Category Archives: Celebrating Eco-Progress

An exercise in positive reinforcement, this series celebrates efforts that companies make towards adopting sustainable practices.

Celebrating Eco-Progress: AT&T

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While AT&T continues to piss people off with their monopolistic tendencies and their worst-in-the-industry customer service, this Celebrating Eco-Progress installment takes a look at efforts they’re making to be more eco-friendly.

Via GreenBix.com:

Just in the last few years, we’ve seen a surge in companies experimenting with plastics derived from sugarcane…

Now we can add AT&T to the list. The telecommunications giant said yesterday it will begin using sugarcane-based plastic in packaging for its branded wireless accessories, such as cell phone cases and power cords that hit the shelves beginning Oct. 2. As much as 30 percent of the packaging will come from ethanol made from sugarcane.

Now, I do have a few concerns about this news.

First, 30% is a relatively small number, and this GreenBiz post is rather confusing about just what will be made of sugarcane and what will not. Specifically, the term packaging is used twice, but there’s a reference to cell phone cases and power cords. Those are VERY different things.

Second, while the prospect of replacing petroleum-derived plastics with plastics made from corn or sugarcane initially sounds like a great idea, as I wrote back in July concerning biofuels, there’s the no-small-matter of carbon output from harvesting, refinement, production, and transportation; conversion of prime agricultural land from food production to plastics on a planet with a booming, hungry population; and potentially disastrous farming practices.

Concerning the latter, this tidbit jumped out at me:

Sensing a market opportunity, Dow Chemical has launched a joint venture in Brazil to make bioplastic using ethanol made from sugarcane, we reported last month. The company claims it can do this at a competitive price-point.

Given that Dow is a pesticide giant, the chances that the sugarcane they use will be organic are clearly in snowball-in-hell territory.

So, you might ask, why would I even bother including this in the Celebrating Eco-Progress series?

Well, if there is even a small chance that AT&T truly has altruistic motivations toward becoming more eco-friendly, I still believe they need to hear from consumers that we’d very much like to see them continue, and by pointing out the flaws in the choices they are making, we at least let them know that they need to do better at the same time.

Celebrating Eco-Progress: Volkswagen

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In this installment of Celebrating Eco-Progress, a shout-out to Volkswagen for this massive move toward a sustainable future:

Via Reuters:

German carmaker Volkswagen will boost its planned commitment to renewable energy, investing almost 1 billion euros ($1.44 billion) in the production of environmentally friendly energy over two years, the Financial Times Deutschland reported…

The German business daily said on Friday that the company was looking to buy an interest in at least two offshore windparks in the process…

Late in June, the group’s plant unit Volkswagen Kraftwerk GmbH signed a deal to draw roughly 10 percent of the electricity used in its 12 German manufacturing plants from hydropower generated by Austria’s Verbund starting 2013.

Volkswagen has set a target of reducing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from its production plants by 40 percent over a period of ten years compared with 2010.

Now, before this is interpreted as purely altruistic, as I wrote back in July, make no mistake about it, this is first and foremost a business decision. With volatility in the oil market not likely to go away, like, ever, and, of course, the fact that there is a finite supply of fossil fuels on the planet, VW is clearly taking steps to plan for an oil-free future.

Smart, and let’s hope they keep making such selfish choices!

Celebrating Eco-Progress: IKEA

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For anyone new to my Celebrating Eco-Progress series, this is my humble attempt to pat big business on the back and thank them when they make commitments to sustainable practices.

Sure, there’s MUCH more that they can do. I just like to think that they will be more inclined to make additional efforts if the efforts they do make are noticed and appreciated.

In this installment, we applaud Swedish housewares chain IKEA.

Via treehugger.com:

IKEA UK To Go 100 Percent Renewable

You may not like their particleboard furniture, but you’ve sure got to love IKEA’s use of renewable energy. The Swedish retailer is stepping up their clean energy game in a big-time way in the UK, setting a goal to get all of its energy from renewable sources. It wants to be 80 percent there by 2015.

IKEA is now installing 39,000 solar panels on the rooftops of its UK stores, and it recently purchased a 12.3-MW wind farm in Huntly, Scotland. This single purchase creates enough clean energy to power 30 percent of IKEA’s UK electricity consumption.

What really stood out for me…

Why is IKEA doing this? One reason is to safeguard itself from fluctuating energy prices. It already has wind farms in Denmark, Germany, France, and elsewhere in the UK, and it spends a huge number–$1.7 billion–on energy every year.

This idea that going green is good for business can’t be overstated.

In our interconnected world, the long-term survival of our planet, of the people on it, and of a marketplace that depends on people (consumers) to buy goods and services, really depends on transitioning to sustainable and resilient systems.

Celebrating Eco-Progress: LG

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This latest installment of Celebrating Eco-Progress — a recurring series that praises companies for their efforts towards sustainable practices — turns its attention to the Korean electronics and appliances giant LG Corp.

GreenBiz.com reports:

LG Earns First CarbonFree Certification for TVs, Fridges

LG Electronics is hoping to appeal to the more climate-savvy consumer when it launches next year the first TV, fridge and other products to carry the CarbonFree logo.

Created by the Carbonfund.org Foundation, the certification means that a product is carbon neutral, achieved by a company reducing or offsetting related emissions.

Sure, not every LG product is going to be CarbonFree-certified, but it’s a start, and LG’s making other investments in sustainability as well:

LG is taking both tacks [reducing and offsetting] for shrinking the carbon footprint of its products, including an $18-billion investment by its parent LG Group to research and develop energy efficient and renewable energy products…

As for what happens to products once consumers scrap them, LG is working with the E-Stewards Initiative to promote and expand responsible e-waste recycling. In being named the first Global e-Stewards Enterprise, LG has committed itself to give preference to E-Stewards certified recyclers around the world.

Since opinion is split on just how effective carbon offsetting is as a means to tackle global warming, if LG was only purchasing offsets I wouldn’t be as impressed.

So, kudos to LG!

(Full disclosure: I own an LG HDTV, the picture quality is great, but the remote SUCKS!!!)

Celebrating Eco-Progress: Haggen

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Here’s a Celebrating Eco-Progress installment that hits refreshingly close to home!

Regional supermarket chain Haggen Food & Pharmacy has officially endorsed an ordinance, under consideration by the Bellingham City Council, that would ban the use of single-use plastic shopping bags by all retailers in the city.

I’m particularly impressed with Haggen’s decision, as they state in their press release that they would prefer a statewide ban. This offers volumes of support for the kind of local approach to sustainability that I wrote most recently about a couple of weeks ago.

While Haggen was founded in Bellingham by the Haggen family, and owned and operated by them for 78 years, majority ownership was assumed by a Florida investment firm, Comvest, back in February 2011.

It’s pretty remarkable, then, that this decision was blessed by a company located over 3,000 miles away, and it doesn’t seem a stretch to deduce that Bellingham’s deeply engrained identity as an eco-conscious community wields the power to influence these kinds of decisions.

Haggen and Comvest deserve our thanks, so please consider following the links here to shoot them some words of appreciation.

(h/t John Stark at The Bellingham Herald)

Celebrating Eco-Progress: Sherwin Williams

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I grew up seeing the Sherwin Williams Paint logo I’ve included here in hardware stores, but it wasn’t until many years later, when my awareness about the environment and what we humans were doing to it peaked, that I realized just how over-the-top sick the image really is.

While it’s hard to give props to a company that still uses that logo, the following seems worthy of a Celebrating Eco-Progress installment.

Via GreenBiz.com:

Sherwin-Williams was awarded for its water-based acrylic alkyd technology being used in some commercial and architectural paints. Alkyd paints are commonly made from oil and emit high levels of volatile organic compounds. The technology being used by Sherwin-Williams results in low-VOC, water-based paints that are made from recycled plastic bottles and soybean oil.

Since launching three paints using the technology in 2010, the company says it avoided the emission of more than 800,000 pounds of VOCs, and avoided the use of 1,000 barrels of oil by instead using 250,000 pounds of PET plastic and 320,000 pounds of soybean oil.

Every little baby step forward counts, in my book.