As you've made sustainability core to your business, have you gotten new customers through that effort? 

A. Yes. There was a survey done of commercial interior designers three or four years ago, who very heavily influence our marketplace, and 91 percent said they preferred recycled content.  Not just accepted it, but preferred it. Today it's probably even higher than that.

It was that community, interior designers, who were asking us the question 15 years ago: "What's your company doing for the environment?"  So when we began to actually do something, they began to embrace us for what we were doing. The goodwill of the marketplace is amazing. 

If you had to state the pure dollar-and-cents business case for sustainability, our cost is down, not up -- the waste-elimination effort alone has more than paid for all the rest of this. Our products are the best they've ever been. Biomimicry has had a huge influence; it's a wellspring of innovation. Our people are galvanized around a shared higher purpose. You can't beat it for attracting people and motivating people. And the goodwill of the marketplace is just astonishing. What else is there that underlies shareholder value but cost and products and people and market? That's it. It's a better business model without doubt.

Q. Do you think the business community at large is capable of a shift to sustainability?

A. They will either do it or be superseded by those who do. The industrial system that operates today is undermining the basis of the industrial system; it's committing suicide because nature is that undergirding factor. There's no business that can operate without air and water and food and energy and materials and climate regulation and ultraviolet radiation shields and pollination and seed dispersal and distribution. All of those are supplied by nature. If we kill nature, we will certainly kill the economy. When somebody sits down and tries to figure out the value of nature, it's very simple: Whatever the economic GDP is today, that's the value of nature, because none of it would exist without that undergirding.

Q. Are there examples of other businesses you've influenced?

A. I claim some credit for Wal-Mart. They sent two teams to our factory in Lagrange, Ga. -- one lead by Mike Duke, who is the president/CEO now, and one lead by Doug McMillon, who is now the No. 2 man. Each of them came and spent the day there understanding what we were talking about and what we were doing. They went away satisfied that it's doable, which was a huge hurdle for them to get over before they went to 60,000 suppliers and said, "You gotta do this too." I think that was a hurdle that we helped them clear. Since then they've been going gangbusters.

Q. So what's next for you?

A. We've got the rest of this mountain to climb.

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Recently, the web has been abuzz with stories about (and press releases from) companies ranked highly by the Dow Jones Sustainability Index review. The vaunted stock ticker-picker turned its eyes to green a full ten years ago to track the financial performance of “sustainability-driven companies worldwide.” Each year it releases a review of the companies in the index, using their economic, environmental, and social performance to rank them (and sometimes remove them). And the companies, in turn, use it as an excuse to make eco-happy headlines.

So what’s with all the hubbub? And is it important to us mere mortals, or just to companies and investors? We checked in with a couple of our favorite eco-business experts, Joel Makower of GreenBiz.com and Auden Schendler of Aspen Skiing Co., to get their take. Here’s what they had to say.

Should average consumers pay attention to the DJSI review? Why or why not?

Makower: No. Being named to the DJSI may be a badge of honor (or seems to be, based on the stream of press releases I get from those companies), but it isn’t really a marker for “green.” DJSI refers to these as “leading sustainability-driven companies,” and there may be some truth to that, in that these are companies that stand to benefit from growing attention to energy, water, toxics, and carbon. But being named as “components” of DJSI doesn’t necessarily mean that these companies have comprehensive green policies and practices, let alone performance.

Schendler: Consumers should pay attention, absolutely, because whether they admit it or not, corporations are paying attention, and are striving to get on, or advance up this list, meaning the the index is influencing practices. We badly need third-party assessments of corporate responsibility, no matter how flawed. We have never had any. We’ll improve on it eventually, but the DJSI is what’s for dinner right now, and it represents an honest effort to assess businesses

Of the 19 companies identified as “supersector” leaders, are there any that jump out at you as particularly surprising?

Makower: I can’t claim to be fully knowledgeable about some of these companies, particularly the non-U.S. firms. In general, it’s what I’d expect from Dow Jones: a marketbasket of companies representing a range of industries and geographies. But I could have picked other companies in the same sectors. It’s all so subjective.

Schendler: When Forbes recently headlined an issue by declaring ExxonMobil a green company because it has invested in natural gas exploration, I blew spaghetti out my nose. But on this list, there weren’t companies that jumped out at me as flagrant offenders. Some jumped out as especially deserving: these include Panasonic, Swiss Re, and Roche.

When it comes to evaluating sustainability, how should one measure a company’s performance vs. its products?

Makower: It’s a big problem. Right now, there’s no standard way of assessing a company. ISO 14001 is a good standard for company performance at the facility level, but it doesn’t speak to activities at the corporate level, or any aspect of sustainability beyond environmental. The Global Reporting Initiative helps companies report their sustainability performance in a standardized way, so we can compare company to company, but it doesn’t say anything about how good companies need to be. Same with other current standards. Someday there will be a global standard for a “green” or “sustainable” company (two different things, by the way). But for now, consumers are left to their own devices.

Schendler: There’s a hierarchy when it comes to sustainable business measures. Climate change is the issue of our time. So addressing climate with the biggest lever is by far the most important thing a corporation can do. And because our failure to solve climate and health care is fundamentally a function of the influence of corporate money on politics (politicians can’t make the right decision, they have to make the decision that keeps them in office), how businesses spend money on politics is perhaps the hallmark of how responsible they are. (If the Supreme Court allows corporate financed ads, as they well may, we can kiss our democracy goodbye.) If a business is working on its carbon footprint (good!) but not lobbying for climate policy, it’s missing the big picture. And if a business is working on factory water use but not climate, same deal. Again, this sounds harsh, but we have a climate problem first. Toxics in cosmetics is something we need to address, but it doesn’t get the same point allocation as climate action. If we don’t solve climate, we won’t be worrying about BPA in our water bottles anymore.

Along the same lines, what do you make of resulting press coverage like this: “Want an eco-friendly car? Buy a BMW!” Does it do a disservice to companies making greener products? Or does it uncover deeper, more useful information? Might it help or confuse consumers?

Makower: The mainstream media does a superb job of trivializing most environmental issues, and is particularly adept at using meaningless, hyped phrases—“Company X is going green!” (sometimes including the exclamation point). What, after all, is an eco-friendly car? Is it an electric one, or one that guzzles 20 percent less gas than it used to? The answer is probably “Yes.” Or “No.” It’s all in the eye of the beholder. Much like the DJSI companies.

Schendler: I was recently at the swimming pool talking to a friend about her family car purchase. She said: “Yeah, we heard Priuses weren’t that green—there are some issues with battery disposal. So we got a Subaru.” There’s a problem with that logic though. We don’t have a battery disposal problem, we have a climate problem. And even if we were overrun with batteries we couldn’t dispose of safely, the climate problem would still trump the battery problem. And the Prius is much better at solving climate than the Subaru.  One of the issues I have with sustainability indexes in general is that, like people do, they tend to value multiple criteria equally. So BMW, not known for efficient cars, gets a good rating, presumably for some of its other practices. But those practices, while admirable, are not as important as producing an efficient fleet of vehicles. Toyota is doing that. So is Honda. Ranking BMW so highly is therefore misleading to consumers.

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Engaging in a bit of a lovefest, Greenpeace and Kimberly-Clark announced today that the paper-products giant has finally agreed to clean up its act. It will source the fiber for its tissue products, under brand names that include Kleenex, Scott, and Cottonelle, from “environmentally responsible sources,” including those that are FSC-certified and recycled. The company has also committed to end the purchase of non-FSC fibers from Canada’s Boreal forest by 2011. For its part, Greenpeace will drop the five-year-old Kleercut campaign that has long urged Kimberly-Clark to quit destroying the Boreal just so cold-sufferers can experience a softer blow.

In a fit of hard-earned mutual admiration, Kimberly-Clark VP Suhas Apte said, “We commend Greenpeace for helping us develop more sustainable standards,” while Greenpeace USA Forest Campaign Director Scott Paul called Kimberly-Clark a “responsible company” and said its “efforts are a challenge to its competitors. I hope other companies pay close attention.”

Those other companies include Georgia Pacific and Procter & Gamble, both of which Greenpeace is still pressuring on the sustainable sourcing front.

I contacted Michael Conroy, who wrote a book on corporate greening and grassroots campaigns called Branded (and whom I interviewed last year for Grist), to see what he made of the news. “This is a huge victory for global forests, the FSC, and Greenpeace,” he replied. “Kimberly-Clark is the world’s largest manufacturer of tissue paper products. The nature of the commitments, the specific timetables provided, and the Kimberly-Clark agreement to report back regularly on what proportion of the fiber sourced for its tissue has come from recycled and FSC-certified sources makes this a very credible commitment.”

Conroy also pointed out that the conclusion of Kleercut, which “used print media, social networking, YouTube videos, and incredibly creative ways to wear down Kimberly-Clark resistance, shows that the new tools for communicating with consumers are bringing even more power to civil society as we seek to transform the social and environmental practices of the world’s largest corporations.”

Ginger Cassady, senior campaigner for ForestEthics, was also pleased as punch by the news. As Cassady wrote in an op-ed for Grist this spring on Kimberly-Clark’s “Scott Naturals” line, “Kimberly-Clark has no trouble with innovation—if they can make an anti-viral tissue product, for god’s sake, they can make Kleenex with 100 percent post-consumer recycled content.” Angry that the company was still “wiping away ancient forests to make Kleenex,” Cassady used that piece to advise consumers to avoid the distraction of a single product line and keep their eyes on the entire company.

The company’s new policy, she told me today, “is among the strongest in the world ... truly impressive.” Along with Greenpeace, she says she hopes the move by Kimberly-Clark will influence other companies. “ForestEthics congratulates Greenpeace and allies for a campaign well run,” she said.

In short, it’s an ugly situation with a hugfest ending—as evidenced by this goofy Greenpeace video:

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My father believes that the one modern invention above all others to contribute to the downfall of the planet, not to mention our civilization, is the drive-through -- or, in the spirit of efficiency on which it's based, the drive-thru.

Your idling could light this sign!Not only does it encourage laziness and obesity by tempting fast-food fans to stay seated in their automobiles during both purchase and consumption, there's the whole car idling issue. By one estimate, every fifteen minutes of idling consumes 0.175 gallons of gas, resulting in as much as 58 million tons of CO2 dispersed into the atmosphere annually. The Sierra Club says that fast-food customers alone burn up some 50 million gallons of gas each year.

But at least one company believes that there is tremendous environmental potential in the drive-thru. New Energy Technologies Inc., which describes itself as "a next-generation alternative and renewable energy developer," has designed a gizmo to green this American institution. It's called MotionPower Kinetic Energy Harvester, and it promises to capture energy currently wasted beneath a car's tires.

The technology, the company says, is the cousin of that used in hybrid cars, but it's installed on the street, soaking up the heat generated by an idling automobile and transforming it into electricity -- possibly enough to power 250,0000 homes daily, if they could trap the heat generated by all 250 million cars on the road. And what better place to grab that heat than the drive-thru?

The company announced recently that it will install a prototype of the technology in a suburban New Jersey Burger King. The start-up is so small and next generation that the one person authorized to speak about MotionPower couldn't be reached to comment for this story -- he was out of the country, apparently convincing other nations that they can transform suburban environmental flaws into potential green gold mines. The Burger King franchise owner, Andrew Paterno, says some 150,000 cars pass through the Hillside, N.J., drive-thru annually, and could simply cruise over an energy-capturing strip as they do so, with nothing getting between them and their Whoppers.

But MotionPower has popped up concurrently with an onslaught of anti-drive-thru sentiment (and not just from my dad), coming in forms as informal as blogs and as formal as legislation. Cities from Madison, Wisc., to Hamilton, Ontario, have considered banning drive-thrus altogether, though powerful restaurant coalitions tend to fight them with force, and with success; San Luis Obispo, Calif., is one of the few cities to successfully ban drive-thrus, which they've done since 1982.

Last year, the Canadian donut company Tim Horton's -- which has been steadily making its mark in America, transforming 12 New York City Dunkin' Donuts just this month -- commissioned an environmental engineering firm to evaluate the emissions generated by drive-thrus. According to the report, the snail's pace of parking lot drivers searching for a spot creates more pollution than the continual line of cars. "Assuming the same volume of traffic, a parking-only store would produce about 20 percent more smog pollutants and as many as 60 percent more greenhouse gases than a location with drive-through service," wrote their director of public affairs in a newspaper editorial based on the report. According to them, drive-thrus are already good for the environment.

If you side with the restaurateurs and believe the drive-thru isn't so bad, MotionPower's premise is still a win. The technology, should it prove to be both profitable and viable, can be used anywhere that slow driving occurs: highway tollbooths, stoplights, residential zones with traffic calming, our nation's borders, and, yes, the lots of parking-only stores. My father might have to find a new scapegoat for climate change and the decline of the modern world.

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Not too long ago I was on a panel with GM's VP of Environment, and I was reminded of how very old school most big corporations are when it comes to discussing their environmental programs. In GM's case, listening to this VP, it was as if GM was God's great gift to the environment, and always has been.

In fact, despite admirable efforts to retool the company around the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt, GM has been nothing of the sort. Actually, it's been a death star for green, between its crappy, huge vehicles, and its gruesome and nauseating national greenwashing campaign touting, among other non-things, flex fuel vehicles (which have been around for years and are kinda meaningless from a climate standpoint), and "green" SUV's that get 14 mpg, less than a Model T, or the Volt, which you can't buy.  

At the same time, GM has opposed gas taxes, increased fuel economy standards (until recently) and climate legislation. (Now, to the company's credit, it's part of USCAP and supports climate action.)  The company also consistently fought off shareholder resolutions on climate change, and as a result recently earned the title of "climate laggard" by some NGOs.

Here's my question. GM is moving in a good direction. So, instead of defending the company at every turn, why wouldn't the GM VP have said something like this: "Look, GM is a very old, very big company. We have not been admirable on environmental issues. But we're trying to change--and I submit the Chevy Volt and USCAP as two examples. We have a long way to go, and turning this big ship is hard."  

There is absolutely nothing to lose through this position, which represents nothing more than an honest take on things. Instead, GM and many other corporations won't acknowledge any past, or present, transgressions. Instead, in GM's case, the company points to the consumer and says, "We're only supplying what the customer wants."

Uh...noooooooo. As Tom Friedman points out, by opposing gas taxes, GM helped create conditions whereby Americans would lean towards big gas guzzlers. And at every turn, there seems to be stock unwillingness to admit any cracks in the company's green armor. But why not? It doesn't hurt a business to say, "We screwed up." In fact, it radically increases credibility.

Conclusion: businesses have nothing to lose by being brutally honest about their environmental successes and failures. So leave the PR people at home and tell the frickin' truth.

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Photo: Sarah van SchagenStroll into the newly renovated Starbucks coffeehouse in Seattle's University Village and the décor may feel more familiar than you'd expect.

The menu boards are made from the chalkboards you may have scribbled on at nearby Garfield High School; the shelving is from old bleachers you may have sat upon; the leather accents near the bar are from your old shoes and car seats; and the ash-wood community table that stretches the length of the store and patio (one-third of it is outside) is salvaged from a tree that fell in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood.

It's part of an effort to create a shared sense of community while reducing impact on the planet -- all by sourcing materials locally. But it's no one-off show-off. The University Village store is actually one of three pilot locations (another in Seattle is on the corner of 1st Ave. and Pike St., and a third is in Paris Disney Village in Paris, France) for the company's new global store design strategy.

That strategy, which is part of the brand's Shared Planet initiative, also involves employing local artisans and craftsmen and incorporating reused and recycled materials as much as possible. All of which will help the stores achieve LEED green building certification -- the goal for all new company-owned stores built and renovated beginning in 2010.

Photo: Sarah van Schagen"This green store vision for the company has been happening and building in momentum for several years now," says Jim Hanna, director of environmental impact for Starbucks. "When we ran our carbon footprint, it basically said that 75 percent of our total carbon footprint is operation of our stores ... so if we were really going to have an impact on reducing our footprint, we had to start with the stores."

And this particular store, which reopened to coffeehounds at 6 a.m. this morning, is the company's second busiest globally, which makes it a perfect location for testing the green design concepts. One of those new elements is the lighting: Unhappy with the LED options available on the market, Starbucks partnered with GE to create an LED light fixture that wouldn't be so harsh.

And while the new GE lights are only available to Starbucks right now, they may eventually make it to the mass market. It's a good example of how the company is using its size for good, Hanna says -- not unlike Wal-Mart and other massive global brands that are often villainized, but can create major change in the market when they put their minds to it.

"A lot of our stores have a relatively similar footprint to people's homes," Hanna said. "So if somebody sees a cool LED lighting bank in the store, that's something they can take home and use in their house to reduce their energy usage."

The same could be said for the dual-flush toilets, which are already in use in all of their Australian locations. "It's interesting," says Starbucks Corporate Architect Tony Gale, "people come out of those coffeehouses and that's what they're talking about -- the dual-flush toilets."

In an effort to shepherd this sort of take-home messaging, Starbucks is adding explanatory signage throughout the stores to highlight the sustainable elements.

"Our new design actually gives the community a way to learn a little bit more about it as they discover it and maybe take some of those behaviors back to their homes," says Liz Muller, director of global concept design. "It becomes more of a lab for taking care of our planet."

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Sports leagues and teams are beginning to take sustainability issues more seriously.If you watch sports on TV, you may be thinking from your perch on the couch that they are a relatively inexpensive, practically carbon-neutral diversion from life's occupations. But sport is big business, facing many of the same environmental challenges as the manufacturing, agriculture, and energy sectors.

Whether it's golf, baseball, football, basketball, soccer/futball, hockey, auto racing, rugby, cricket (yes, cricket! -- remember, it's huge in other parts of the world) or countless others, they individually and collectively have an enormous impact on the environment.

Grist has decided to take your carbon-based guilt and extend it to one of those few places that serves as a distraction from it: your favorite sport. In regular articles, I will venture forth and examine with a green eye (meaning both financial and environmental) some of the major sports the world has to offer. Within that context, I will try to unearth the good, the bad, and the ugly of operational practice that have profound impacts on the environment, both on a local and global scale.

While no sport or team is identical in how it operates, some themes are universal -- including energy use, waste management, water consumption, pesticide use, land use, transportation, carbon emissions etc. Facing the sports community is a host of challenges -- from complying with existing and future environmental rules to meeting high consumer expectations -- all the while focusing on good business practices and a strong balance sheet.

To say that the professional sports community has yet to recognize the impact its members may be having on the environment is disingenuous. Professional football, baseball, basketball and hockey all have fledgling green initiatives at the league level, and several teams have taken major leaps at becoming sustainable operations (more on those in later columns).

However, this phenomenon is relatively new. As corporate America (GE, Proctor & Gamble, PNC etc.) began to embrace environmental sustainability as a profitable business model in the not too distant past, the sports industry has only made a measurable appearance at the table within the past few years.

Whether the change was self-started or the result of prodding by some heavy hitters within the environmental community is up for debate and further examination. What can be said is that certain segments of the professional sports community recognize the need to move towards sustainable operations, but the speed and fiscal capacity to do so are a continuing concern and claimed impediment.

For readers who are not familiar with the fiscal expenditure habits of a professional sports team, this next fact may be a shock. While the media brings us stories of sums being paid to professional athletes that can only be described as mind numbing (one example: a Manchester United soccer star is being paid the equivalent of $190,520 per week, and it may not be enough to keep him (too late: he just got bought by Real Madrid for $131.6 million), the front office staff is not so lucky.

While I am sure there are exceptions, historically, the folks who perform heavy operational lifting for sports teams and leagues are paid comparably middle-class wages. This frugality transcends other expenditures, including sustainability investment. The industry grabs as much free help as it can in the development of individual green initiatives. Eventually, as some teams have realized, investing real dollars in sustainability programs will not only save them money they would otherwise have to spend, but also generate new, profitable revenue streams as a result of the initial investment.

One question I have is this: In order to get the snowball really moving before it melts, who in sports business needs to step up to the proverbial plate? Is it the teams/organizations? The players? The fans? Or a combination of the three?

For those who argue that it is the team (i.e. owners) who should pay up (because operational costs are built into ticket prices, advertising dollars, licensing and merchandise revenue) -- that's a fair point. But sustainable investment was not originally built into pricing formulas, therefore, the cost for tickets and merchandise would have go up.

As for the players, they are certainly part of the organization and collectively receive the largest portion of the organization's revenue. Thus they should bear some of the costs of sustainable practices in the form of reduced salaries (god forbid!).

And lastly, the fans. Costs are already passed on to the consumer, so the fan is inevitably invested. But an additional point needs to be made: When one is looking at the carbon footprint of an organization's operation, the fan is by far the biggest contributor. Just imagine the carbon footprint of 108,000 fans traveling to and from one Michigan football game. How is that impact measured, and who should be responsible for offsetting it?

There are countless small examples of sustainable practices infiltrating the sport industry, including recycling programs at stadiums and planting trees to offset a team's carbon emissions. Getting a sports team or college athletic departments to adopt a profitable sustainability program is an expensive and time-consuming commitment for which teams will need fan support, encouragement and assistance.

Because it does all start with the fans' (make that customers') support. After all, sports is a business, and the fans are the customers.

Check back in two weeks for my first effort at describing the greening of sports -- a closer look at golf. Why not? President Obama has been playing a lot of it lately (five times since late April).

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Entrepreneur Jeffrey Hollender launched a mail-order catalog business 20 years ago and nursed it for more than a decade before it became profitable. That company is now Seventh Generation, and there's no more catalog, but there certainly is a ton of recycled toilet paper -- and all-natural cleaning supplies and non-toxic personal-care products.

It's a product category that has seen massive growth in the last few years as environmental issues have risen to front-page news status. In fact, Seventh Generation saw its biggest numbers recently -- posting about 50 percent growth last year. Which is exactly why Hollender has decided it's time to step down from his role as CEO.

Sound like odd timing? Not for Hollender. "I realized that I lacked most of the experience that would be required to manage that growth to its fruition," he says. Hollender was also growing increasingly torn between other projects like writing -- his next book, In Our Every Deliberation, comes out next month -- and speaking gigs, and a TV program called Big Green Lies. "As I wandered around the offices, I began to wonder what all the people in different rooms were doing."

So as of last week, there was at least one more new face in the Seventh Generation offices: Chuck Maniscalco. He comes to the company from PepsiCo, where he was CEO of the $10 billion Quaker, Tropicana, and Gatorade division, which he calls "very purpose-driven businesses." Maniscalco, who actually came out of retirement to take on this job, says he's determined to manage Seventh Generation's growth in a way that remains true to the company's commitment to sustainability.

As for Hollender, he'll be continuing in the role of "Chief Inspired Protagonist," focusing more on corporate responsibility and sustainability advocacy work rather than being involved the company's day-to-day operations.

I spoke to the two of them in a three-way conference call just days after Maniscalco took over his new office. Here's what they had to say:

Q. One of the reasons you're leaving, Jeffrey, is because of the massive growth Seventh Generation has seen recently. What do you attribute that success to?

A. Hollender: I think that we live in a world where there is a tremendous sort of search for purpose and meaning. In some respects, who Seventh Generation is and what we aspire to helps people be the people they want to be and live the lives they want to live and that is a stark contrast to what they often experience from [other] companies and businesses ... [It] builds a strong and deep connection to people that I think is more important than it has perhaps ever been. Now, that's not enough; you have to also get your products on the shelves of stores at the right price and the products have to work the way people expect them to work.

Q. Speaking of getting your products on the shelves at the right price, are you still refusing to sell them in Wal-Mart?

A. Hollender: Historically, that was true; up until a year ago while we were in a very close dialogue with Wal-Mart and working to help them become a more sustainable and responsible business, we were not comfortable selling to them. But the progress that Wal-Mart has made in the past three to four years is astounding and absolutely an incredible inspiration for what's possible of a large company. Does that mean they're perfect today? No, but they have made more progress than just about any company that I can think of and that progress has led us to experiment with them in a small group of stores. ... So it's really a question for Chuck in terms of when is the right time and what is the right way, but there is no philosophic issue that restrains us from doing business with them.

Q. Do you feel like it's possible for a big company like Wal-Mart or PepsiCo to commit to the same standards of sustainability that Seventh Generation has?

Chuck Maniscalco (left) and Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation.Photo: Chrystie HeimertA. Maniscalco: I think it would be difficult for any company to ever reach up to the standards that Seventh Generation has set. I've never seen it before, and I probably will never see it again and that's why I'm here. Having said that, Wal-Mart, for example, was a very big customer for PepsiCo and Quaker Oats, and Wal-Mart over the course of the last several years has been the single biggest force in getting companies in the consumer packaged-goods world to take waste out of their products, out of their packages, and out of the supply-chain stream. So I think they can be a force for good.

Hollender: And they can move quicker than government or any regulatory agency. Now, they don't all use that power in ways that are beneficial, in fact we wouldn't be in the situation we are if they did. But I don't believe that we can solve the urgent problems that face us -- whether it's global warming, or whether it's a crisis of fresh water or species disappearance -- without aggressive leadership from the business community. Part of the role that Seventh Generation wants to play is showing business that being responsible is good business and being sustainable is good business, and that we can't afford to have business stand in the way of the progress we need to make to become more sustainable.

Q. In the same vein, is it possible for a company like Seventh Generation to scale up? You've said your goal was to take the company from $150 million annually to $1 billion. How do you plan to do this while maintaining a commitment to sustainability?

A. Maniscalco: It's a question of how to get big and be authentic at the same time ... Even with all of the growth this business has had over many, many years, we have still tapped into a minority of the consumers out there who care about what we offer in our products and who care about what the company stands for ... so there's still distribution opportunities. And from a consumer standpoint, this group of people is already big and it's growing by the day, because all of the issues that we all know the world is facing are becoming much more apparent to more people. So I absolutely think it's doable, but you have to do it with real care and real discipline. And that's our charge.

Hollender: It helps to be a private company so that we don't have to answer to shareholders who've purchased stock in the company who might not share our vision or our values. We choose our investors as carefully if not more carefully than our employees, because the alignment of those investors is absolutely critical. I also think that what I've experienced is that a company with the mission we have is a magnet for the best talent in the marketplace ... that's one of the ways in which we will scale, because we can get the best and brightest people to come and join what we're doing.

Q. When you started Seventh Generation, you were a big fish in a little pond. That pond is more crowded now; is there enough room in the pool for everyone? How do you feel about the competitors like Method who are on the shelves with you at Target or other stores?

A. Maniscalco: People always say they love competition and they rarely mean it. I would say, in this case, we love competition and we do mean it. In my view, the more people who come into this space -- and do so legitimately -- the greater good we're serving. And as Jeffrey pointed out before, we don't succeed against our mission if we do it all by ourselves. Secondly, the more people that come into this space and do it right, the more awareness and understanding consumers will have about how to behave responsibly. The challenge for us, I think, is to ensure that we keep driving standards higher and higher and higher, so that as other people come along, we still have a significant edge over them.

Hollender: One of the biggest gaps that exists today is a green product does not make a green company. And what we need to do -- and what we need our customers, consumers, and partners to do -- is to push businesses beyond greening a teeny part of their business, to embrace sustainability across everything they do. When you look at the competitive landscape today, it's mostly large companies taking a small part of their portfolio and making it greener than it was before. I think that consumers will increasingly look for sustainable companies, not just sustainable products.

Q. You're touching on a major problem for consumers: greenwashing -- companies putting out products that have green labels on them, but aren't really following that up within the actual product or their company as a whole. What can consumers do to make sure they're buying a legitimate product?

A. Hollender: Well, I'll just mention two things. One is we have a great application that you can download to your phone or your computer or your PDA. As you're walking down the aisles of a grocery store, you can use this application to help make better choices. Secondly, we are big advocates of what the Good Guide is doing, and we think that the service that a third party like the Good Guide provides in making independent evaluations of the products on the shelf is a very valuable service to consumers.

Q. What is the biggest challenge for a business wanting to be truly sustainable?

A. Hollender: I think we face a couple of challenges. Clearly, education is a huge challenge, so it is critical that we help consumers make conscious and responsible choices. We need greater transparency so that they can make informed decisions. Secondly, we live in a regulatory environment that often encourages us to do the wrong thing because companies are allowed to externalize so much of their costs that dangerous, environmentally irresponsible products often cost less than sustainable, responsible products. If consumers are shown the full cost of the products and services that they're buying, there's no question that they will increasingly choose responsible, sustainable products.

Q. How can we show them that cost?

A. Hollender: There are hundreds and hundreds of examples, and some of them directly affect our business. We're in the business of selling recycled tissue paper, and the government -- for the last year in which a calculation was made -- spent a billion dollars subsidizing the virgin timber industry by building roads and allowing that timber to be cut at below-market prices. What that does is it artificially makes recycled fiber more expensive. All of these things send the wrong message to the consumer, and we need to actively make sure that the government and the regulatory agencies are reflecting decisions that are in the best interest of future generations, not the shareholders of some of America's largest companies.

Q. So, it's got to be a political-activism sort of thing?

A. Hollender: It does, and Chuck's going to allow me more time to do that, which I'm looking forward to.

Maniscalco: The great news is we've now got Jeffrey playing a much bigger role in that big external environment, and I can get really focused on driving [the company] from the inside, and I think that's a really good one-two punch.

Hollender: Absolutely. We're subtly sending a message to all these large companies that they better, to a certain extent, watch out because this is a game-changing event for our business and for our industry. The addition of Chuck to Seventh Generation will dramatically accelerate the need for everyone to rise to a higher standard and move more quickly in a sustainable direction.

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Q. Dear Umbra,

I am a consumer who has recently convinced a friend of mine to green his business. I am now in charge of doing all of the research. My question is, how do I go about assessing the life cycle of various products? ... Do you know of such a service/website? I have tried to Google things but it is very hard to get side by side comparisons. Also, do you know of a good website that rates random products according to their environmental impact?

Tamara A.
Munich, Germany

Data, people. We need data.iStockA. Dearest Tamara,

Welcome to my life. If there were such a website, I would keep it secret, so that I seemed to have a mysterious font of knowledge. Instead we have floors 2B-4B, vast subterranean shelves stretching in to the distance and little cubbies filled with gerbils manipulating abaci. It's quite dusty down here.

You appear to seek two separate assessments. A "Life Cycle Assessment" in the environmental sense is an examination of an object or action from birth to death, resulting in a quantified measurement of its total environmental impacts. An LCA does not usually include an evaluation of the quality of an object. In a comparison between cloth and disposable diapers, the LCA might mention that disposable diapers are less durable, i.e., single-use items, but this is inherent to the product category. So you are asking for two things: one, to know which of various comparable categories is environmentally superior (e.g., bus vs. light rail, paper vs. plastic); and then within those categories, which individual product is best (e.g., Friend of the Planet Pencils vs. Feel Really Guilty Pencils).

For the daily stuff, the product evaluation is easier to find than an LCA. People like to read product reviews, so there are many services providing reviews, and many online discussions. I fell into the black hole of European Clothes Washer message boards a couple years ago -- men passionately discussing the various benefits of their German machines. Where do people find the time?

The side-by-side evaluation is less common than "We Like This!" Grist does comparative product reviews. Other sites with a green review component are the Green Guide and Consumer Reports' Greener Choices. I've also noticed that Amazon consumer reviews are enthusiastic and prolific. There is a new site, GoodGuide, that looks interesting and like it would suit your needs, but it is still under development.

I'll just give you a few suggestions for formal LCA sites, because these are denser. A big behemoth is the Carnegie Mellon EIO-LCA site, which "estimates the materials and energy resources required for, and the environmental emissions resulting from, activities in our economy." I've talked about the EIO-LCA before, and using it requires some work on your part, to figure out what parts of the (U.S.) economy the activity involves and then do some math. The benefit of EIO-LCA is being able to estimate emissions even if you can find no formal comparative LCA. Here is an LCA database -- just enter your search terms and have a party! And here's another that I've yet to use.

There is no simple answer to what you are asking, but in the several years since I started writing this column, these services have proliferated. I believe that in a few more years all knowledge will be laid at our fingertips. Umbra has spoken.

Prophetically,
Umbra

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A mess in Texas?City of ArlingtonRemember how we reported on green sports venues, and one of them was the new stadium of the Dallas Cowboys, and the stadium was steeped in land-use controversy, but the good news was that the team was registering with the EPA to monitor the facility’s long-term performance?

Turns out that EPA program no longer exists. The agency axed the National Environmental Performance Track—a voluntary program that asked member facilities to “set typically four public, measurable goals” showing their eagerness to “go above and beyond their legal requirements”—last month. The program’s website, which is still up but carries a message at the top notifying visitors of its cancellation, says it had more than 500 members. A mid-March memo from EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says the program “may not speak to today’s challenges” and outlines a plan for halting and reviewing it. A follow-up document from March 25 spells out details of the closure for members. The good news: You can still display your certificates, and next week’s National Environmental Partnership Summit is still on! The bad news: uh, your program has been killed.

In fact, it’s not bad news at all. The program, created in 2000, is a Bush-era relic that apparently did nothing much more than cozy up to corporations—this Philadelphia Inquirer piece from December outlines numerous sketchy dealings, including wooing big polluters and padding membership numbers by adding subsidiaries and individual facilities instead of parent companies. And that whole “voluntary” thing didn’t pan out so well: a review in 2007 showed that only two of 30 members surveyed had actually met their goals.

As for the Cowboys, they may be better off without it.

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Len SauersProcter & GambleDoes Earth Day still matter? Sure, it does -- absolutely.

But the reason for the day should have evolved for all of us. Instead of simply planting a new seedling and moving on, we should be looking at Earth Day in a new light.

Earth Day should no longer be a jump-start to action, activism, and awakening. We all need to be far beyond that.

Instead, Earth Day should now be about:

Earth Day started as a way to recognize that the Earth needs help. We should all get that. Now, what are we doing to intervene -- and how we can help each other do more?

From a corporate perspective, we are faced with many opportunities to make a tremendous difference. But I would challenge that today's mission of "going green" is not a bandwagon, it's a journey. And the deliverables need to not only be real, but long-lasting and sustainable in and of themselves.

I also would challenge that if done strategically, all the "green" stuff we do throughout the rest of the year should be good not just for the environment, but also for business and partnerships. And that right here, at this intersection -- where environmental issues and business needs meet -- is where green can establish real roots and begin to grow. Here is where it becomes more than a day, but a way of doing business -- every day.

At P&G, we made a commitment several years ago to integrate sustainability into every part of our business. All new facilities are built from a sustainability blueprint, ensuring that we are maximizing the natural environment and minimizing our footprint. We're designing production lines that recycle once-escaping energy. We're re-engineering packages on many of our 300 brands to reduce packaging without any discernable change to design or to the user's experience. We've also reformulated some of our products, delivering compact laundry formulas that come in smaller bottles or deliver superior cleaning in cold water.

As a result, we're reducing our energy intake, our waste, and our costs while increasing efficiency and productivity. It's an artful blend of environmental green and business black.

We're learning that it's important to not only make a difference now, but to also ensure we remain a strong player tomorrow. That way, we can continue to help shape the future.

To me, that's what Earth Day should now be about for us all. It's not an awakening or a campaign. Short-term wins are not wins. And we can and should be helping each other. After all, we are on this journey -- together.

Happy Earth Day!

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If a huge coal power plant goes next door and sets up a cute little boutique collection of five solar panels, have your basic feelings about that giant coal power plant changed? Probably not. After all, you're reading Grist.

But what if said coal company releases advertisements announcing that they've "gone solar," complete with misleading close-up pics of those cute solar panels? Enough people might fall for it to make the ads worthwhile.

Call it the cute little dollhouse effect: a nasty company builds a cute, green dollhouse version of their house, takes misleading pics suggesting that the dollhouse is the real house, and then declares itself a cute little green company.

Ladies and Gentlemen, gargantuan loggovore Kimberly-Clark has built itself a cute little dollhouse!

The world's largest manufacturer of tissue products, Kimberly-Clark continues to clearcut Canada's Boreal forest to make their flagship Kleenex brand tissue. It contains no recycled content. Zero. Donut. Greenpeace has been on the case for a number of years, running a markets campaign highlighting the fact that Kimberly-Clark is wiping away ancient forests to make Kleenex -- which is more useful than most junk mail, but only for a split second.

Natural, or just another faker?scottcommonsense.comThe company's new Naturals line of products -- released under their "Scott" brand name -- is a clear acknowledgement of the impact of Greenpeace's campaign, but also a classic example of the cute little dollhouse effect. It's like a cleaner, greener Mini-Me, which while cute and ostensibly good, does not change the wholly unimpressive state of the parent brand.

The Naturals line amply demonstrates that Kimberly-Clark can make a high-quality tissue with recycled content. That's great to finally see. But Greenpeace's recent tissue guide gave all of the Naturals products an "avoid" rating because their levels of post-consumer recycled content still fall below recommended levels.

Kimberly-Clark has no trouble with innovation -- if they can make an anti-viral tissue product, for god's sake, they can make Kleenex with 100 percent post-consumer recycled content. But Seventh Generation's and Cascades' entire product lines still outdo Kimberly-Clark's best.

And though Kimberly-Clark chooses not to, other companies make the grade. To see how Kimberly-Clark fails to stack up against truly sustainable options, check out the guide. View the kind of destruction that results in a box of Kleenex here.

And while Kimberly-Clark wants you to look at dollhouses and other relatively meaningless playthings, keep your eyes on the real company.

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Corporate sustainability guru Auden Schendler lays out the problem with corporate sustainability gurus in his recent Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution. In doing so, he pretty much dares the nation's copy editors to title their reviews with the decade's most played-out headline: "It's Not Easy Being Green." Can they resist?

The book argues that environmental overhauls of corporations are not easy, nor are they necessarily profitable. And environmentalists who want corporations to green-up anyway would do well to talk straight with them about the difficulties.

Schendler finds that sort of honesty lacking in the proliferation of green-business cheerleading.

"Dig beneath the surface of one of the many green 'success stories' you read about in the news and you'll frequently find something more like Apocalypse Now than a finely tuned operation," writes Schendler, who has written for Grist. "This doesn't mean we give up. But we need to recognize that it's one thing to watch a PowerPoint presentation on corporate sustainability, and another thing to make it real."

He draws examples from his day job, executive director of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company. In his early days there, he approached the manager of the company's Little Nell Hotel with the idea of using compact florescent bulbs in the guest rooms. Schendler promised the move would save on energy costs, replacement bulbs, and staff time, paying for the cost of switching in less than a year (a win-win-win, if you will). The manager, with a five-star reputation to preserve, promptly shot him down.

"When you go to Las Vegas and stay in a Motel 6, they have compact fluorescent bulbs," he told Schendler. "This isn't a Motel 6."

If reducing the environmental impact of a high-end ski resort brings unique challenges, it also exposes Schendler to some obvious criticisms. In fact, he suggests a few of them: Aspen can afford solutions that other places can't. Ski resorts are more interested in polishing their image than in achieving global change. And an industry reliant on disposable income, jet travel, and second homes has no right to preach to the rest of us.

Schendler responds, in part, that the world needs test labs -- or canaries in the coal mine. Even wealthy ones. Aspen can help craft a roadmap to sustainability because it can afford to fail in some experiments. Perhaps less convincingly, he argues that the lavish Aspen lifestyle is an advantage here, making the town a good microcosm for the lavish American lifestyle at large.

On the question of image-polishing, Schendler argues that every "green" claim a company makes opens it up to more environmental scrutiny, which in turn encourages more thorough greening. This makes corporate greenwashing a good thing, he says, even though it's deceitful by nature. Scrutiny from customers, employees, watchdog groups, the public, and the press holds the company accountable to its environmental claims, and "painting a business green invariably steers it toward improved practices."

But wouldn't corporate honesty (laugh if you must) be better and more efficient to begin with? And what about false claims that are never exposed? Schendler doesn't have much to say on this, which is why this happily counterintuitive section feels a little thin.

The book fairly brims with Schendler's playfulness, though. You get a sense that the 38-year-old feeds off the unavoidable conflict his job involves -- with both the mechanics in the plow shop and the suits in the board room.

Auden Schendler

Schendler claims blue-collar cred from his time as a "weatherization technician" in a low-income housing program. "It sounds fancy, but it means that I crawled under mobile homes [to install installation] through mud and animal carcasses into spaces so small I couldn't turn my head," he writes. That work convinced him the sustainability movement requires "more grunts, fewer visionaries," and that for innovations such as biodiesel engines to catch on, they need to win over the grunts who actually use them.

As for working in boardrooms and business conferences, Schendler says everybody with "environment" or "sustainability" in their title labors under the disadvantage of being lumped with hippie scolds -- the product of a cultural "70s hangover":

He cringes at the woman at a sustainable business conference who announces "I cry for the earth," knowing she makes it that much easier for skeptical executives to write off his message.

But he also acknowledges that green business leaders must be willing to speak about a moral mandate. Quite a few green business measures, particularly energy efficiency projects, will pay for themselves quickly. But profitability won't justify all of them. Or the payoff will take too long to interest CFOs focused on quarterly reports.

The book more or less delivers on the title's promise of "hard truths." Schendler includes a sober assessment of recent climate science, refuses to take comfort in personal-behavior improvements like reusable shopping bags, and attacks renewable energy credits (RECs), long a darling of corporate greening-up programs. (Read a version of his REC critique on Climate Progress).

Yet another chapter provides a persuasive critique of the LEED building certification program: In short, energy use outweighs every other factor in green building, but LEED doesn't reflect this.

If this all sounds like a wide range of topics, it is. But Schendler's bald enthusiasm for wrestling with such problems holds the book together. Anyone with a passing interest in these issues would likely find it engaging reading. And for corporate sustainability officers, it should be required.

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Nike, Starbucks, eBay, and a handful of other big-name U.S. companies are putting forward a climate agenda that's just as ambitious as that of many environmentalists, if not more so.

The new coalition -- Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy, or BICEP for short -- grew out of a partnership between Nike and Ceres, a nonprofit network of investors and enviro groups. Other members now include Gap, Symantec, Levi Strauss & Co., Sun Microsystems, and Timberland.

At a briefing in Washington, D.C. in early March, the coalition unveiled its priorities: cutting emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and creating an economy-wide cap-and-trade system that auctions 100 percent of carbon credits.

The group is also calling for aggressive policies that will at least double the country's energy efficiency; the creation of green-collar jobs in low-income communities; and a national renewable electricity standard that will require 20 percent of electricity to be generated from renewable sources by 2020.

Starbucks Director of Environmental Impact Jim Hanna noted that global warming will affect the climate of coffee-farming regions in Central America and Africa. "It's important for us to realize that there is a direct risk to our companies," said Hanna. "It wasn't altruism."

Ceres President Mindy Lubber, speaking with Grist after the briefing, stressed the need for more business leaders to be involved in the national discussion about climate change. "The public face has to be more than environmentalists and scientists," she said. "These are business leaders saying it is good for the economy to act, because it's a mandatory cap that will send the right market signals, that carbon has a real cost, we have to stop willy-nilly putting it into the air." The members of BICEP want a price on carbon so they can better plan for the future, she said -- and so that businesses already working toward sustainability can be rewarded for their efforts.

The BICEP agenda is more ambitious than the plan put forward by the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of major companies like ConocoPhillips and General Motors plus green groups like Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council. USCAP calls for emissions cuts of 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050, and a cap-and-trade program that would give away a significant portion of the carbon credits. While USCAP's members include more energy-intensive companies, both coalitions represent big players in the U.S. economy.

Lubber called the BICEP plan "much more aggressive" than USCAP's, but said the two should be seen as complementary. "We need multiple voices, we need hundreds of voices on this," she said. "Members of Congress need to hear that acting on climate is not bad for our economy, but is an important piece of jump-starting our economy, which we sorely need."

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