How does a company become sustainable? That was the overarching question at the start of the second day at the Greener by Design conference here.
Whether talking about the process for turning a corporate giant's operations toward sustainability or building it into the DNA of a brand-new company, methods for developing, promoting and sustaining green practices were on display this morning.
Jeff Renaud, the head of GE's ecomagination initiative, started the day off with an overview of how the company has grown the initiative since its launch in 2005. At the top-most level, there are now 67 products that meet the ecomagination standards for environmental and functional performance, Renaud said.
From light-bulbs to locomotives to hospital buildings, GE has brought its ecomagination to all corners of its products. Among the case studies Renaud explained were a ecomagination-designed hospital building that, in addition to being LEED certified, is 17.5 percent more energy efficient, 20 percent more water efficient, and sees a 99.9 percent reduction in airborne bacteria. GE is also incorporating hybrid technologies into its locomotive engine and partnering with other companies to apply plug-in hybrid technology to construction vehicles, tugboats and passenger cars.
From a major company that has succeeded in communicating its achievements to one that has worked steadily worked behind the scenes but has not put a big marketing push behind its sustainability. Jean Sweeney from 3M talked about the challenges of communicating successes.
3M, Sweeney said, has been working devotedly on environmental programs for over 30 years; pollution prevention projects, environmental management systems and waste-reduction strategies have saved 3M an estimated $2 billion since 1975. Although green awareness is baked into the company culture, the company has struggled to communicate their achievements successfully.
Leaders at three other large companies discussed how their companies are bringing green products and practices to their work. Patty Calkins from Xerox, Dawn Rittenhouse of Dupont, and Lorrie Vogel from Nike explored the different forms that can take.
Similar to 3M, Vogel said that Nike has preferred to take a behind-the-scenes approach to environmental initiatives. Because the brand took a serious beating from the fallout around its labor issues in the mid-1990s, Vogel compared the company to Wal-Mart: "If we say we're doing something green, the stones will start flying."
Despite the black eye Nike received from its labor troubles, the company started seriously focusing on sustainability in the late 1990s as a result of those issues. Vogel said that they "served as a wake-up call. We realized that we needed to both know all about our supply chain, but that we also needed to be transparent about it."
From grappling with supply chain issues to environmental goals was a relatively short path, and Vogel said some of the notable successes she's seen at Nike have come from the design department: designers are responsible for company's Trash Talk shoe, which was made entirely out of scrap materials that otherwise would go to the landfill. "I believe that designers are going to change this company," she said.
Both Dupont and Xerox are seeing a growth in demand for green products, although Rittenhouse explained that more often than not, Dupont's customers are not asking for green, but rather for more efficient products. Calkins said the growth in demand has shaped the organizational structure at Xerox: there is now a sustainability representative for each product development team, and a higher-level sustainability council incorporating those teams' work into the larger sustainability goals.
Small Companies with Big Goals
On the flip side of the coin, Friday's program featured several new and smaller companies that have been green from day one. NatureWorks, IceStone and Method highlighted the different ways that starting out from a goal of the most sustainable practices can shape how the business develops.
IceStone, Brooklyn-based manufacturers of high-performance concrete products, was founded with the goal of making environmentally beneficial products, most notably its kitchen countertops that are made from up to 75 percent recycled materials. Even the materials recycled into those products was chosen with an impact-reduction reason in mind.
"Glass is not at the top of the heap, recycling-wise," explained Miranda Maganini from IceStone. "Only around 20 percent gets recycled here, and it's about 90 percent in the U.K., so it made sense to incorporate that into the products."
In addition to environmental goals, IceStone also incorporates social responsibility into its business, keeping as much of its expenditures within its immediate community as possilbe, employing the hard to hire and creating a cooperative and inclusive cross-cultural company culture.
NatureWorks, which makes plastics, textiles and other products from plant sugars and fibers, is the brainchild of Cargill and Japanese company Teijin Limited. Started with the goal of developing renewable plastics, it's no surprise that the company has sustainability on its mind all the time. Despite that goal, Steve Davies, the global marketing executive at NatureWorks, said, "I don't really like the word 'green.' we prefer to make a better product."
Joshua Handy, the senior creative director at cleaning products company Method, also said that the company prefers to make styish and effective products that just happen to be deeply green. "Our mission was to make products that were 'IceStone-worthy,'" he said, ones that customers would want to leave out on the counter.
Having the environment at the core of the company -- Handy said Method puts equal importance on design, effectiveness and greenness -- gives designers a chance to impact the progress of the company, an idea that the other panelists also echoed as a key benefit of working for their organizations as well.
Next up: as the conference winds down, designers take the stage to look the state of the art and what's yet to come.