Sustainable Brands '07 Walking your talk
Don't allow your customers, suppliers and business partners to dismiss your efforts to green your company with cries of 'greenwashing' - or phony efforts to seem environmentally-friendly, attendees of the first Sustainable Brands were urged by several speakers here at the elegant Ritz-Carlton New Orleans.
However, there are several ways in which one can fall prey to disappointment, and one is to make claims that you cannot measure or substantiate, according to Jacquelyn Ottman, a green marketing pioneer and author who is a conference co-chair.
"It's important to walk the talk," she said, noting "degradeable" Hefty trash bags, which were trashed as not being biodegradable unless they were exposed to the elements, which of course would not happen when dumped into a landfill, as all but a small fraction of them would be.
Wal-Mart's Rand Waddoups, a former missionary who is the company's Senior Director of Corporate Strategy and Sustainability, followed with a spirited walk-about, declaring his believe that sustainability is the single largest, lucrative opportunity "out there today" and one which enhances the giant retailer's service brand.
New Orleans was the site of major Wal-Mart disaster relief efforts after Katrina, he noted [although television screens for days repeated imaging of store lootings which sent a rather different image across the country]. Katrina and its aftermath developed "the lens of sustainability" which he said brought home to Wal-Mart the importance of a full-scale commitment to sustainaibility.
"We believe sustainability is a business opportunity, not a PR cost," he said, repeating Wal-Mart's own efforts to 'walk the talk' by targeging zero waste and 100% renewable energy as ultimate objectives. He described several cases in which Wal-Mart has reduced packaging, for example, at no additional cost and sometimes at greater savings, with a better experience for its retail customers as well.
"Wal-Mart is not just about always low price always, it's also about saving money and living better." He described how the company had saved $1 million a year by pulling out lights from its cola refrigerators in its employee break rooms, for example, as one of its associated came up with that as a bright cost-saving idea.
Many in the audience were impressed by the example of a Wal-Mart purchaser who noticed laptops going to Europe were built differently than the same computer being sent to its U.S. stores, in order to meet European environmental standards. When he asked what it would cost to ship the more environmentally sensitive version to Wal-Mart instead, and found it could be shipped for the same cost.
Simply asking the right questions, while seemingly naive, can produce powerful results, Waddoups opined.
Waddoups also described how Wal-Mart is bringing individual commitment by encouring its employees to commit to their own individual Personal Sustainability Program, with 600,000 [of 1.3 million US.] associates signed up. More than 15,000 associates have reported stopping smoking, while later in the day executives of the company's counsultant ACT NOW said more than 600,000 miles had been walked, biked or swum since the program launched.
Waddoups also reference a number of blogs and blog comments he'd read which raised the question of greenwashing in commenting on this conference, and said there was much work yet to be done to demonstrate becoming green was neither a flash in the pan or a fake proposition.
Note: the author has been an advisor to Sustainable Life Media, which is host to Sustainable Brands 07.
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