environment friendly Archives

Everyday Habits for Environment Sustainability

Posted on April 21, 2017 by robbie

Carbon is at the center of most environmental problems. Reducing food waste, consciously choosing low emission transportation and adopting new business practices are key ways Americans can trim carbon emissions and work towards greater environmental sustainability by 2020.

Eliminate Food Waste

A striking forty percent of food is thrown away. Most of it ends up in landfills, where it produces powerful methane gas as it rots, or is tossed into incinerators. According to a United Nations report, “If food wastage were a country, it would be the third largest [carbon] emitting country in the world.” (China and the United States take first and second place, respectively.)
So eat your leftovers! There are numerous apps to help you keep track of the food in your refrigerator. FoodKeeper provides guidelines for how long food is safe to eat. (You can eat leftover rotisserie chicken for up to four days, if you’ve kept it refrigerated.) And Foodfully (which is currently in beta) eliminates food waste by keeping you from buying an extra head of lettuce you might not need because you’ve forgotten you already have one.
Beyond your own home, get involved with the Food Recovery Network, Food Cowboy, Zero Percent, and Spoiler Alert, which all redirect food, from restaurants, schools and food manufactures to people who need it.
“There are things we can do as individuals to clean our plate,” says Jeremy Kranowitz, executive director of Sustainable America. “Some municipalities, Seattle and San Francisco; states like Vermont and Connecticut (to a lesser extent) and counties like Westchester in New York are starting to ban food waste from their landfills.”

Choose Low Emission Transportation

Strict fuel economy standards have been rolled back, but that doesn’t mean more vehicles are suddenly going to spew carbon-laden smog into our skies. Many people’s daily routines now depend on carpooling, walking or biking, and public transportation. According to a CDC study, kids that walk or bike to school (instead of being dropped off in the family car) are preventing hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon from being emitted into the atmosphere. Rather than buying a new car, you might consider a new pair of sneakers or a bike lock.
If that’s not practical, keep your eye on the prices of electric cars compared to traditional gas guzzlers. In January 2017, Ford CEO Mark Fields announced, “The era of the electric vehicle is dawning” and that the company planned to release 13 electric cars in the next five years. Meanwhile, Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that electric cars will be as affordable as regular cars by 2022.
“While the economics of EVs are becoming attractive to consumers, their ‘high-tech’ nature will also be an important factor in future purchase decisions,” says Jack Gillis, director of public affairs at the Consumer Federation of America.
The promise of an electric future has prompted 30 cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City, to jointly inquire about the purchase of more than 100,000 zero-emissions vehicles for police, fire and sanitation department usage. As a taxpayer and a voter, you have the ability to support these local initiatives.

Make Sustainability a Workplace Priority

At work, employees are increasingly looking for better sustainability practices. According to the 2017 Deloitte Millennial Survey, only 13% of millennials believe their companies are addressing the issue of climate change, while a majority of these younger workers are concerned about our environment.
So, if you’re a mid-level manager or a hiring team, take action. Create incentives for so-called “green” programs in your office and use them as recruiting tools. You might take inspiration from the new trend of linking executive pay to energy consumption and carbon emission targets. For example, Royal Dutch Shell recently announced that a portion of its executives’ bonuses will be based upon meeting operational greenhouse gas emission goals.
“Linking performance management with sustainability efforts places societal impact at the forefront of the company ethos and generates fuller employee buy-in,” says Nathaniel Wong, a manager of social impact strategy at Monitor Deloitte, adding, “these incentive structures may also foster internal [sustainability] innovation.”
And according to this Harvard study, workplace incentives may not need to be monetary to be effective in driving carbon emission reductions.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT A CARBON-FREE FUTURE, CHECK OUT THIS ADDITIONAL READING:
Behind the Quiet State-by-State Fight Over Electric Vehicles, The New York Times
The Low Carbon Economy, Goldman Sachs

A Green Hardware Store on Every Corner? It’s Not As Far-Fetched As You May Think

Posted on February 9, 2017 by robbie

The house in Boulder, Colo., was beautiful. The floors were cork, the carpets were made of recycled plastic bottles — the whole place was being redone on sustainable, environmental principles. “It was mind-expanding,” says Jason Ballard, the co-founder and CEO of eco-friendly home improvement retailer TreeHouse. The house belonged to Ballard’s instructor in a wilderness EMT program. Ballard was staying there shortly after college, and he was inspired by his instructor’s efforts to remodel his home to make it more environmentally friendly. “It was such a lovely vision of what was possible,” he says.
But the more Ballard learned about sustainable home improvement, the more he realized how difficult it was to find attractive, well-designed products. That insight — and that vision of what was possible in the home — led Ballard to create TreeHouse, a company that’s aimed at transforming the home improvement market and, with it, the home itself. Among the wares and services available are recycled glass countertops, electric lawn tools and solar-panel installation. Ballard says customers often call his company “the Whole Foods of home improvement — and it’s not too far from the truth.”
Ballard has always had an eco-conscious mindset. His grandfather was an early role model. “He wouldn’t have called himself a conservationist,” Ballard says, “but he gave me both a conservation ethic and a tremendous sense of wonder about the natural world.” He studied conservation biology in college, where he started to learn about the enormous impact our homes have on the environment. “All we hear about on TV is gas-guzzling SUVs,” he says, “but the real problem is the buildings we’re living in every day.”
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Private residences are the biggest users of energy, the biggest users of renewable and nonrenewable materials, the biggest producers of landfill waste and the second-biggest users of water. Most exposure to toxins also takes place in the home. “I realized that if I wanted to make an impact with regard to these existentially challenging issues, then the best area for me to focus on was, in fact, the home,” says Ballard, who’s currently completing a Social Impact Fellowship with GLG, a membership-based learning platform. Through GLG, Jason and his team have learned about inventory management, retail strategy, in-store user experience and customer data management to help the company implement best practices across multiple locations.

Learn more about the GLG Social Impact Fellowship, including information on applying.

After college, Ballard worked in green building for a while, learning all he could about the market. “What I noticed was that everyone had the same set of problems,” he says. It was hard to find sustainable products, and when he did find them, they were expensive, and only available from a few boutique companies. “The obvious blocker to the whole industry moving forward is access to products at a decent rate, and with some level of curation and education around those products,” Ballard says.
TreeHouse is built on a few core ideas. First, Ballard says, most home improvement products are terrible — poor quality, toxic and unsustainable. Second, most home improvement services aren’t very good, either. Anyone who’s ever embarked on such a project knows that they’re often delayed and routinely run over budget. The industry also hasn’t gone digital yet, making it difficult to get information on the status of your project when you want it. “The whole experience around home improvement needs to be reimagined,” Ballard says. “We are now trying to make not just the products great, but the technology great and the service great.”
TreeHouse aims to make sustainable options appeal to more than just die-hard environmentalists. “If we want healthy and sustainable homes to be the norm, they have to be better than conventional homes. And everything around the process has to be better,” Ballard emphasizes. That’s part of why he decided to start a for-profit company to accomplish his environmental goals. “If you’re in a for-profit business, all of your assumptions are tested all the time,” he says. “It forces you to very quickly arrive at what works to affect change.”
Ballard has ambitious goals for TreeHouse. Today, the company has one brick-and-mortar store in Austin, Texas, and is opening two more this year, including one in Dallas. Within the next two years, he plans on opening still more stores, and expanding beyond Texas. Right now, TreeHouse touches only a tiny fraction of the 80 to 100 million homes in the country, Ballard says. He believes 20 stores — a benchmark he hopes to hit in five years — would drive that figure up to 10 percent. The ultimate goal: Launch 300 stores nationwide to reach 80 percent of all the homes in the U.S.
“Our plan is to run hard at those milestones,” Ballard says. “We don’t have a thousand years to figure this out. We are making decisions in the next hundred years as a species that we will have to live with for the next two thousand years.”

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GLG Social Impact is an initiative of GLG to advance learning and decision-making among distinguished nonprofit and social enterprise leaders. The GLG Social Impact Fellowship provides learning resources to a select group of nonprofits and social enterprises, at no cost.
Homepage photo by Kirsten Kaiser

Watch: Now You Can See Which Restaurants Help Feed the Hungry

Posted on April 28, 2014 by robbie

In 2011 Ben Simon launched The Food Recovery Network at the University of Maryland. The goal was simple: intercept as much leftover food from his college campus’s cafeteria as possible and get it to those in need. Within months, the network grew to include dozens of chapters at colleges across the country. More than 320,000 pounds of recovered food later, Simon is launching his most ambitious initiative to date — Food Recovery Certified.
Any food provider in the country can apply to be Food Recovery Certified as long as they donate their leftovers at least once a month. Cara Mayo, Food Recovery Certified’s program manager, works with local nonprofits to verify the donations. She says she hopes becoming certified will become a national trend. “Consumers want there businesses to be associated with an environmental or social cause. They want the effects of it to be felt in their home and in their community.”

Editors’ note: Since the original publication of this story, Ben Simon, founder of The Food Recovery Network, has become a NationSwell Council member.