Posts Tagged ‘sustainability’

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‘Taxi’washing

Monday, February 6th, 2012

I’ve taken two taxis in the city of Houston, Texas in the past week. My experiences in both were pretty much exactly the same. I get into the taxi, tell the driver where I want to go, the driver turns on the meter, locks the doors and then says “so how do I get there”. Since I have no idea, this is the beginning of 5 minutes (which I am paying for) of the driver I’m guessing pretending now to recongnize any of the streets I mention and then asking me if I can take out my iphone and look for it on the map and show him.

I have taken my fair share of taxis around the world and to me the definition of a taxi is a car that has a driver in it that is knowledgeable about the roads in that particular location and that if you give them an address their primary job is to know where that address is (or find out themselves) and then get you there in the shortest amount of time possible. Seems that is not the case here in Houston. In the world of sustainability if you look green, talk green, smell green but aren’t actually green in any way that is called greenwashing. So perhaps this is ‘taxi’washing?

Worst thing is that at the end he expected me to leave a much bigger tip than I was prepared to leave. Paying extra for service that wasn’t rendered. Sounds a lot like greenwashing to me!

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The law of common sense

Monday, January 30th, 2012

There are some great laws around the world. China has a state ban on films or TV programmes depicting time travel because they “treat serious history in a frivolous way”. It is illegal to wear armour in parliament in Britain and all males over the age of 14 must carry out two hours a day of longbow practice. In Australia children may not purchase cigarettes but they can smoke them. It is also illegal to wear hot pink pants after midday Sunday. In the US it is illegal to wear a fake moustache that causes laughter in church, boogers may not be flicked into the wind and (luckily) it is illegal for a driver to be blindfolded while operating a vehicle.

Apparently there is a law in Texas that says when two trains meet each other at a railroad crossing, each shall come to a full stop, and neither shall proceed until the other has gone. Not sure how that law is enforced, practically speaking. Same goes for the new law that Bolivia has recently passed granting the planet legal rights, a Bill of Rights for Mother Earth that grants nature the same rights and liberties as human beings and treats resources as blessings. It is a great idea, a great story, but isn’t it already governments role to do this, with or without a law? How exactly are they going to do that?

The most powerful law of our times is Murphy’s law, that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and for that reason we need laws to protect everything. That is the challenge because even with rules people often do the minimum. New York had a law that said that new office buildings had to put in parks around new developments. Builders proceeded to just put in a concrete area next to the building until individuals within City Hall reworked and reworked the law specifying EXACTLY what they meant by park (i.e. it has to have grass, trees and a certain number of park benches).

Whatever happened to the law of common sense? That if we destroy the world around us we won’t have a world to live in.

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Finding the Balance

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

Yesterday I was riding my bike in the park and I saw these two women out walking in their full walking gear. They were both holding very large takeout mugs from Starbucks which they were sipping as they walked. As I kept passing them (they were walking counterclockwise around a loop meant for bikes which was mildy annoying) they had me thinking about balance. Is that balance, when you are drinking back the fat and sugar exactly at the same moment you are walking around to burn the fat off. Does this result in equilibrium? Not getting skinnier but then not getting fatter either?

I spent a lot of time thinking about this (I was riding for a while) but this is also something I think about often when it comes to businesses involved in sustainability. There are a lot of businesses that are doing some great things when it comes to sustainability and those initiatives are well known and much talked about. On the other side when you are in the store or actually experiencing the brand you see a lot of things that are pretty unsustainable. A product packaged in a plant based, minimal packaging but the product inside is full of harmful chemicals. A supermarket with a strong sustainability strategy around sourcing but when you enter the store you are hit by a wall of excessive plastic packaging.

Does one thing cancel the other out and create balance? Not moving forwards but not moving backwards either? Perhaps this is how it starts and then the coffee cups will get smaller, the walks with get longer and we will really see some changes.

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Starting from scratch

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

A few weeks ago I was the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona. The theme of the event was all about making a difference, and it looked at all of the natural disasters that have occurred in the past year and the work that is now being done to rebuild those cities and neighbourhoods affected.

One of the many interesting speakers was from New Zealand. The majority of Christchurch was destroyed in the 2011 earthquake, 45% of the buildings in the central city have safety problems and 1000 of the 4000 buildings are expected or have been demolished. (10,000 houses would also need to be demolished). As they begin efforts to rebuild the city they are realizing that they have the chance to get things right this time. Despite the tragedy of the loss, it is an amazing opportunity to rebuilt the city in a more sustainable way. Some of the discussions are around how it is important not to move too fast. It is important to take the time for reflection, for conversation and that is exactly what they are doing.

I found these discussions very positive but also very exciting. If you had the chance to change something about your city, to rebuild part of it from scratch, what would you do? What makes a city strong and vibrant. Would it be to create more parks? more pedestrian spaces? to make space for farmers and artist markets? to mix business premises and living residences? How would you build sustainability concepts into the buildings and infrastructure right from the start?

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Something Sweet

Monday, November 28th, 2011

I’m a big fan of honey. When I was doing my MBA, a group of us even put together a business plan around selling honey. At the time I was amazed at all the health benefits that honey provides; it boosts energy, builds immune systems, has cancer preventing properties and is a remedy for quite a few ailments such as sore throads, sleeplessness and even hangovers. Despite many attemps to create honey from scratch using artificial ingredients such as corn and rice syrups, they haven’t been able to. Only the bees can make it properly. Such a simple thing, but quite magical really.

Problem is, that jar of honey you have in your cupboard at home is probably not honey at all. Recently 60 samples of honey were tested in the US and the majority, three-quaters, were missing the one key ingredient that actually makes it honey; Pollen. The World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of other organizations including the U.S. Food and Drug Admnistration all say that if the honey has no pollen, then it isn’t honey.

It is the pollen in honey that has nutrients and antioxidants. You can trace the origin of honey and even the conditions in which it was produced through the pollen. Without the pollen you can’t know anything about the honey.

So what happened to the pollen? The pollen has been filtered out because consumers don’t like cloudy honey, they like clear honey which looks cleaner. So then new things are added into the honey to make it do the things that it already does, naturally.

Companies are doing so much work today making information available about their products, cleaning up their supply chains, creating healthier products, giving consumers the ability to learn about how that product was made and where. Honey has all these already built into it, so why mess with it? Some things are good just the way they are.

(tip for buying honey? Look for unfiltered and buy local. For more on the study click here.)

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The Story behind the storyteller

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

I remember some years ago seeing an ad for Australia. The ad focused on how modern the country was and showed skyscappers and business people and all those things that modern, developed countries had. Later on, when I first visited Australia, I very quickly realized that the very last reason you would want to visit Australia is to see its skyscrapers. Today Australia’s ads really do introduce you to just a few of the fantastic things you will experience once you get there, the history, people, culture, music, fashion, and of course kangaroos, all those things that make Australia unique rather than just like everyone else.

Seems to me that we humans live in a series of loops. While before everything needed to look modern, today we are going back to the roots, the ingredients, the history, the story. Retro is today, modern is yesterday, everything is tomorrow.

While reading a magazine in the train I saw this ad for Kellogg’s (click here for Video version of the ad). I’m not sure if it makes me more or less likely to buy Kellogg’s, but it does make me stop and think about the history of these huge international brands, that they too, like everything else, had a father or a mother (or both) that created them. They too, like the products they sell, have a story worth telling.

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Don’t waste my time (please)

Friday, April 30th, 2010


Yesterday while walking through London I was offered a flyer. A few blocks later, another flyer. Then someone tried to stop me to get me to give money to a charity and then tried to make me feel guilty for not stopping. All that in a matter of 5 minutes.

Last week I conducted a little experiment at home. On average, in the space of the day I have 6 pieces of junk mail pushed through the mail hole on my front door, 1 telemarketer calling to sell me something I couldn’t possibly use, 4 calls with automatic messages again trying to sell me something I don’t want and (lately in particular), one individual knocking on the door to sell me something, usually an idea or a politician. So on average, when I am in my home, 12 people/companies are invading my personal space on a daily basis to try to sell me something that I have not asked for. It wastes my time, especially because the majority of these messages are not even targeted at me or people like me, and it wastes a lot of resources.

What if all these companies or individuals that are forcing their way into my home on a daily basis were to give me something that I could really use. I wish the telemarketers would call everyday to tell me the weather forecast for the day, or perhaps a word a day in Japanese (why not, seems like an interesting language). I wish that the companies giving me junk mail pamphlets would give me some nice seeds for my garden instead since I could really use some right now. I wish the individuals knocking on my door would clean the leaves away from the front yard since I have been meaning to do that for a while now.

Ok, maybe that isn’t going to happen, but maybe it should. It isn’t a good idea to waste people’s time giving them things that they don’t want. Give people something that they can use in exchange for their time. Today I received an apple juice add that has a coupon on the back. I don’t use coupons but I can see others using it as it is a good discount on a good apple juice. But I’d like to see companies take it further. Perhaps the Indian takeout menu I am given every week could also have a recipe for a classic indian dish on it, or something about the region of India that the food they cook is from. At this moment I may be more likely to vote for the politician that gives me a pack of tomato seeds with their face printed on the front. Not only are you eliminating waste in terms of waste of time and waste of resources to create pamphlets no one wants by turning them into something they can use, you also become more interesting, something people remember, perhaps even something they will talk about and share.

Mexican restaurant Wahaca in London doesn’t have brochures to publicize their food. Instead they have created little branded matches which are actually Serrano chilli seeds (see picture). They are my current favorites, mostly because they gave me seeds.

Adults are just big kids. We want to be entertained too.

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Having fun with it

Monday, April 26th, 2010

When I was writing my book, I read over draft after draft of the different chapters. Everytime I read over the part where I introduce Icebreaker, the outdoor clothing company from New Zealand, I would giggle.

The reason I giggle is because Icebreaker is the creator of the baa-code. (I’m smiling now). Isn’t that fantastic! So simple, so silly, so predictable yet so effective.

New Zealand has 40 million sheep, 2 million of these are Merino sheep that provide the perfect raw material for sports apparel. More than $100 million in sales uses this material. In 1995, when Jeremy started the company they would buy wool a season at a time at different prices based on supply. This wasn’t working so he shook things up a bit. He started offering farmers multiyear contracts at guaranteed prices on the condition that they provide him with uniformly high quality fiber. Farmers have a predictable income and icebreaker a steady high-quality supply.

So what about the baa-code (smile). Each of Icebreakers garments has a little code that allows users to trace where the wool that went into making their outfit came from. As the website puts its
” Your unique Baacode will let you see the living conditions of the high country sheep that produced the merino fibre in your Icebreaker garment, meet the farmers who are custodians of this astonishing landscape, and follow every step of the supply chain. We’re sure you’ll find the experience as inspiring as we do. Enjoy your journey back to the source.”

What they are doing isn’t anything revolutionary, as many other companies are providing ways for their customers to see the story behind their products. However, sustainability is serious business so I always appreciate when people have a bit of fun with it all, especially as a way of involving their customers.

I think that if I ever have the chance to meet the CEO Jeremy Moon we would get along just fine.

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Am I Normal?

Monday, April 19th, 2010

I have a series of radio stations I listen to during the day depending on my mood. Today I listened to my favourite French station which is a little crazy and different. The station is great, except that they talk quite a bit, about random nonsense generally, but just now she mentioned a new website that sounded intriguing so I checked it out.

It is called ‘suis je normal’, ‘am I normal’ and is all in French (sorry). Basically the idea is that people write up something that they do or think and other visitors to the site can vote as to whether they think that is normal, kind of normal, not sure, kind of not normal or definitely not normal. For example one person said “I need a minimum dose of music every day. Without it my day becomes sad” 86% said this was normal. Another writes “ I’m a fan of Celine Dion. Am I normal?” 93% said that this was not normal.

I did a quick search to see if anyone had written “I see sustainability opportunities everyday, all the time in everything I hear, read, see, do etc.” I suspect I would get quite a few definitely not normals if/when I put it up. But who wants to be normal. Isn’t it better to be a little different? The companies, products, schools, entrepreneurs, CEOs that you remember, that you admire, that you respect, that are leading the way in sustainability, would you vote them normal?

At the same time, people like normal, they identify with normal, so you need to be different, but in a way that is close enough to normal to be accepted and to be understood. I love using Interface as an example. They make carpets, which is very normal, but what they do with carpets is definitely not normal.

Well, if you see my statement on the site, please do vote ‘normal’.

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Expectations and Assumptions

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

When we go to see a big Hollywood movie, we expect the special effects to be spectacular. When we go to a fancy restaurant, we expect the service to be impeccable. When we buy a bicycle we expect it to have wheels (two hopefully).

When we see a company selling a product in the store, we expect that that company is producing that product in a safe and legal way. If not, they wouldn’t be able to sell it, right?

But is that really the case? Do we know for sure? How can we know? We assume a lot of things when it comes to the products that we buy and use on a daily basis relating to their labour, environmental, health standards. But is this really the case?

Expectations and assumptions are dangerous words for companies that don’t have their back office in order when it comes to sustainability. Several companies seem to rely on the fact that their customers assume that they are doing certain good things relating to the environment and society. What will happen when customers realize that this is not the case?

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