Perpetual Innovation

Category: green business

  • Sustainability in EDU Over last 20 years

    The SustainZine has been blogging (although rather sporadically)
    for 11 years. Wow!. One of the first blogs was related to an article (and a SAM
    presentation) by Hall, Tayler, Zapalski and Hall (2009). It focused on
    sustainability in Higher ED, specifically on how the facilities of universities
    were doing sustainability initiatives but there were few actual classes on
    Sustainability. The classroom, i.e., the future of sustainability was far
    behind.

    Later in 2010 Hall (2010) published an article on Lessons of recessions: Sustainability
    education and jobs may be the answer.     (SustainZine
    Blog post here    .) This article discusses the Great Recession of 2007-2008.
    Make no doubt about the pandemic of 2020, it too was a recession so destructive
    innovation has been (and will continue to be) the result.

    People needed to go back to school during the Great Recession
    to up their skills and to avoid the big blank spot on their resume that comes
    from prolonged unemployment. But, universities continued with the same EDU
    programs as if nothing had changed. Universities were taking on Law students,
    for example, even though we were swimming with a glut of lawyers. Hall argued
    that programs of the future, like sustainability, might be a much better
    training program; it might be a differentiator when compared to a glut of the
    regular degree program graduates.

    Over the last 10 years there have been numerous
    Sustainability programs created and many “sustainability” classes created
    within almost every discipline of many universities and Tech Schools.

    Green jobs have outpaced almost all other job categories. See the Green Job forecasts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Solar and Wind technicians are in high demand, but so are all the environmental cleanup specializations. 

    Here’s the SustainZine blog on Sustainability in Education
    post from
    Jan 19, 2010    .

    Sustainability
    in Education?

    Even
    though campuses are getting greener, the classes are not.

    A big study of campuses, the Campus Report Card, by the NWF (with
    others) showed how much various schools are doing in terms of sustainability.
    They are doing a lot on campus but not much teaching of the concepts in the
    classroom. (Also see some recent research on Generation E.)

    The Campus Report Card is actually two
    similar studies, on in 2001 and one in 2008. They show that the course
    offerings of environmental and sustainability programs essentially reduced by
    half. That is, the average student in 2001 had an 8% chance of having an
    sustainability/environment class, but that dropped in half to 4% chance by
    2008.

    In fact the worst educational department was teachers education. “Teacher
    education, that program that trains K-12 teachers, has about a 15% chance of
    being able to take a course on sustainability within their major”
    (Hall et al., 2009, p. 17).

    The best guess as to why this drop happened is because of two forces. First,
    and probably foremost, the prices of oil were really low until after this
    2008 study was completed (and then they shot up to ~$150 per barrel). Second,
    the Bush/Chaney administration was friendly to oil interests and not so
    friendly to environmental interests (no links to environmental sites
    comments on this since this is a family-friendly site).

    Can we move forward with Sustainability in the US without educating on the
    subject?
    Tell us what you think?

    Reference
    Hall, E., Taylor, S., Zapalski, C., & Hall, T. (2009). Sustainability
    in education: Green in the facilities, but not in the classrooms. Proceedings
    of the Society for Advancement of Management, USA.

    Hall, E.
    (2010). Lessons of recessions: Sustainability education and jobs may be the
    answer.     Journal of Sustainability and Green Management. Jacksonville, FL: Academic and Business Research Institute.
    Retrieved from:     http://www.aabri.com/OC2010Manuscripts/OC10079.pdf  

  • Sustainability at “the Costco”

    Costco wholesale club continues to impress. While many other retailers are struggling to stay alive and relevant, Costco keeps chugging along at a 7% sales growth and an impressive 36 Price/Earnings ratio (32 PE based on foretasted earnings), a PE ratio reserved for rapid growing tech companies not the single digit PE where most retailers find themselves. Investors like this safe, rather counter-cyclical, recession-resistant steady growth company(NASDAQ: COST). Note the huge 4.7 PEG rate (multiple of PE to 5-year growth rate) suggesting an over-priced stock. But the company itself is impressive. At $300 per share and a market cap of $132B Costco continues to push all time highs.

    Costco is also a big proponent of sustainability. In terms of paper and wood products (and the related requirements for their suppliers and Kirkland-branded products). Read about Sustainable forest products in November 2019 Costco Connection. As a wholesaler/retailer, Costco has to work through their supply chain, especially with the Kirkland-branded products. As it pertains to wood/paper/tissue, they are working through the certification organizations for trees, forest, etc.
    “We believe that the best first step is to source these products from
    responsibly managed and certified forests. To achieve this, we employ
    forest management certifications through three leading groups: the
    Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the Sustainable Forestry Initiative
    (SFI) and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification
    (PEFC), with a preference for FSC. Products that have these
    certifications have met strict standards to support sustainable forests.”

    Costco continues to push for better, more sustainable products. You don’t have to go to the “organic” section of the store. Because of their buying power, you don’t have to pay the Whole Foods’ prices to get quality, organic foods. Each year, you find more and more shelves with the only options being “organic”, “sustainably sourced”, etc. You can spend less time reading the labels and more time packing your cart to the rafters!

    The consumer has a cost-benefit and consumer-responsibility consideration. Is the special trip to Costco worth the extra time, and is buying a 5-year supply of something — say toilet paper — really the right way to purchase. We often car-pool and share. We don’t need an entire box of printer paper, but dividing the box among 2 or 3 people works great. Kind of leaverage our buying power, while minimizing our footprint.

    One thing that you gotta love about Costco, Starbuck’s and other sustainably minded companies is their open statement about trying to figure it out together: “We do not have all of the answers, are learning as we go and seek continuous improvement.“

    [Costco’s] Sustainability Principles
    • For Costco to thrive, the world needs to thrive. We are committed to doing our part to help.
    • We focus on issues related to our business and to where we can contribute to real, results-driven positive impact.
    • We do not have all of the answers, are learning as we go and seek continuous improvement.
    [Costco’s] Sustainability Responsibilities
    • Take care of our employees.
    • Support the communities where our employees and members live and work.
    • Operate efficiently and in an environmentally responsible manner.
    • Strategically source our merchandise in a sustainable manner.

  • Sustainable Supply Chains: 75 including Ryder

    Here are 75 supply chain companies as compiled by Inbound Logistics that have significant commitment to efficiency and sustainability in their companies and in the supply chain. Shipping companies include major shipping companies: packaging (FedEx, DHL, UPS), cargo and trucking companies.

    Ryder Logistics has been honored with this distinction for 11 consecutive years. See here in business wire. Wow.

    Some of the Ryder efficiencies include EV and Fuel cell solutions for (client) trucks.  But a critical first step in shipping is the efficiency of routing and shipping. If a “better” route can reduce the truck and driver time by 10%, the savings are huge. Provide that savings to thousands of client fleets, and Ryder really makes a difference.

    Financially, doesn’t Ryder (R) stock seem rather cheap, even after a big run up to $59 this week. Forward PE is 9, PEG 0.63, Dividend Yield is almost 4%. The company has orders/contracts for years, even decades.  I guess that’s the impact of a little trade warring and economy slowing? Uncertainty can really whack out those companies in the middle of everything — especially shipping and logistics companies.

    Glad to have been associated with Ryder in the past.

  • XGame Innovation in Carbon Capture

    Look at the great innovations up in Canada in the CCS xGames.

    Checkout the blog at SustainZine related to this very cool competition: http://sustainzine.blogspot.com/2017/01/co2-xgame-winners-in-canada-losers-in.html

    Here’s some info on this big competition in Canada: CBC News discusses competition sponsored by Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance and U.S. company NRG.

    Normally you think of Carbon Capture & Sequester as a dead cost. Take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere (maybe at a smoke stack where it is highly concentrated, and pump it down into caverns, maybe where the coal or oil came from. But CO2 is a valuable and sell-able byproduct. Think about the fizz in your pop.

    Maybe innovation like this Carbon XGame contestants have demonstrated, might allow us to burn all the oil and coal in the world without impunity. Maybe if we all hold our breath (one way to reduce CO2), the impact of our non-sustainable ways will not come back to bite us in the proverbial butt.

    SustainZine said: “That means the the job of the CCS might turn out to be far, far bigger in the future, as we try to burn up the last century or so of fossil fuels over the next hundred years.

    We here at SustainZine consider “conservative” this way: The bestest, cheapest, cleanest gallon of gas is the one never extracted, never processed and never burned. The bestest, cheapest, cleanest tonne of coal is the one never extracted, never processed, and never burned (scrubbing or no scrubbing).”  


    In the meanwhile, innovation is the engine that will keep providing options, long after the most obvious alternatives have been exhausted. 

  • The State of Green Business, 2016 | GreenBiz

    The State of Green Business, 2016 | GreenBiz:

    The latest report by GreenBiz (and Trucost) on the State of Green Business is great. Optimistic, but no green-colored glasses. There was a lot of progress in Paris (COP21) in December, but the progress from businesses is were major progress seems to be forming.

    It is great to see businesses taking more control and starting to shape sustainability arguments and the form the solutions. We at SustainZine are not great proponents of big government efforts coming to “help” solve all the world’s sustainability issues; businesses can avoid this help by being proactive (and no, proactive does not mean and army of K-street lobbyists protect smoke-stack industries and to inhibit all forms of progress).

    More and more companies are offering more transparency about social and environmental impacts. More companies are stepping forward with transparency on the labels (Campbell’s “non-GMO” labeling, for example) and more transparency on the footprint of the supply chain, and cradle-to-cradle efforts. Management should monitor their full impact on the environment, and investors should care about progress in the most critical areas of the business. Employees are critical to any and every sustainability effort, on corporate facilities, in transit, or in their personal lives.

    It is possible to develop new business models. The sharing economy is kicking huge industries in the rears.  The sharing economy is causing massive and dynamic reallocated of time and resources of homes, cars, crowd funding and innovation on a time-share basis. The old economies of taxis and hotels are going to have to scramble to stay relevant, often sending them to court and to congress to try to stop the renegades from tipping over the ship. The time and resources savings from a sharing economy, often have profound savings to the environment. Many of these improvements in performance will go unmeasured by the traditional metrics of performance (like GDP).

    On a leadership level. Just saying it out loud, seems to be the GIANT step: measurement, forming initiatives and the monitoring progress toward goals. As of 2014, about half of the companies had Greenhouse Gas (GHG) reduction targets. That percentage seems to be increasing at about 2-4% per year since this reporting was started a decade or so ago.

    The current targets by companies represents only about 28% of what is needed in reductions by about 2030 of about 3 gigatons of GHG emissions reduction per year. With the magic of compounding geometric growth, the required reductions per year would need to be about 32 gigatons each year if we wait until 2050. (Or 51 gigatons reduction per year if we continue business as usual until 2100; obviously far too late to consider seriously since CO2 persists in the atmosphere for about 100 years.)

    Sidebar on GHGs. In terms of greenhouse gasses, this year has blasted through the 400 ppm level for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Look at the Keening Curve on this. January 2016 was 402.5 ppm. We may never be below 400 ppm again. Since this is an El Nino year, the September-to-September increase should be about +4 ppm, not the current trend of +2.2ppm per year base on the lowest month of the year (September in Mauna Loa, Hawaii). Paul Keening developed this curve starting with observatory data starting in 1958 when the CO2 level in the atmosphere was below 320 ppm. At that time the annual increase was about +0.75 ppm but quickly jumped during the global industrialization to the current average increase of +2.2 ppm each year. Many (rapidly becoming most) scientist believe that we need to get down below the 350 ppm level to avoid massive impacts from warming and climate change.

    A decent percentage of companies are reporting on water, about 20% in the US and 15% globally. This seems unnecessary for many companies.

    There is an interesting discussion and presentation related to natural capital (R&D, investments, profits and savings).  Natural capital costs are the unpaid costs to the economy from pollution, natural resource depletion and related health costs (see the Natural Capital Project and at Stanford). Natural capital takes into consideration factors that tends to elude normal accounting and finance. A company’s financials may show profits, but when all costs are considered — including externalities — those profits might evaporate. In fact, the S&P 500 have natural costs of about $1T per year and overall natural costs have escalated about 22% since the great recession. If all costs were considered, about 115% (to 153%) of corporate accounting profits would be wiped out in the US (and globally). (Even if you question the cost assignments for natural costing, the general methodology is sound; and this is not a pretty picture of corporate sustainability in terms of true profits.)

    So, in the real world, with full costing, corporations, on average, are not profitable. And, if the company is not sustainable, then the true costs and profits are not real. Right?

    Innovation and patents: Lot’s of CleanTech patents, but the number is way down. The measure of Clean Tech patents is fuzzy and getting fuzzier. Electronic and auto companies (Toyota & Honda) are at the top of the list of patents. But IBM is not listed.

    GreenBiz and Trucost have a wonderful 2016 report; and lots of progress is being made, in large and small ways. But keep in mind that too much reporting is, well, too much. We don’t want businesses to adopt (or have forced on them) the same approach from education where testing and reporting has replaced much (most) of the teaching/learning!:-(

    But, for the 50% of business that is not reporting (may not be monitoring at all), no metrics and no reporting has multiple implications. First, you obviously don’t have a business plan, if you don’t also have a sustainability plan in it. Second, you definitely don’t know your true costs if you don’t assess externalities and supply chain. Third, you have no idea what all your risks are, so you have no ability to manage or mitigate them. Even Sarbains-Oxley would have to kick in at some point when it becomes “material” to the company. Lastly, you don’t know if you are actually, and truly profitable, your accounting system misrepresents the business.

    If you like Sarbains-Oxley, then you will have no end of joy if/when governments starts requiring more environmental or natural capital reporting. Seems like businesses should take initiatives voluntarily, and on their own terms. A sustainable leader would insist on knowing a fully sustainable path forward. Investors, business partners and employees would want to know.

    Note that this report is based on a Trucost database of 12,000 global companies that represents 93% of the world markets by market cap.

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