Enviro Co
by Lynn Bliss
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When forest manager Bill Howe met the people hired to evaluate the environmental methods used to log the 94,000-acre Collins Almanor Forest in the early 1990s, he was skeptical and annoyed. Howe had been working in logging for the Collins Companies for nearly two decades, and knew that the company was devoted to preserving the softwood forest that is tucked into the Sierra Nevada mountains of northern California, which they do by selecting trees to be cut on a case-by-case basis. Unlike many other forestry companies, Collins didn't do clear-cut logging on its Almanor property, and trees ranged in age, size, and species throughout the dense woods.
But, the Collins Companies wanted to become the first U.S. logging company to receive Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification for its wood products. The council, an international nonprofit that certifies wood as coming from forests managed in an environmentally and socially responsible manner, requires logging companies seeking the FSC label to submit to an independent assessment of their forestry management. And that's how Howe came face to face with Robert Hrubes, a member of a team dispatched by Scientific Certification Systems of Emeryville, California, who had some suggestions for improvement. Howe had met Hrubes before, when he had attended state board of forestry meetings, and Hrubes had been working as a private forestry consultant for the Sierra Club and other environmental groups—the logging industry's equivalent of the Antichrist.
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"He was always on the environmentalist side, always arguing against the industry, and there we were, hiring these people to come in and evaluate us," said Howe. "I didn't want anything to do with this guy."
Today, a decade later, the Collins Companies has certified portions of two other forests in southern Oregon and the Allegheny Mountains of northern Pennsylvania, and Hrubes and Howe have put their differences behind them. Howe, now retired at age 57, became a strong supporter of FSC certification and went on to serve on the group's U.S. board. Hrubes, now a senior vice president at Scientific Certification Systems in the San Francisco Bay area, said that in the years since their initial meeting the two men became friendly.
"We weren't exactly welcomed with open arms. It was kind of tense in the beginning, because we were there only because of the corporate folks. He was openly hostile to the idea, or at least reluctantly going along," said Hrubes, who said that Collins had already been operating its forests in a very environmentally sound manner for decades, but needed to better document what it was doing to obtain certification. "And just a few short years later, he was jumping in hook, line, and sinker and becoming a true believer."
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The Collins Companies was founded in the 19th century
by a family that donated generously to what is now the
United Methodist Church; a church-related trust still
holds a minority stake in its timber holdings. But the
firm's decision to become FSC certified wasn't
motivated primarily by selfless concern for the environment
and fellow man—
executives thought they could boost business by getting
their forests certified. Their hunch turned out to be
correct: They were able to charge more for some FSC-certified
products, and they were able to gain more market share
from competitors on contracts that specified a preference
for certified products.
"We did it because, frankly, we thought we could make some money. We thought we could differentiate ourselves from other companies. But in the process, senior management became true believers," said senior vice president Wade Mosby.
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In many ways, what happened at Collins Companies parallels what is happening throughout corporate America with respect to environmental issues. It's usually the companies that are already employing sound environmental practices that decide to commit to higher standards, whether it involves certification or signing a voluntary promise with a nonprofit group to reduce emissions. Adopting those new standards can be a rocky process, as employees at all levels have to adapt to changes in the way they work. And most companies go that extra step not because their executive suites and boardrooms are populated by ex-Greenpeace members, but because they see it as a valuable sales tool that will allow them to either sell more or sell at a higher price.
"I think what's happening is that more and more companies are realizing that this is good business. As much as we like to believe that companies are in this for the common good, what they're really looking at is the bottom line," said Peter Wilkes, a managing director at Innovest, a New York research firm that rates companies on their environmental sensitivity. "And at the end of the day, that microcosm of how a company is running its environmental programs gives investors a picture of how the company is running overall. It becomes a proxy for good management."
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Investor response to good environmental policy, along with the potential for more profits, has nudged more and more publicly traded companies into greener pastures in recent years, but the level of commitment varies. The World Wildlife Fund and the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions has signed up six companies—including the Collins Companies, Johnson & Johnson, Nike, IBM, Polaroid, and construction-material supplier Lafarge North America—to join its Climate Savers pledge to reduce global warming gases. Another 38 corporations have joined the Business Environmental Leadership Council of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, pledging to assess their domestic greenhouse-gas emissions and establish programs to reduce them, but without committing to set targets publicly.
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Even in traditionally earth-unfriendly industries,
such as manufacturing, some companies have made significant
strides. One corporation that has revamped nearly everything
it does is a small Atlanta, Georgia-based carpet tile
maker, known as Interface, Inc. The 29-year-old company
has a lofty goal: It wants to run an environmentally
sustainable business by 2020. To that end, it has reduced
the scrap going to landfills by 80 percent, reduced
its carbon dioxide emissions about 30 percent per unit
of production at its largest business unit, and closed
one-third of its outlet pipes and stacks at factories
worldwide. It has reduced its reliance on fossil fuel
by about one-third in the past seven years. Three of
its factories use photovolteic energy, and four purchase
certified green electricity. Eighty percent of the polyester
manufactured by its Guilford of Maine unit and used
in its fabrics comes from recycled plastic bottles.
The company's founder and chairman, Ray Anderson,
drives a Toyota Prius, a hybrid gas and electric car.
The company contracts with American Forest, a nonprofit
company, to plant a specified number of trees for every
plane trip its employees take; since 1997, Interface
has planted 30,000 trees to compensate for the CO2 generated
by business
air travel.
"We're about a third of the way to our goal of eliminating waste," said Anderson. "Most of our raw materials are still petroleum derived, but we're gradually cutting that umbilical cord."
Anderson said that for the first 21 years of Interface's existence, the only thing he cared about was making sure the company complied with existing environmental regulations. Then, in 1994, he read Paul Hawken's Ecology of Commerce, and it changed his thinking.
As with the Collins Companies, there was some initial resistance to Anderson's vision. Dan Hendrix, who was the chief financial officer when Anderson declared his interest in going green, was concerned it would be too expensive to adopt environmental goals beyond what was legally required.
"I was a pretty big skeptic of it. I said all right, but it can't cost us money," said Hendrix, now president and CEO. "The whole culture at that time was "We're trying to cut costs." Ray said it would take a while to change the culture, and it really did."
David Oakey, president of David Oakey Designs in LaGrange, Georgia, was enlisted by Interface to design a carpet tile that would incorporate elements of biomimickry, or using design principles found in nature. Oakey came up with Entropy, a pattern that doesn't require each tile to exactly match the next. The result is less waste when the tiles are cut and installed, and faster installation by workers who no longer have to worry about matching the pattern. Entropy has quickly become Interface's top-selling product.
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"Nature doesn't make things perfect. There is no such thing as a solid-color leaf or stone," said Oakey. "If nature were going to design carpet tile, every tile would look different as far as its color and design. Which is completely opposite of what we've been trying to do for decades."
There's no question that the measures taken have benefited Interface's bottom line. By eliminating waste, the company has added $185 million to its operating income over the past seven years. It has been able to win more contracts from architects and designers, who often specify that they prefer to use environmentally sensitive products.
Herman Miller, Inc., a Zeeland, Michigan-based manufacturer of office furniture, has also made strides to reduce its environmental footprint, and in the process has knocked $1 million a year off its energy bill. It has set goals to reduce the energy it uses, the hazardous waste it produces, and the volatile chemicals it uses. A founding member of the U.S. Green Buildings Council, Herman Miller's manufacturing plant in western Michigan burns the company's own waste in a heat-recovery boiler, diverting 13,000 tons of waste from landfills each year and heating and cooling the entire plant. The company has developed a system of returnable packaging for its suppliers, so that materials are delivered in reusable bins that are sent back to be refilled again, rather than being tossed out. To reduce the waste involved in packaging products that it delivers to customers, Herman Miller ships about half of its chairs wrapped in the same blankets that commercial furniture movers use, which can be re-used.
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"It's good business for everybody," said Paul Murray, the company's corporate environmental affairs manager. "The end user doesn't have to deal with all that packaging, and we like it because it saves us money."
As corporate America begins to realize the benefits of going green, is it possible that the U.S. could some day reach a point where companies like the Collins Companies, Interface, and Herman Miller outnumber those that are indifferent to the environment? Environmentalists aren't so sure, particularly in the wake of a report from the Ford Motor Company in August. The Detroit automaker, previously praised for the progressive outlook of its leader, William Clay Ford, Jr., and the goals it had set to reduce climate change, said it couldn't commit to any major environmental programs for the next several years. Difficult business conditions make meeting previous green promises harder to achieve than Ford first thought, although the company doesn't plan to abandon its goals, the report said.
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Matt Arnold, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, said more companies are waking up to green issues and beginning to consider changing the way they operate. But he believes the U.S. needs better public policy to reinforce good environmental behavior by corporations, primarily through incentives to companies that combat issues like global warming. It also wouldn't hurt for political leaders to funnel more subsidies to industries like alternative energy and organic farming, he said. In the meantime, it will take a lot more business leaders to shift the balance toward the environment, citing the "jellyfish" reaction that many executivesexhibit when confronted about environmental issues.
"They're the hand-wringers who say, 'Gee, I wish we could do the right thing, but we can't. It's cheap to pollute, the
customer won't pay the price to clean up, and Wall Street will beat us up.' So we can't do anything other than float in the water," said Arnold. "I feel like there's a little bit of that out there now."
—Lynn Bliss is a freelance writer who lives in Takoma Park.
ZooGoer 32(1) 2003.
Copyright 2003 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.
