Green Business Roundup: (Skipping) Earth Day
A quick glance at the business-oriented coverage of Earth Day would suggest that the theme of Earth Day 2009 is that a single day for this concept makes no sense anymore.
Grist, the sponsor of a “Screw Earth Day” campaign, asks if Earth Day still matters, and the answer is a resounding yes, but with a clarification:
I also would challenge that if done strategically, all the “green†stuff we do throughout the rest of the year should be good not just for the environment, but also for business and partnerships. And that right here, at this intersection—where environmental issues and business needs meet—is where green can establish real roots and begin to grow.
Newsweek, in part referencing the Grist campaign, asks if it’s time to retire Earth day:
What was originally intended as a sounding alarm has been reproduced each year in the exact same way. The problem is, it’s hard to be motivated by a screeching alarm when you’ve been hitting the snooze button for the last four decades.
Forbes, in asking how you make Earth Day good for your company, observes familiar sentiments:
It’s like dieting. We see friends, neighbors and celebrities go on crash diets all the time, and after the crash period is over, the weight always comes back. When it comes to our planet’s carbon diet, we can’t take the crash approach. We need to make the Earth Day sensibility part of our employees’ everyday lives by making it fun. After all, who ever stuck with a diet that made them miserable?
Clearly the environment would benefit from a widespread adoption of this “every day should be Earth Day” philosophy, but the real motivation for lasting change will usually come from the bottom line. What we could really use are good case studies where making environmentally sound investments resulted in a positive impact to profit, such as the Wal-Mart example in this FT.com piece on signs that corporate responsibility is surviving the recession:
Wal-Mart also has commercial reasons for its stance. The company has been encouraging companies to cut down on packaging. This enables it to fit more goods into each delivery truck, not only reducing its emissions, but also cutting the amount it spends on petrol. Its insistence that manufacturers produce concentrated laundry detergent has allowed it to save on both packaging and shelf space. Cost-cutting is vital to beating the downturn and if companies can boost their green credentials at the same time, why not?
What are some of the best examples you know of where integrated environmental practices leading to profit?
