Shiny Green Button

I’m a writer by trade, so I go through a fair amount of pens. I hate tossing dead ones in the trash, but there’s really no good alternative. Until now:

Sharpie, Paper Mate and EXPO have formed a partnership with TerraCycle  to repurpose used pens, markers and other writing instruments. Touted as the world’s first program to collect and reuse writing instruments, the partnership will also help raise funds for schools, charities and non-profits nationwide, as well as reduce waste headed for landfills.

Each pen recovered is worth 2 cents to the school, community group, charity or nonprofit organization of the participant’s choice. Drop locations will be set up at corporations and schools. Shipping is prepaid. And then returned pens will be upcycled to make new products.

Not to reduce it to a crude formula, but there’s a lot to like about this program. It’s simple for anyone to participate. There’s an incentive. It covers both environmental and social angles. It’s got the backing of companies. And it’s got economic upside for TerraCycle.

That’s a story that can virtually write itself.

Just wish I’d thought of it first.

Photo credit: tiffanywashko on Flickr

This past Tuesday, I arrived home to find a box on my front stoop. It contained two brand new SIGG water bottles, and a letter that began like this:

Thank you for your participation in our SIGG Voluntary Exchange Program.

We understand that you may not have heard from us as often as you may have wished during the process – and may have had to wait an extended time for your new SIGG bottle. We can assure you it was not due to a lack of effort on our part. We are a small company (15 people in the USA) and this program has been a huge undertaking for us. We truly appreciate your patience and understanding.

My AHA! cohort Shelby posted back in October about how SIGG has bungled their communication around the BPA content of their water bottles. And I have to admit, I was a pretty frustrated customer when I returned my water bottle only to wait months to get my replacement. But this letter (and the bonus bottle!) went a long way to make me a SIGG fan again. Here’s why:

1. It fesses up. I’m immediately more receptive when a company doesn’t claim they are perfect.

2. It shows they care. They tried. They really did.

3. It’s human. Fifteen people were all they had to deal with this PR and product take-back nightmare! Wow. I feel for them.

The letter does one last smart thing in its conclusion: it encourages me to pass on my extra bottle to a friend in order to help more people kick the bottled water habit. Nice. More SIGG fans for them, and a free way for me to feel like I’m doing a good thing.

Remember when you were in grade school, and you tied a note that read, “If found, return to …” to a helium-filled balloon, and then released the balloon? I loved that experiment. No one returned my note, but it seemed magical that I could send a balloon out into the world, and someone in China or Ghana might find it.

Now the geniuses at MIT are doing a similar experiment with trash. By attaching SIM cards to things like used coffee cups and milk cartons, they will be able to track the movement of our garbage.

The project begins in September 2009, and I can’t wait to learn the results. I only hope they are widely publicized, because I think they have a huge potential to educate all of us about the truth about our trash.

The more I learn about how to motivate people to make more sustainable choices, the more I hear about the power of raw facts and transparency. For example, a few weeks ago the folks at the Natural Step were here at AHA! to talk about sustainability practices for businesses. They shared a story about how Shore Bank made a switch to copy paper with a higher percentage of recycled content, which just so happened to also be more expensive. The fact that employees knew it was costlier to print changed their behavior—they began printing less.

Some of my colleagues at AHA! have had similar epiphanies when they learned that replacing a set of four color toner cartridges can cost more that $1,000 a pop. Now that they know, they’re thinking, “Do I really need to print this?” And sometimes the answer is yes, but the point is, that simply knowing the cost of toner is driving a thought process that could have good environmental effects.

Everyone’s selling green products these days. So communicators have to work that much harder to be heard above the noise. Throwing back the curtain and letting your customers see inside the machine can be extremely effective in grabbing their attention. I’d challenge companies to let it all hang out—reveal the challenges and even your failures in addition to your successes. That transparency not only educates your customers and gives them the facts they need to make a good choice, but shows them your CSR efforts are authentic.

The FTC recently took action against certain companies that claimed their products were biodegradable.  The issue here revolves around language, around what we can really, honestly say about green products and services.

According to Michael Davis, an FTC lawyer, even if products (in this case disposable wipes and plates) are theoretically biodegradable, the fact is that most consumer products go straight to a landfill, where they stand little chance of ever “returning to nature” (to use the FTC’s phrase).

So what kind of claim to biodegradability can be made? “It’s hard to think of one marketers would like,” said Davis. It’s hard indeed to imagine his example phrase as a selling point on the side of a box of wet naps: ”Biodegradable in 1,000 years.”

Davis’s remarks bring a central conundrum of green marketing into bold relief.  Marketing, in the most basic terms, is supposed to create desire for a good or service. But to make certain green claims truthful, it requires so many caveats and footnotes as to wither any appeal the original claim once had. Some might say this is the price of truthfulness, but I think it suggests a broader idea of what marketing might be. Instead of persuasion, what if marketers engaged in education? For instance, if company X makes a product that can biodegrade, shouldn’t that company also explain how to dispose of it to make sure it does biodegrade? Maybe the campaign focuses not just on disposable wipes, but on composting and how easy–even cool–it can be.

I realize this sounds a bit naive, or at least idealistic. But then again, idealism has been known to sell pretty well at times. It sent a man to the moon in less than a decade forty years ago, after all. Maybe the time is right for companies to inspire purchases by inspiring environmentally sustainable behavior, rather than by adding asterisks and footnotes to their green claims.

A week before Chase took over Washington Mutual, I walked into a local branch to make a deposit.

“So, it sounds like there are changes on the horizon for WaMu,” I said to the teller as she was doing magic to the computer to make money go into my account.

“We’re not going anywhere,” she snapped and left it at that.

It occurred to me then that a) they were most certainly going somewhere and b) they were in desperate need of better talking points about it.

A few weeks later, I returned to the branch. New and perhaps hastily printed fliers were stacked on the counter. I took one from the pile. It said:

We love Chase. And not just because they have a trillion dollars.

What followed was a paragraph about their “bright new future” thanks to Chase’s sheer size (and trillion dollars in customer deposits).

Really? That’s the message you want to get across? That we needn’t worry about our money because we’re now customers of Chase, America’s largest bank? Wasn’t WaMu America’s largest savings and loan? And if anything, shouldn’t we be more wary of the biggest banks? Isn’t that kinda what caused much of this mess in the first place?

My new Chase debit card arrived in the mail the other day, officially signifying the beginning of the end of my relationship with WaMu. The piece of paper attached to it warned me to activate the new one before May 1, when the old one would expire. So I did, right then and there.

What that piece of paper did not warn me of was that once I activated the new one, the old one would stop working. (Or, if it did, it was so small that I didn’t notice.) Of course, I forgot to remove my old card from my wallet and not two days later, I used it out of habit at a restaurant.

DECLINED.

REJECTED.

WAMU NO LONGER WANTS YOU.

AND FRANKLY, CHASE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU EITHER.

The bank that once lured me in with its welcoming Starbucks-like interior design was now leaving me high and dry—and so was my massive knight-in-shining-armor bank, the one that was supposed to swoop in and save my checking account.

The waiter returned with the bill; I apologetically gave him my new card and spouted out a bunch of nonsense about how “it’s not my fault! It’s my bank! They failed!” to cover up my embarrassment, which probably only made it worse.

Anyway. The point is this: I don’t love Chase just because they have (or had, before the market tanked) a trillion dollars. I chose WaMu for its prevalence: at a time in my life when I needed a bank to be flexible (in five years I lived in four states), it made sense to belong to a bank that had branches EVERYWHERE. Now? I’d rather bank in my community.

Frankly, I’m terrified at the thought of a bank being large—”too big to fail” is not a good thing. I’m also not happy with Chase’s less-than-frequent and not-particularly-informative communications to me, one mere account holder. At a time like this, Chase, when news of the End of Days spills out of my RSS feed like an over-poured IPA, I want you to reassure me.

And that begins by not leaving me with the bill.

You have two months to cooperate or I will find myself a community bank or credit union.

At the Going Green East conference in Boston this week, CEOs of green technology businesses have been mixing it up with venture capitalists. They’re debating best practices, discussing emerging trends, and looking for the perfect match between innovators and investors. It’s exciting stuff, but three days of bigwigs throwing around big ideas might get a little stuffy, too. Enter our very own Betsy Henning, with 15 minutes of fresh air.

When a technology glitch left her without the slides for her presentation, Communicating Green, Betsy had no trouble winging it. She simply followed her own advice and delivered a memorable, concise, story-rich discussion of how to authentically and effectively communicate a company’s efforts in the green space.

Her first piece of advice for the audience at Going Green: Don’t be green. Instead, be remarkable.

Be the purple cow in the herd of regular old cows (mental image courtesy of marketing guru Seth Godin, who Betsy loves).

Her other purple pearls of wisdom:

Put a value on it. Weave your greenness into your larger story—that means social responsibility, how you treat your employees and the core values that define your company.

Face the facts. Tell real stories about how you can affect real people’s lives.

Finish strong. Discover what’s memorable about your company, cut away the other noise and stay on message. (A good editor is your best friend.)

Don’t take my word for it. Your customers don’t care what you say about your company. They care about what other people say about you. Cultivate a tribe of evangelists and reap the rewards.

Betsy’s 15 minutes were much anticipated and well received. Proof? Just before Betsy spoke, about 65 viewers were following the conference online. When she took the stage, that number spiked to 250+.

Betsy Henning at GoingGreen East 2009

Like any other red-blooded American, I enjoy the latest video of some rickety old building, such as the Pacific NW’s beloved Seattle Kingdome, imploding or exploding. But at what cost? Especially when we know that a third of all the trash produced in the United States comes from construction and demolition waste.

Enter Chilean architect Alberto Mozó. In the design of the BIP Computers office in Santiago, Chile, Mozó incorporated the philosophy of transitivity—designing structures so that they can be easily broken down and reconstructed elsewhere. So now, as with every other important aspect of our lives, we can take our buildings with us when we go.

What makes the building transferable is the use of the same standard-sized timber beams throughout the design. At 9 x 34.2-centimeters, the beams do not need specialized labeling and placement because they can be used interchangeably. Also, due to the standard size, beams can be mass laminated, reducing the amount of waste during the process.

So, why hasn’t this trend been picked up in the U.S.? Some would argue that in such a mess of an economic crisis, cutting jobs (like that of wrecking ball operators) isn’t the wisest idea. But what about job creation? Why couldn’t these same wrecking ball operators apply for positions with a construction company that never really tore anything down? If construction companies hire someone to demolish buildings, they should be able to hire people to manage the breakdown and reconstruction of buildings.

With impressive resource-conserving initiatives already making their way through the architecture/construction industry (see LEED-certified buildings, houses made from recycled automobile parts, etc.), transitivity, the ultimate model of reusability, needs to be incorporated in our design much more frequently.

Regardless of the fact that a building being demolished looks much cooler than a building being responsibly broken down.

The peanut butter salmonella scare is just the latest in a long series of food contamination issues—and it is, unfortunately, not the only one in the news right now. What else should you be worrying about? Antibiotics in your vegetables. And yes—possibly even your organic vegetables.

In a nutshell: researchers found that as much as 90% of the antibiotics given to livestock (to promote growth and prevent illness) gets excreted. And what do we do with cow manure? That’s right—we use it as fertilizer. The result? Trace amounts of antibiotics get absorbed by plants as they grow, and we all end up with penicillin in our peppers. (You can read more about the health and environmental implications of this at the Ethicurean.)

This is in addition to another study that found trace amounts of mercury in high-fructose corn syrup (PDF).

So what is a consumer to do? Nothing feels safe (and likely, nothing is totally safe). It’s already hard enough to communicate about food, with labels like “natural” and “organic” meaning next to nothing. But now these words mean even less: we can’t avoid low doses of drugs in the safest of the safe healthy foods (whole, organic fresh produce) even if we try. Consumers need a dictionary to purchase anything these days: free-range, cage-free, pasture-raised, grass-finished, rBGH-free. What’s next: “Grown with antibiotic-free cow shit”?

Seventh Generation tells us that we have “the right to know” and we do—the question is how are we supposed to know when we have no meaningful language with which to talk about it?

Do you know where that monitor, those two computers and your three old cell phones went after you “responsibly” disposed of them at your local e-waste recycling station?

You probably didn’t think they’d end up in some small, desperate village in China where men, women and children spend their lives using caustic chemicals to dismantle your digital detritus. But, that’s exactly what happened when 60 Minutes’ Scott Palley followed a container of monitors, illegally shipped by the oh-so-reputable Executive Recycling from Englewood, Colorado, to Guiyu, China where villagers ultimately will, in all likelihood, die in order to make a few yuan dismantling OUR e-waste. I had no idea. (Shame on me for being gullible.) I mean, if you go to Executive Recycling’s website and read their claims and creds you’ll feel like you can rest assured that they’re a reputable, registered with the EPA, recycling agency. So NOT true.

So, where can you safely recycle with the certainty that your e-waste is not being sent to China or anywhere else, for that matter? Astonishingly, the 60 Minutes report utterly neglected to provide a word of advice as to where one might go to locate reputable recyclers. I’ve discovered the International Scrap Recyclers and the International Association of Electronics Recyclers and that Oregon, where I live, has an electronic recycling program called Oregon E-Cycles financed by…get this: manufacturers…hmmm. I even checked out our state Department of Environmental Quality website where I discovered this jarring statement that, “Oregon state law does not prohibit e-waste from being exported to countries like China for processing…”

What the heck???

So, what now? I guess the keyboards, the monitor, the two CPUs and dead cell phones will continue to decorate that dark corner of my basement until I can find an e-waste recycler I can believe in. And when will that happen? I don’t know…is hell freezing over this year?

Note to all you greenwashers with your dashing displays of Corporate Social Responsibility and statistics of just how much “X” was recycled last year and all that righteous blah blah blah: it would be so nice to believe you, but I will not be so naïve…I will not be so gullible anymore. Given the revelations of the 60 Minutes exposé, and the profoundly troubling truth that not only is the life of the planet at stake, but so too are actual human lives: this millennium, this year, this month, this minute—children, mothers, fathers struggling to make the only living available to them by dismantling OUR waste and dying because of it. I can’t live with that—can you?

Google has a little bit of an image problem. The way they attempt to communicate their brand isn’t meshing with the way people actually see them. You could say the trouble all started when they decided to make “don’t be evil” the company mantra, and it’s only gotten trickier as the company has gotten larger.

The things I’ve heard and like about Google include their obsession these last few years on green buildings and solar panels, their employee perks (free sushi every day!), or just the fact that they give Microsoft a good, healthy scare on a daily basis. These things go right to my heart, but then I hear that other not-so-sunny stuff from newspapers, NPR and friends.

The stuff I’m kinda peeved about includes the fact that Google has started charging insane amounts of money for their in-house daycare, they way they caved to China’s censorship demands, and the fishy banning of some Scientology critics from YouTube a week before the sponsored Scientology channel launched.

Wired’s nifty Google evil meter, courtesy Wired magazine

So, when asked about all of this nasty stuff Google backpeddled: “’Don’t be evil’ is misunderstood,” Eric Shmidt said. “We don’t have an evil meter.” Interesting, because two years ago he said they did when the company debated whether or not to agree to China’s censorship demands, but since they did eventually agree it’s pretty clear that their meter was broken anyway. Good thing Wired made them a new one.

This is quite the conundrum. Google.org is doing all sorts of good, but the image of Google itself is getting bleaker. There’s the possibility that people are watching them closer because they made “don’t be evil” their goal in the first place. What’s the giant company to do? Well, learn from their mistake. They may still be raking in the money but people are starting to get suspicious. If you’re like me and you use heaps of Google applications (email, calendar, documents, youtube, blogger) you might be wondering if maybe it’s not so wise to have so much of your information stored on their servers, just in case they break their new evil meter.

Google needs to start paying attention to their image immediately and take a note from Microsoft, whose own image never has fully recovered.