A new sustainability standard for companies is being released for public comment: ULE 880 — Sustainability for Manufacturing Organizations, a partnership between UL Environment, a division of Underwriters Laboratories, and my colleagues at GreenBiz.com.

It is a day that I’ve been awaiting for the better part of a decade.

A 45-day comment period opened Aug. 2, and we hope you will review the draft standard and provide detailed feedback.

ULE 880 is the first in a series of company-level standards and certifications that are being produced by this ULE-GreenBiz partnership. It results from about eight years of work — initially by a small team of us in Alameda County, Calif., and starting last year, between ULE and GreenBiz.

The first draft of the standard is now complete, the product of a Herculean effort spearheaded by my friend and colleague Rory Bakke, director of sustainability at GreenBiz. Rory was lead author of the ULE 880, with assistance from me, a terrific team from UL Environment, and a small group of advisors.

ULE 880 covers five domains of sustainability:

• Sustainability Governance: How an organization leads and manages itself in relation to its stakeholders, including its employees, investors, regulatory authorities, customers, and the communities in which it operates.

• Environment: An organization’s environmental footprint across its policies, operations, products, and services, including its resource use and emissions.

• Workplace: Issues related to employee working conditions, organization culture, and effectiveness.

• Customers and Suppliers: Issues related to an organization’s policies and practices on product safety, quality, pricing, and marketing as well as its supply chain policies and practices.

• Social and Community Engagement: An organization’s impacts on its community in the areas of social equity, ethical conduct, and human rights.

All told, there are 102 questions (or “indicators”) in ULE 880, including 18 in Governance, 45 in Environment, 15 in Workforce, 15 in Customers and Suppliers, and nine in Social and Community Engagement. The number of indicators doesn’t reflect the weight each of these categories holds in the overall standard, however. Environment covers 80 points, Governance and Customers/Suppliers 40 each, and Workplace and Social/Community 20 each. There are also 18 “Innovation Points” — three points each for six different indicators — that reward companies for going above and beyond the standard.

But that doesn’t mean the core standard is a low bar. It was designed to be comprehensive — that is, to the extent that indicators are measurable and verifiable. Among the core principles of ULE 880 is that it be both reasonably attainable (at the lowest level of certification) and a high bar of excellence (and the highest level of certification). This and other core principles behind the standard are spelled out in the document’s introduction.

Why does Environment carry a disproportionate weight — 40 percent of the total? Therein lies one of many challenges the GreenBiz-ULE team faced. We set out to create a standard that is comprehensible, consistently applied, credible, measurable, relevant, and for which data is obtainable. As a rule, company environmental data is more widely tracked, analyzed, quantified, and defined consistently than social and governance data. For that reason, this version of ULE 880 is more heavily weighted toward environmental indicators. Over time, as companies seek certification under ULE 880 and the sustainability field continues to mature, we expect to refine the standard and potentially adjust its weighting of specific indicators and across issue areas.

Of course, all of this is subject to feedback, and that’s where you come in. The stakeholder feedback period, which ends Sept. 14, is free and open to all. To participate, you must register, after which you’ll receive a link to ULE’s Collaborative Standards Development System, or CSDS, an online tool Underwrites Laboratories uses to develop its standards. Already, more than 100 companies and thought leaders have registered to review and comment.

In the CSDS, you’ll be able to download ULE 880 or read an online version, the latter of which enables you to enter comments. You’ll be able to read others’ comments, and others will be able to read yours — an open and transparent process. Comments can be as broad or as specific as you wish.

“There’s really no comment of a constructive nature that isn’t potentially valuable,” Daniel P. Ryan, Standards Technical Panel Chair at UL Environment, told me recently. Ryan — who’s been with UL for 27 years, most of it in the standard-development process — continued:

We want the standard to be clear and concise in language so that manufacturers can read a clause and understand what it means, clearly and without ambiguity. Similarly, we want auditors who might be assessing manufacturers to that standard to have the same understanding. So, even if we get comments from someone who is confused, that’s really valuable input because it points us to something we thought was clear but obviously needs work.

This is just the beginning of the review process. “After the comment period closes, we’ll sort through all of the input, break it down by topic and try to see the different facets of an issue various stakeholders are arguing,” explains Ryan. “And then engage a smaller team of sustainability experts of diverse interests that will help guide the standard forward — how we should address the input we received.”

The plan is to announce the first pilot companies for ULE 880 later this fall.

During the next 45 days, we’re hoping to hear from a broad cross-section of those affected by or interested in ULE 880: manufacturers, assessment and standards groups, regulators, policy makers, procurement officers, sustainability professionals, the socially responsible investing community, and nonprofit sustainability interest groups.

I sincerely hope you will weigh in — and encourage your colleagues and stakeholders to do so, too.

Cross-posted from GreenBiz.

On Monday, Newsweek magazine unveiled its first annual Green Rankings, the fruits of a near-Herculean endeavor: rating and ranking the environmental performance, achievements, and reputation of the S&P 500. The list, published today in a 12-page special section in the magazine as well as online, is the culmination of an 18-month journey.

The resulting rankings are straightforward, almost elegant, but it wasn’t a straight or easy path. Like most such rankings, they’re imperfect. They’ll likely be challenged and debated, especially by some of the lower-ranking companies, not to mention the activist/blogosphere community. But it may well be the best effort yet to rigorously and comprehensively assess the mainstream corporate marketplace — at least in the U.S.

Over the past week, I’ve spoken with the creators of the rankings to understand the story behind this effort: their methodology as well as the challenges they faced, and how they faced them. As the creator of the annual State of Green Business report, I know these challenges well: creating a defensible, easy-to-understand set of metrics on business and the environment in a world in which data can be sketchy, inconsistent, or simply nonexistent.

First, the basics. The Newsweek rankings assess the S&P 500 — the 500 largest publicly held companies that trade on either the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ, the two largest American stock markets — on three metrics:

• an “environmental impact score,” based on more than 700 metrics, compiled by Trucost, a leading provider of data and analysis on company emissions and natural resource use;
• a “green policies score,” an analysis of corporate policies and initiatives by KLD Research & Analytics, one of the pioneers in socially responsible investing research; and
• a “reputation survey score” resulting from a survey of CEOs, corporate environmental officers, and academics conducted by CorporateRegister.com, an online directory of company-issued CSR, sustainability, and environment reports from around the world.

Each company’s score, and thus its ranking, was based on a weighted average of those three components: 45 percent for the impact score, 45 percent for the policies score, and 10 percent for the reputation score.

The overall winner: Hewlett Packard, which edged out its rival Dell for the number-one spot. Rounding out the top 10 after Dell were Johnson & Johnson, Intel, IBM, State Street, Nike, Briston-Myers Squibb, Applied Materials, and Starbucks.

The bottom 10 companies — those ranked 491 through 500 — are FirstEnergy, Southern, Bunge, American Electric Power, Ameren, Consol Energy, ConAgra Foods, Allegheny Energy, NRG Energy, and . . . in last place: Peabody Energy.

Only one oil company made the top 100, Marathon Oil, squeaking by at number 100. The majors didn’t fare so well: ConocoPhillips (238), Chevron (371), ExxonMobil (395); BP and Shell aren’t part of the S&P 500, so weren’t ranked.

It’s interesting to peruse high-profile companies. Examples: McDonald’s ranked 22, Microsoft 31, Walmart 59, Clorox 77, Google 79, General Electric 82, Kimberly Clark 120, Apple 133, Halliburton 169, Tyson Foods 479, Monsanto 485, Duke Energy 490. I encourage you to dive into the full rankings and do your own comparisons and analysis. (The online version has some great detailed data.)

It may not be surprising that half of the top 10 rated companies (as well as half of the top 20) are technology firms, and that 8 of the 10 lowest-rated are energy utility or coal-mining companies. That makes sense: Most tech companies don’t actually manufacture anything themselves these days — they mostly purchase components from other manufacturers — while utilities and mining companies are known to make quite a mess, in terms of emissions and other impacts.

Therein lies one of the big questions of such an effort: What do the rankings really mean?

“We regard this as a best first effort,” Peter Bernstein told me last week. Bernstein and his partner, Annalyn Swan, operate ASAP Media, a “publishing and content development firm,” and collaborated with Newsweek to produce the rankings. Both Bernstein and Swan have served as senior editors at Newsweek, U.S. News, and Fortune, among other places.

The ASAP-Newsweek team, along with a small advisory panel — including Yale’s Dan Esty; John Steelman of NRDC; Marjorie Kelly of Tellus Institute; Climate Counts executive director Wood Turner; and David Vidal of the Conference Board — wrestled with issues like the one described above, ultimately creating a system that tried to account for the different industries’ footprints. As Swan explained: “The advisory panel asked all the relevant questions you would ask: How do you calibrate and fine-tune the weightings between the actual environmental footprint of companies and positive reputations and initiatives and policies. That took several months of discussions. We convened the panel on numerous occasions. This was not a light undertaking.”

Added Bernstein: “If you rank companies solely on their environmental footprint or impact, certain industries would dominate that list — technology, health care, banking — they all don’t have as great an environmental impact as other industries. So, we had to adjust that with intentions and an industry bias. That was the subject of discussions concerning the weighting between these various data points, something all of our data partners debated. It was the single most time-consuming subject that we went back and forth on with the advisory panel.”

The fate of corporate rankings rest on any number of such institutionalized biases, but that’s par for the course. If you peel back the methodology of any massive undertaking like this — Fortune magazine’s annual ranking of the World’s Most Admired Companies, is one of many such examples — you’ll find minuscule differences between companies that, depending on how things are scored and weighted, can rocket any given firm up or down the rankings.

And then there’s the quality of data, about which I know more than a little, having attempted various analyses over the years using other organizations’ research. As Bernstein put it: “This is a field in which, across the board, a lot of the data isn’t as good as one would hope, or isn’t as fully exposed, or doesn’t exist. In each of these areas, greenhouse gas emissions being the most obvious, not everyone has data. Concerning the [U.S. government's] Toxic Release Inventory, some companies have to disclose by law and some don’t. All of these factors were a balance. We hope that both disclosure and measurement will get better over time. This is a first stake in the ground.”

I (and many of you) could pick apart the Newsweek rankings — for example, they don’t include some of the more admirable privately held companies, such as Patagonia; Interface, the iconic green carpet company, isn’t included in the S&P 500, even though it’s listed on NASDAQ (not sure why). But I’ll leave the picayune stuff to others. I’d rather step back and admire this first effort, however imperfect, and salute the team for doing what hadn’t previously been done, or done well: brought together a wealth of data on a broad spectrum of the world’s biggest companies to provide a snapshot of the green business world.

There’s also the bigger picture beyond the numbers. As Bernstein told me: “You can’t help but be struck by the enormous range of efforts and programs across the board that so many of these companies are engaged in their environmental efforts. Whether they’re the most effective programs that will have their intended effects, or whether they’re just good public relations, remains to be seen. But to the extent to which these large companies are engaging in efforts to look at their own emissions and their own environmental footprint — and coming up with imaginative, creative programs that are addressing climate concerns, water usage concerns, supplier concerns — it’s rather staggering.”

I suspect that as you read this, scores of senior sustainability professionals are getting calls from their overlords in the C-suite, asking tough questions about why their companies fared more poorly than hoped, and demanding answers.

And for that reason alone Newsweek’s rankings are a beautiful thing.

Campuses are going green — and not just with ivy.

Photo: iStockphoto

The greening of academe is nothing new, but it seems to have taken root in a big way. Today, it’s not just about doing a few good, green things — recycling, buying green energy, building green buildings, and all the rest — and it’s not just about saving money or being seen as a good neighbor. It’s about being seen as a sustainability leader in order to attract students, funding, and media attention.

As a result, in a growing number of schools, “green” has become the Big Meme on Campus.

But getting colleges and universities to make the grade as environmental leaders is no slam dunk. Like their corporate counterparts, schools face a variety of challenges and barriers, from a lack of top-level commitment, to institutional inertia, to a dearth of answers to the seemingly simple question “How good is ‘good enough’?”

Companies and activist groups alike are trying to help schools answer that question. For example, General Electric and mtvU recently launched an ecomagination Challenge, with a $25,000 prize for the school proposing “the most impactful and innovative project to ‘green’ their campus.” It joins the Campus Climate Challenge, an activist-led network of more than 300 schools promoting leadership on global warming.

So, how do you green a school? When viewed through a green lens, colleges and universities are, in fact, businesses. A decent-sized school can combine the environmental footprint of a myriad of operations: office buildings, hotels, food service, laundry, retail, vehicle repair and maintenance, energy production, waste hauling, construction, health care, even road building and small manufacturing. And if there is scientific research going on, it may involve a witch’s brew of hazardous chemicals and materials, from urethane to uranium.

Forget a business. A college is actually more like a small city.

A Matter of Policy

So, how do we make all that activity safe for people and the planet? First, someone’s got to take the lead. At some schools that leadership comes from the administration and faculty. At others, it comes from the real powers that be: the students themselves.

Historically, students have been the major drivers, says Julian Dautremont-Smith, associate director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. “They can make things happen in a way that staff or faculty haven’t. That said, there is increasingly leadership from school presidents that are committed to these issues. It’s developed into a more high-level activity. Schools are trying to compete — be the leader in environmental studies or sustainability.”

Inevitably, though, it takes a village. For example, at the University of California campuses, students have proposed dozens of policies that have been embraced by administrators, from green building designs to organic produce in the dining halls. Student representatives from throughout the UC system created the California Student Sustainability Coalition “to fight for a sustainable University of California,” according to the group’s website. Activist groups have played a role. A campaign sponsored by Greenpeace targeted system-wide policy changes to bring green buildings and renewable energy to all UC campuses. (Full disclosure: My firm, Clean Edge, authored a report funded by Greenpeace as part of that campaign.)

The UC administration has pitched in, too. The university system’s governing body, the UC Regents, approved a Green Building Policy and Clean Energy Standard [PDF] in 2003, which mandates that new buildings outperform state energy-efficiency requirements by at least 20 percent. And in the UC’s Office of the President, there sits a “sustainability specialist.”

Sustaining and broadening campus greening initiatives over time has proven to be very difficult for most students, who typically cycle in and out of the campus every two to four years, says Julian Keniry, who heads the National Wildlife Federation’s Campus Ecology Program. “We’ve encouraged addressing this in three ways: cultivating administrative champions who can adopt and build programs over time, hiring sustainability directors to lead and facilitate these initiatives, and developing alumni networks to serve as fiscal sponsors and watchdogs,” she says, adding that there has been good progress on the first two: “Administrative champions are emerging who are networking through their planning, business, and physical-plant associations, and dozens of colleges and universities have created a sustainability director or similar positions.”

Fee to Be You and Me

How to pay for green investments, like solar panels or green building designs, is another matter. Cash-strapped school administrators may balk at spending extra money for such things, even if the investments will yield savings within a few years. Students inevitably end up paying the extra costs, either through tuition hikes or voluntary fees. For example, in July, the Tennessee Board of Regents approved increases in student fees to fund renewable energy at Middle Tennessee State University and Tennessee Technological University. The $8-per-semester fee hikes had previously been approved by almost 90 percent of students at both institutions. Students at Central Oregon Community College voted last spring to increase their $1.75-per-credit hour student fee by 25 cents in order to purchase renewable energy.

It can be money well spent, and not just for the environment. The process of greening campuses can provide a learning opportunity for students that will be directly transferable to greening their future employers, says Liz Maw, executive director of Net Impact, the 10,000-member association of MBA students and recent grads, which runs a Campus Greening Initiative. “Students build project-management skills, cost-benefit analytical skills, change-management skills, and communication skills,” she says.

Ultimately, the real challenge is determining how much is “enough.” There is no certification program or generally accepted definition of a “green campus,” leaving each campus to define its own goals. As with companies, this leads to some schools hyping what amounts to a so-so greening effort — the equivalent of a C student acing a single course and claiming to be a scholar. “There are some schools not doing as much as they could do and claiming to be leaders,” acknowledges Dautremont-Smith. “But some are putting sustainability into their guiding documents — their mission statement, master plan, and strategic plan.” That, he says, is the sign of a true leader.

Tools Rush In

Despite the lack of standards, there are several tools to assess sustainability on campus. The most comprehensive is the Campus Sustainability Assessment Framework, the result of more than two years of intensive work by a master’s student at Royal Roads University in British Columbia. It covers 170 social, environmental, cultural, political, and economic indicators to assess campus sustainability, including short-term and long-term goals for many indicators. Schools all over Canada are using it to support sustainability progress, says Dautremont-Smith.

That’s a long list, to be sure. Others have come up with simpler checklists — see here and here, for example. However “simpler,” they still describe the full range of potential activities in which a comprehensive sustainability effort needs to engage.

It’s a lot of work, to be sure. It requires tilting against windmills (or maybe installing them), enlightening and inspiring leaders, and getting bureaucracies to change their well-worn habits.

At minimum, it’s good practice for what students will face after graduation.

Green Campus 101

Worldwatch Institute offers several case studies on campus greening initiatives. Good resources can also be found on the websites of NWF’s Campus Ecology Program and the Association of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future.

“What’s your company’s climate footprint?” It’s a hot question these days — one being asked increasingly of companies by customers, investors, activists, regulators, and others.

OK, it may not be exactly that question, but it’s probably in some form, like, “What’s your company doing to reduce its climate impacts?” Or, “How do you call yourself environmentally responsible when you take so damn many plane trips?”

Photo: iStockphoto

Whatever the question, providing an answer will require understanding what, exactly, your company does to contribute greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And therein lies a challenge: Calculating a company’s climate footprint (sometimes referred to as a “carbon footprint”) is far from simple. To begin, there are the sheer number and range of business activities that must be tracked: facilities, operations, transportation, travel, and purchases of everything from raw materials to office supplies.

Beyond that are complex questions of where to draw the boundaries: how far upstream and downstream your company must count. For example, are you accountable for the greenhouse-gas emissions related to extracting and processing the raw materials or energy you purchase for your operations, or are they your suppliers’ responsibility? When your employees travel by air, are you or the airline responsible for counting and reporting the climate-related impacts? What about downstream: Who should account for the climate impacts of customers using and disposing of your products?

On top of all that, how do you ensure that this information is collected consistently so it can be aggregated for different departments, facilities, business units, product lines, and geographic regions?

Answering such questions can require the wisdom of Solomon — and the patience of Job. Fortunately, there is growing consensus about how to measure and track greenhouse-gas emissions.

Good thing. Companies seem to be increasingly tripping over themselves trying to put on a friendly climate face. Each month brings new reports of companies making commitments to reduce or offset some part of their climate footprint. It’s hard to attend an environmental event these days without hearing that the event, including all participants’ travel, has been rendered “climate neutral” (or some such moniker; there are several variations on this theme). Even rock bands, from Pearl Jam to Dave Matthews, are drumming out the climate impacts of their concerts and tours.

So, how do you measure your firm’s carbon footprint?

Measure Twice, Cut Once

Start with the basics: Your offices and how you get to and from them each day. If you’re a small or mid-sized organization, energy use and transportation probably represent a good chunk of your impacts. There are simple online calculators, like the one offered by the U.K. group Climate Care, that can give you an instant measure — though gathering all of the information needed for even this simple calculator likely won’t be instant. (Keep in mind that many of these free calculators’ creators want to sell you climate offsets, which allow you to “neutralize” your emissions by purchasing renewable-energy credits and other things.)

Next, take a look at the rest of your operations — what you buy, sell, and make. To calculate the climate impacts, you’ll need to find carbon or greenhouse-gas emissions data for these things. This is where you’ll need some outside help from consultants or other experts.

“The first comprehensive footprint that we did in 1999 measured facility energy, finished-product distribution, incoming supplies, employee commuting, and work travel, and we chose a few key items in our supply chain that we intuitively thought would have high emissions — our yogurt cups and the milk production,” says Nancy Hirshberg, vice president of Natural Resources for Stonyfield Farm. She notes that while there is a lot more information available today than in 1999, the process hasn’t changed much. “There are still a lot of assumptions that need to be made. Footprinting is still far from an exact science. But we definitely end up with a very clear picture on where our greatest impact is and where we need to focus our efforts.”

Stonyfield is one of many companies that have worked with Portland, Ore.-based Trexler Climate + Energy Services, one of the pioneering firms in the climate arena. “If all you’re doing is tallying up your gas and electricity use, it is about a seven-minute operation, not a big deal,” says Mark Trexler, president of the company. The bigger deal, he says, comes when you attempt to comply with the GHG Protocol Initiative, the globally recognized reporting standard for greenhouse-gas emissions.

According to the protocols, companies must choose how to account for direct and indirect emissions. Direct emissions are those from sources owned or controlled by your company — for example, emissions from factory stacks, manufacturing processes and vents, and company-owned or leased vehicles. Indirect emissions are a consequence of company activities, but occur from sources owned or controlled by others — such as emissions from the production of electricity you purchase, contract manufacturing, employee travel, and emissions from using the company’s products.

Suffice to say, it can get complicated quickly. The GHG Protocol is intended for larger companies, so if yours is a smaller operation, or a service company with no factories or other industrial operations, it probably isn’t worth going through it.

Why bother at all? A well-designed emissions inventory can serve several business goals, including helping your company improve its efficiencies, reduce costs, and get public recognition for taking action to reduce or eliminate your climate impacts. Addressing climate change may also affect your company if it is part of a larger supply chain. Some small businesses serve larger organizations and companies that must calculate and manage both direct and indirect greenhouse-gas emissions. Many major corporations now seek suppliers with a demonstrated commitment to minimizing their climate impacts, as this impact adds indirectly to their own.

Stonyfield’s efforts to measure its emissions makes for a good case study that may help your company understand the process. In 1996, the yogurt maker committed to offsetting 100 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions from its production facility’s energy use by the year 2002. The company published an “Environmental Cookbook” describing the successful project.

Trexler emphasizes that for most smaller companies, measuring and tracking climate impacts is a fairly simple proposition. “It’s certainly not rocket science. It’s being able to track down the right conversion factors for your company. There are a lot of people around right now who do that.”

More important, he says, is to understand why you’re doing this in the first place. “Is the inventory the end or the beginning?” he asks. “If it’s the end, then what was the point? If it’s the beginning, that’s a very good thing. It opens up a lot of possibilities, like education, offsets, and trying to spread the word in order to influence policy makers and others.”

Count On This

ClimateBiz.com offers a special section on climate management for smaller companies, including a backgrounder, best practices, and links to organizations, tools, and other resources. There are also a variety of other online carbon calculators intended for companies. Two of the best are from the Climate Neutral Group and the Australian firm Climate Friendly.

How many light bulbs does it take to change a supply chain? In the case of Baxter Healthcare Corp., just three.

When Jenni Cawein, manager of corporate environmental health and safety engineering at the Illinois-based $9.8 billion health-care giant, arrived six years ago, she saw that the company was losing ground on waste. “I asked my boss, ‘Who’s working with purchasing?’ It turned out it was nobody,” she says. Cawein set out to build a case for integrating environmental criteria into the company’s procurement process.

Show them the money.

Photo: iStockphoto.

“I asked what the purchasing department cared about the most,” Cawein explains. “I did a lot of research, and of course they care about cost reduction, and had made certain commitments to reduce costs.”

Armed with details about the department’s goals, Cawein set up a time to address the purchasing staff. At that meeting, she offered an illustrative example involving three fluorescent light bulbs: one cost $1 and was expected to last 2 years; another cost $5 and lasted 8 years; the third cost $2 and lasted 2 years, but used 30 percent less electricity.

“When I ran the actual numbers, including real costs of electricity for all of our facilities around the world, plus labor and disposal costs, and showed them the data, their eyes just opened up,” says Cawein. “I showed them that the cheapest bulb would cost us $50 million more than the most efficient bulb.”

Cawein’s message was clear: greening the supply chain is a strategic, bottom-line issue. Largely as a result of Cawein’s light-bulb inspiration, Baxter has embarked on an effort to integrate environmental thinking into every aspect of supply-chain management.

Baxter is not alone in embracing supply-chain environmental management (though its effort may be one of the more ambitious). Companies in a number of sectors have been driving environmental thinking increasingly further upstream — typically beginning with a handful of their biggest suppliers, and expanding those successes to smaller players.

Link Link, Nudge Nudge

In recent years, the supply-chain environmental management, or SCEM, movement appears to have gathered steam, and has given birth to some new industry and government initiatives. The U.S. EPA’s Green Suppliers Network, a public-private partnership, aims to help suppliers and manufacturers eliminate waste, save money, and reduce their eco-impact. Members of the network — including Abbott Laboratories, General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, Herman Miller, Johnson & Johnson, Pratt & Whitney, and Steelcase — focus on the root causes of waste, enabling them to decrease the use of toxic and non-renewable materials, use energy more efficiently, reduce labor costs, and promote greater employee participation in environmental-improvement activities.

At Baxter, SCEM isn’t limited to buying light bulbs — or, for that matter, to procurement itself. Its efforts extend from the manufacturing floor all the way to end users, primarily hospitals and doctors’ offices.

Once Cawein helped her company’s purchasing department understand the business value of SCEM, the next step was to bring manufacturing into the fold. Like many companies, Baxter has embraced the concept of “lean manufacturing,” viewed by business gurus as being to the 21st century what “mass production” was to the 20th.

Lean manufacturing centers around the identification and elimination of waste. Its touted benefits are cuts as great as 50 percent in production costs, number of personnel, time required to get new products into the field, plus higher quality, higher profitability, and increased flexibility, among other things. In lean-manufacturing systems, waste-free, “continuous one-piece work flow” processes are highly reliant upon real-time supply-chain reliability. Lean manufacturing’s focus on waste and procurement creates an attractive partner for SCEM: the former looks at things from a system-wide view, while the latter delves into the nitty-gritty process steps.

Baxter’s supply-chain efforts extend downstream as well. The company’s participation in another program co-sponsored by EPA, Hospitals for a Healthy Environment, has enabled it to better understand some of the end-of-life issues its products encounter inside health-care facilities. That, in turn, has helped Baxter work with suppliers to make changes in packaging and materials that reduce customer waste. In one case involving a medical-grade plastic that usually ended up in landfills, the manufacturer was able to get government funding to help develop a less-wasteful alternative. “I would never have dreamed,” says Cawein, “that there was as much government seed funding for these technologies as there is.”

If You’ve Got the Money, Honey, I’ve Got the SCEM

Efforts like Baxter’s demand that companies already have in place a firm environmental commitment and some strong management systems. A benchmarking survey of large companies conducted several years ago by Business for Social Responsibility found that companies with leading supply-chain practices shared common organizational characteristics, including a strong commitment to environmental stewardship; a desire to serve as a model for their industry; clear, consistent, and frequent internal communication and communication with suppliers; ongoing supplier education; and continuous improvement through built-in feedback mechanisms.

Such qualities, BSR concluded, are what separate ad hoc, reactive approaches to supply-chain management from more holistic, strategic approaches like Baxter’s.

Cawein will be the first to tell you that making such shifts isn’t easy. “You’ve got to be persistent and patient,” she counsels. “You’re talking about culture change. It’s going to take a while. What I tell myself is that as long as I’m making steps forward, I’m happy. I expect this [effort to improve] will never end if we do it right.”

Learning how to talk with procurement folks is key, she says. “You have to focus on your own internal people who are responsible for suppliers first, and that will take you a while. Environmental people on their own cannot do this. They tend to talk in generalities, and purchasing people tend to talk in hard facts. When you talk about cost savings, you’ve got to be specific. That’s the thing that really started to bring them over. It has to be quantifiable.”

In the end, it’s the economics, stupid. If you can convince the powers that be that there’s a way to save money beyond the purchase price — and then can show them that it comes out of a specific budget — you can break through the purchasing department’s traditional reluctance to change vendors or products, says Cawein. “You’ve got to show them the link and prove it to them. Once they understand that it’s not funny money, they go out and start negotiating.”

Special delivery.

Photo: iStockphoto.

So what are you going to pack it in, cardboard or plastic? And how are you going to keep it safe: Styrofoam, newspaper, popcorn, peanuts, Crackerjacks?

Last month, this column reviewed the impacts of shipping by plane, train, and automobile (and ship, of course). This time we dig a little deeper, looking at the impacts of the actual packaging materials that companies choose.

Those who ship products confront a boatload of packaging options, when you consider both the outer container and the inner materials used to cushion goods and fill space. Much like the perennial grocery-bag dilemma, opinions abound about which combination is “best” — and few of those opinions are conclusive.

Should you use a cardboard box instead of a plastic bag? How about shredded newspaper filler instead of foam “peanuts”? Logic might dictate that tree-based materials trump petro-based ones. But logic might be wrong.

So what’s the best call when you’re going green? The bottom line: It’s the weight, stupid — that is, the heft of the material, not its recycled content — that most influences the environmental impacts of your bags and boxes.

Bag It

Recently, a study commissioned by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. EPA offered one of the more comprehensive looks at the environmental impacts of transport packaging. It might even cause some manufacturers, retailers, and distributors to rethink their strategies.

The study analyzed more than 20 packaging options, including boxes, padded and unpadded bags, and several kinds of loosefill materials, made with both recycled and non-recycled content. It found that shipping items in bags — whether paper or plastic, virgin or post-consumer — had the lowest energy profile, including lower consumption of fossil fuels, less solid waste, and lower emissions.

Using corrugated boxes, including those made from post-consumer recycled content, was deemed to have a much higher impact. The heaviest combination (a corrugated box and molded-pulp loosefill) was found to weigh 26 times more than the lightest option (a linear low-density polyethylene, or LLDPE, plastic bag).

“The study confirms the waste-management hierarchy of reduce and recycle,” explains David Allaway of Oregon DEQ’s Solid Waste Policy and Program Development office. “Regardless of what the material is made of, the shipping bags have lower energy requirements and emissions because they weigh so much less.” (The full report — a weighty 500-plus pages — can be downloaded from DEQ.)

The findings of the study — which focused on materials used to deliver “soft” goods such as clothing and other relatively unbreakable products directly to consumers, as opposed to electronics and other more sensitive goods — are significant, since they are contrary to many companies’ tendency to focus on post-consumer recycled content as the main environmental attribute in selecting shipping materials.

“We have not found the environmentally friendly packaging material that doesn’t cause environmental impacts,” Allaway says. “Sometimes I think that gets lost in the enthusiasm for changing materials or using recycled content.”

Weight and See

Allaway is quick to point out, however, that “this is not a paper-versus-plastic study.” Rather, he says, it’s about factors that are too often overlooked: “The lesson is to pay attention to weight and volume,” he says. “Weight matters.” Indeed it does. In 2004, Ontario became the first jurisdiction in North America requiring companies to contribute toward recycling fees based on the weight of their packaging.

In fact, more than 30 countries across Europe and Asia currently mandate some form of producer responsibility for packaging, according to Raymond Communications, which produces publications and conferences on the topic. As more such laws come on board, these seemingly simple decisions are becoming increasingly important.

Even aside from governmental regulations, choosing the right packaging can save a company, well, a bundle. Norm Thompson Outfitters, for instance, estimates that it is saving around $1.15 million each year by increasing its use of lightweight polyethylene shipping bags — $664,000 in freight, $415,000 in materials, $75,000 in labor — instead of using cardboard boxes.

And even small steps add up quickly. Nike slaps “Re-Use It” stickers on incoming boxes in one warehouse, then does just that, saving more than $50,000 a year. And Toyota implemented a system of returnable plastic containers to ship floor mats to a distribution center. After eliminating disposable pallets and cartons, the supplier was able to pass along savings to Toyota in the form of a reduced unit price for floor mats.

In the end, says Allaway, the rule of thumb is to first make sure that your shipping cartons aren’t oversized, in order to reduce the use of packaging materials. (Smaller packages can also decrease freight impacts, as many long-haul trucks fill by volume, not weight.) Once you’ve downsized, select combinations that weigh less than the other comparable options. And only then, focus on making the “right” green choice: “Once you’ve chosen the material, by all means use post-consumer recycled content,” says Allaway.

Of course, if you take this advice too far and underpackage the World’s Greenest Product, causing it to break during shipment and require replacement, you’ll end up creating an even bigger environmental impact, since you’ll have to ship out a whole new one. Sometimes more really is more.

Pack It In

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality offers checklists for evaluating packaging options, methods for reducing waste, a rundown of waste-prevention regulations, and other useful information. See also the Reusable Transport Packaging Directory and a report on environmental packaging in the overnight shipping industry, both available on GreenBiz.com.

Your new iPod is in there somewhere.

Photo: iStockphoto.

The environmental impacts of shipping goods hither and yon are significant but relatively obscure, the true costs hidden amid complex shipping tariffs and product price tags. Businesses that rely on products being moved from one place to another have been able to do little to change the performance of truck, rail, and marine cargo companies. Moreover, cargo companies haven’t been on most environmental activists’ radar screens.

But that’s changing. The growing focus on climate and energy — along with such evergreen issues as biodiversity and air and water pollution — have brought shipping’s environmental impacts into the fast lane. Activists are starting to wage campaigns against dirty shippers. And a handful of companies, including some of the world’s largest freight haulers, are beginning to take action.

Ships Happen

The environmental cost of moving goods can be significant. Take cargo ships, for example — the means by which two-thirds of the goods purchased by U.S. consumers arrive on American shores. While oceangoing vessels worldwide account for just 2 to 3 percent of global fossil-fuel consumption, they are responsible for 14 percent of the nitrogen emissions from fossil fuels and 16 percent of all sulfur emissions from petroleum, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon University.

One reason: cargo ships run on “bunker fuel,” the dirtiest, cheapest product that remains after gas and other high-grade fuels are refined from crude oil. Bunker fuel contains up to 5,000 times more sulfur than diesel. As a result, according to Bluewater Network, a division of Friends of the Earth, a single container ship emits more pollution than 2,000 diesel trucks.

Ballast is another issue. Modern cargo ships hold within their hulls millions of gallons of water, which is moved around to ensure the ship is properly trimmed, improving safety and speed. Ships routinely exchange ballast water while in port as cargo is loaded or unloaded. The water pumped out of the ship is alive with organisms from ports previously visited. One analysis of ballast water from foreign ships entering Canada found as many as 12,392 marine creatures per cubic meter. The survivors often invade their adopted homes, sometimes wreaking havoc; the zebra mussel fouling the Great Lakes is just one example.

Of course, ground and air freight have impacts, too. Truck and rail represent about 17 percent of all transport-related climate emissions. Over the past four decades, freight-truck vehicle-miles have increased more than 50 percent, while fuel efficiency has grown only about 12 percent. Overall, the 35 billion gallons of diesel fuel used by truck and rail companies each year produce more than 350 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, aircraft transport boasts greater fuel consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions per ton-mile than any other mode of transport. And their emissions’ negative impacts are amplified due to the high altitude where they occur.

All of which is getting activists moving. In recent years, for example, Bluewater Network successfully sued the U.S. EPA over regulation of emissions from large, oceangoing vessels. In April, a delegation of environmental and public-health organizations from the E.U. and the U.S. pressed the International Maritime Organization to reduce ship smokestack emissions by 70 to 90 percent, saying the cuts would protect those who live and work near ports from cancer, respiratory ailments, and premature deaths.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has also weighed in, issuing a report that points out that although trucks account for just under 6 percent of highway miles driven in the U.S., they account for a tenth of all domestic oil consumption. They’re also responsible for a quarter of smog-causing pollution and the majority of the cancer threat posed by air pollution in some urban areas. According to the EPA, idling trucks and locomotives use 1.2 billion gallons of diesel fuel a year and emit more than 200,000 tons of nitrogen oxides. Talk about idle indulgences.

Freight Expectations

What’s going on to reduce such impacts? A boatload. A couple of years ago, the nonprofit Business for Social Responsibility convened a Clean Cargo Working Group to help retailers and manufacturers reduce the impacts of oceangoing transport. They developed a set of standards for measuring the climate impacts of shipping, along with a questionnaire to give ship operators.

This wasn’t easy. Calculating the climate impact of, say, a pair of shoes being shipped from China involves understanding the type of ship, the kind of fuel it burns, the shipping lane it traveled, and other factors. Companies like Chiquita, Hewlett-Packard, Mattel, and Nike have been involved with the effort to work with vessel operators including K Line, Maersk Sealand, and NYK Line to implement the new standards.

Meanwhile, back on dry land, trucking companies — driven by such mega-shippers as Dell, Home Depot, IKEA, J.C. Penney, and Lowe’s — are gearing up a new generation of vehicles that significantly improve fuel economy and reduce emissions. FedEx has been working with Environmental Defense to produce a low-emission, hybrid-electric delivery vehicle that could become a medium-duty truck for the company’s fleet. Wal-Mart, with one of the world’s largest fleets, has pledged to increase its trucks’ efficiency by 25 percent over the next three years and double it (from 6.5 to 13 miles per gallon) within a decade. Efficiency comes from improving engines, of course, but also from such steps as installing “side skirts” on trailers to reduce wind resistance.

What can you do to reduce shipping’s impact? Four things:

• Avoid air freight whenever possible. Aside from being expensive, it consumes far more fuel per mile traveled. Patagonia calculated that the energy costs associated with a product rose from 6 to 28 percent when the mode of transport shifted from ground to air.
• Consolidate shipments. This reduces overall packaging and fuel use, and can lead to lower shipping costs.
• Press shippers on their environmental practices. Encourage them to use hybrid vehicles, idle-reduction devices, and other cleaner technologies.
• Buy local whenever possible to reduce the need for shipping altogether.

In the end, keep in mind that the environmental impacts of the products you buy may pale compared to the impacts of shipping them across oceans and continents.

Getting there, as they say, is half the fumes.

Package Deals

The U.S. EPA’s new Smartway program aims to help shippers reduce the climate impacts of cargo. A good backgrounder on the topic is available from Business for Social Responsibility. Green Shipping World offers a directory of regulations, organizations, and awards. GreenBiz offers two free publications: Questionnaires for the Purchase of Environmentally Sound Transportation and Good Practice in Freight Transport.

Water saved is a dollar earned.

Photo: iStockphoto.

If you’ve read the headline, you already know that the resource in question is not oil, but water. For companies, it’s a liquid asset that’s long been undervalued and overconsumed. The world’s freshwater supply is at risk, and the question is when and where, not whether, there will be major droughts or shortages that could dry up business and the bottom line.

As a result, some companies are tapping into water conservation, reuse, and recycling. A few are finding that doing more with less water represents a classic alignment of environmental and business goals. Water reduction, reuse, and recycling investments often have quick paybacks, especially when one considers the multiple business benefits water efficiency can provide.

Consider a few brief success stories:

• Graphic Sciences, a Portland, Ore., company that manufactures water-based inks, previously used about five gallons a minute in making pigments. The water, used only once, was dumped into the city wastewater system. After conducting a water audit, the company installed a cooling tower to recirculate the water. The tower cut water use by 80 percent — some 2.5 million gallons — as well as sewage costs. The $5,800 project costs were recouped in about two months.

• Gangi Brothers Packing Co., a tomato processing and canning plant in Santa Clara, Calif., monitored its water use to identify areas for savings. Before the audit, Gangi used some 148 billion gallons of water during a single canning season. After implementing conservation measures, water use dropped to 56.8 billion gallons. The combined capital and operating costs for water conservation were $89,500 per year, but the savings from lower sewer and water costs was $130,000 per year, yielding an eight-month payback.
• La Quinta Inns, based in Dallas, Texas, developed a utility management information system that allows analysis of utility expenses each month and flags deviations from normal use. The company works with facility managers and utilities to investigate high consumption and take corrective action. Often, the analysis identifies a problem before the facility manager is aware of it. In one year alone, such measures led to a 9.5 percent drop in per-guest water consumption, for a corporate-wide reduction of 76.5 million gallons.
• Gallo Wineries partnered with the Santa Rosa, Calif., Subregional Water Reclamation System to expand the city’s system to accommodate additional growth while providing a reliable supply of recycled water to Gallo during irrigation season. Gallo developed 350 acres of vineyards for irrigation and a 300 acre-foot reservoir, with the city providing the piping and pumping facilities. The finished system reuses 3.8 billion gallons of recycled water each year on more than 5,700 acres of mostly agricultural lands.

Awash With Benefits

The point of doing all these things is to shrink water bills, of course. But that’s only half the glass; saving water provides several other benefits for businesses. For example:

• Energy savings. The money saved on energy for heating, pumping, and treating water typically often outweighs the actual water savings.

• Reduced wastewater production. Less water going in means less wastewater going out, cutting firms’ sewer service costs. In some areas, wastewater utilities offer financial incentives for reduced wastewater output.
• Improved processes. Re-examining processes to minimize water and energy waste can suggest entirely new — and better — ways of accomplishing the same tasks.
• Higher productivity. Facilities that make better use of water and energy are typically more pleasant to occupy. Worker productivity and service quality may increase due to lower absenteeism and other factors.
• Ecosystem benefits. Using less water leaves more for local streams, wetlands, and their natural inhabitants. Regulatory requirements and incentives for doing so are increasingly common.
• Public relations value. Companies and other organizations perceived to be protecting the environment may enjoy a competitive advantage.

A lot of this is simple efficiency: tightening taps, installing more-efficient fixtures, checking for leaks, and the like. But new technologies are helping, too. For example, the city of San Diego designed a $150 million system to bring recycled water up to the quality of tap water and pump it back into the city’s reservoir.

While the high cost of such systems puts them out of reach for most companies, some lower-tech solutions are becoming increasingly affordable: constructed wetlands, biological filtration systems, and others.

Among the better-known is the Living Machine, created by biologist John Todd to treat high-strength industrial wastewater and sewage. Todd’s system harnesses sunlight and a diversity of organisms to digest organic pollutants. Todd’s satisfied customers include Ethel M. Chocolates in Henderson, Nev. The company’s Living Machine saves up to 20,000 gallons of water per day, with treated wastewater used for on-site irrigation. And the water-saver serves another duty: The Living Machine is included in Ethel M.’s factory tour, offering visitors and the company alike the sweet smell of success.

Drink It Up

GreenBiz offers a special resource center on water conservation. The U.S. EPA offers some good resources and tips on the topic. New York City’s NYCWasteLe$$ site offers useful hints for saving water at work. The nonprofit Global Environmental Management Initiative offers a Water Sustainability Tool with a wealth of suggestions and case studies.

Mask not what you can do for your country.

Photo: iStockphoto.

Talk about a health-care crisis.

For years, the health-care sector — which employs more than 10 million people in the U.S. and garners roughly one in seven dollars generated in the economy — didn’t pay much heed to the environmental impacts of its operations. And when it did, it tended toward paper recycling and other modest efforts — Band-Aid solutions, as it were.

But that’s quickly changing, as activists, regulators, and concerned health professionals come to understand that the industry needs some environmental CPR. A variety of events, initiatives, and trends have helped shape the shift: community groups have pressured hospitals and labs to shut down or not build medical-waste incinerators, which can be a significant source of carcinogenic dioxin emissions and other pollutants; activists and public-health officials have raised public awareness and concern over the use of plastics and mercury, among other commonly used medical materials; researchers and think tanks have given the sector’s environmental impacts far more scrutiny than ever before, quantifying its contribution to air and water pollution as well as solid and hazardous waste; groups of enlightened doctors, nurses, and allied professionals have convened meetings and developed networks on the greening of health care, helping to propagate awareness of the problems and their solutions; and the U.S. EPA and other regulators have pitched in with partnerships, voluntary programs, and information resources.

Such a convergence is taking place none too soon. The issues surrounding the greening of health care will require a concerted effort among all parties to overcome the institutional barriers.

Toxic Buy-Products

Consider procurement. Hospitals don’t shop like we do. They rely on group purchasing organizations, or GPOs, that buy medical and surgical equipment on their behalf. So they’re committed to dealing with the suppliers that their GPO relies on, sometimes locked into years-long contracts. If a given GPO uses eco-unfriendly products and a hospital wants to go a different route, the hospital could face a financial penalty for breaking its contract, or may have to wait to make changes until the contract is up for renewal.

Purchasing is just one hurdle health-care facilities must clear to improve their environmental performance. Like other businesses, they must grapple with segregating waste for recycling and other disposition. But hospitals and doctors’ offices face a special challenge in this arena, because potentially infectious medical waste — every bed pan, set of gloves, syringe, swab, blood bag, and intravenous tube — is regulated and must be “red-bagged” — that is, placed in red containers for proper disposal through a third party.

The problem — and this will sound depressingly familiar to many managers — is that keeping health-care workers educated about what trash to throw where is a never-ending battle. The result: people red-bag everything, just to be sure. However prudent a move this may be, it can raise hospitals’ disposal costs significantly by requiring tons of additional trash to be specially handled. (It also turns out that many red bags themselves are hazardous, because they are dyed using cadmium, a highly toxic chemical. Cadmium-free red bags are now on the market.)

As in many businesses, there’s the janitorial issue — but to an extreme degree, due to the need for sterility. And then there’s the problem of weaning doctors and others from time-proven products and materials, such as PVC bags used for blood and other intravenous solutions, and devices containing mercury — including thermometers and blood-pressure units — which, when they break or are discarded, can contaminate air, soil, and water.

The Road to Wellness

Sound like a hopeless case? Fortunately, there are ready alternatives, and a variety of organizations are actively seeking to educate doctors and others about their availability and use. And they’re making progress. Some examples:

• As part of a comprehensive waste-reduction program, Albany Medical Center in Albany, N.Y., built a distillery in 1995 that converts waste alcohol, formalin, xylene, mineral spirits, and paint into products the center can use in its labs. In its first 10 years of operation, the distillery reclaimed 147 tons of chemicals, valued at more than $1 million.

• Kaiser Permanente, the country’s largest nonprofit health-care provider, has its own guidelines for clean and ethical operations and an executive-level position for resource conservation. Kaiser also has a “green team” that collaborates with manufacturers on targeted products.
• Seeking to become mercury-free, Spectrum Health’s Butterworth Campus in Grand Rapids, Mich., instituted a purchasing policy stating that whenever possible, the hospital must buy mercury-free products. It also replaced blood-pressure gauges with those containing a mercury-free alternative, and stopped sending traditional thermometers home with new mothers.
• Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, Calif., takes used, clean supplies and, rather than throwing them out, distributes them to the community through its “DominAgain” store. Surgical drapes that would have been landfilled become painters’ tarps, scrub brushes are used by cooks to clean vegetables, and small jars become paint canisters in local schools. The hospital either gives materials away or exchanges them for small donations.

It will take years to get every health-care facility following these leaders, of course. But the treatments seem to be working, and the prognosis for recovery is good.

Rx for Information

Needle little more information? Check up on these resources: Green Guide for Health Care, Healthcare Without Harm, Healthcare Environmental Resource Center, Hospitals for a Healthy Environment, and the Sustainable Hospitals Project.

Any thoughts, indeed.

A Grist staffer hard at work.

Photo: iStockphoto.

Buying eco-friendly desks, chairs, cabinets, space dividers, and other furniture is getting easier. With government agencies, universities, and corporations specifying greener products, furniture makers have been fairly quick to put environmental options on the table. Both large and smaller companies offer furniture made from sustainably harvested woods and recycled, bio-based, or nontoxic materials, and made with glues, paints, foams, and other ingredients that don’t give off noxious odors.

Why bother with green furniture? What environmental harm could office furniture possibly cause?

Not much while you’re sitting there, yakking it up on the phone. But furniture making has traditionally been a problematic source of emissions. And in this eco-conscious world, there is growing consideration given to what happens to furniture after it fulfills its useful life. In recent years, the major makers of office furniture have undertaken big changes. You should too.

Spit and Polish

Consider air pollution. Traditional manufacturing processes create emissions of volatile organic compounds from glues, stains, and finishes. VOCs are a major contributor to indoor air pollution and outdoor smog. Greener solutions include powder-based finishing coats, which not only are VOC-free, but require less energy and create less waste. About 95 percent of powder ends up on the product, compared to only about 60 percent of paint in traditional wet-spray processes.

And then there’s wood. With increased pressure to reduce the use of hardwoods from poorly managed forests, companies have had to scrutinize their suppliers’ sources, sometimes even tinkering with their most cherished product designs. Several years ago, Herman Miller shook up the industry by announcing that some of its top-of-the-line furniture, including its classic Eames lounge chair, would switch from rosewood and Honduran mahogany to walnut and cherry. (For a recent anniversary edition of the chair, the company used Forest Stewardship Council-certified rosewood.)

At the Knoll Group, another wood-sourcing leader, designers have committed to identifying wood producers “with the best overall forestry practices,” according to a company spokesperson. Knoll works to verify lumber companies’ sustainable practices and seeks out reclaimed lumber. For example, it has used red birch obtained from logs that sank in Midwestern rivers and lakes during turn-of-the-century lumbering operations.

Recycled materials, once shunned as second rate, are becoming much more common as well. Steelcase uses a growing amount of recycled content in its steel and particle-board products. Knoll uses material made from recycled soda bottles in some chairs. Guilford of Maine, a leading supplier of fabrics to the office-furniture industry, also offers a line of upholstery fabrics made from recycled soda bottles.

Thinking beyond the factory floor, leading-edge companies are also designing for disassembly — that is, making furniture that can be easily taken apart and fixed or recycled. Over the past few years, for instance, Herman Miller has adapted a “protocol for sustainability” that includes a rating tool for new products, a materials database, and disassembly guidelines and training procedures.

The idea, says Scott Charon, commodity manager in new product development at Herman Miller, began with customers’ growing questions about green attributes. “We wanted to develop a tool to bring products to market that customers are asking for,” he says. “This is an area where we wanted to be a leader.” Charon noted that some larger customers are now putting environmental considerations ahead of cost.

Don’t Table the Issue

So how do you choose green furniture? It helps to have some specifications of what you want — and don’t want. For example, the Denver office of the U.S. EPA is moving to a new green building this year, and developed a set of environmental standards for the shift. Among other things, furniture must meet the certification standards of Greenguard, a nonprofit that evaluates products’ effects on indoor air quality.

In addition, EPA is requiring that work-surface substrate (the base material beneath the laminated finish on desks and tables) be made from non-wood agricultural fiber, that wood used elsewhere be FSC-certified, and that laminated surfaces be adhered using water-based or bio-based glues. The specs also call for non-toxic dyes, fabric finishes made with recycled PET plastic, and recycled material in tiles and panels.

If new isn’t for you, consider the refurbished route. Increasingly, companies are using refurbished desks, chairs, and space dividers, and a whole industry has grown up around providing these things. With good reason: each year, U.S. companies buy about 3 million desks, 16.5 million chairs, 4.5 million tables, and 11 million file cabinets. Experts estimate that about half this amount is thrown away annually; according to one estimate, that’s enough to furnish all the offices in Boston.

Open Plan Systems, a “re-manufacturer” based in Richmond, Va., is a typical example of this trend. To offer lower-cost, recycled workstations, the company cleans and repaints metal, replaces fabric, and recycles used materials. Open Plan uses low-VOC coatings, fabrics made from recycled plastics, and other environmentally friendly processes.

Today’s technology can work magic on furniture, turning ugly ducklings into — well, if not beautiful swans, at least birds of another feather. With a bit of paint, new fabric, and some adjustments, it is possible to remodel an entire office using its original furnishings.

It’s the environmental way: everything old is new again.

A Leg to Stand On

The state of California offers a useful list of green furniture specifications. The U.S. General Services Administration — aka the federal government’s landlord — publishes a vendor list of green furniture companies and a database of related products and services. TerraChoice, the Canadian eco-rating organization, provides an office furniture guide. And GreenBiz features a report titled “Recycled Office Furniture: Good for the Environment, Good for Business.”