Celebrating Real Leadership On Earth Day 2020

Happy Earth Day. It’s that one day a year where a parade of companies will go to great lengths to tout their efforts in sustainability. For many enterprises this temporarily adopted moral high ground will be a far stretch from what their business operations really look like the rest of the year.

It’s called greenwashing, and it’s serious enough to be regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a government agency that protects consumers against unlawful and unethical business practices. In 2013 six companies were investigated for misleading consumers with greenwashing, five of which were found guilty and were forced to pay large fines.

Environmentalism is not a marketing campaign you run a single day in April. Taking action to protect the planet and make a real impact on climate change takes a sustained year-round effort. We need more companies making environmentalism a core part of their values, something that drives day-to-day decisions as well as overall business strategy. So today we wanted to draw attention to a handful of companies that put effort into sustainability year round.

Microsoft

Social responsibility and sustainability are a clear priority for the software giant. The company was even once named the best at Corporate Social Responsibility by the Reputation Institute. However they make our list today for the sustainability commitments they made in January of this year.

From their blog post on the initiative, “While the world will need to reach net zero, those of us who can afford to move faster and go further should do so. That’s why today we are announcing an ambitious goal and a new plan to reduce and ultimately remove Microsoft’s carbon footprint.” Their ambitious plan calls for Microsoft to be carbon negative by 2030, remove their historical carbon emissions by 2050, and they plan to create a $1 billion dollar climate innovation fund.

These initiatives represent some of the most ambitious sustainability goals for an existing enterprise, especially at Microsoft’s scale. It would be great to see more companies look to erase their historical carbon footprints. To help push action amongst the companies that make up Microsoft’s supply chain the company will be making carbon reduction an explicit aspect of their procurement process.

New Belgium Brewing Company

Best known for its popular Fat Tire brand, this Fort Collins, Colorado brewing company has made sustainability a core part of doing business. Their mission statement is "to operate a profitable company which is socially, ethically and environmentally responsible, that produces high quality beer true to Belgian brewing styles." A mission statement is only as powerful as the actions they take to make it a reality. To this end, they clearly understand that you can’t impact what you don’t measure. Much of their website shares metrics on the impact they have on water, waste, emissions, and energy. Not only do they share the numbers behind their impact, they also self assess how they are performing against goals they have set.

Measuring impact has been historically difficult for companies of all sizes. However, efforts like those of New Belgium Brewing Company represent great strides in the right direction. This type of radical transparency is what is needed if we are going to change the outcome of climate change.

Lego

When your product is quite literally plastic bricks, you’ll have to find innovative solutions in order to be stalwart of sustainability. With this big challenge as a backdrop, back in 2015 Lego committed to investing $150 million over 15 years with a focus on addressing climate change and reducing waste. So how are they doing now that this fifteen year initiative is five years old?

They have already made some considerable strides towards their sustainability goals. For example, Lego has reduced their packaging and invested in alternative energy sources. In fact they beat their plan to source 100% renewable energy by 2020 by a whole three years. They’ve since hired a dedicated team to support its commitment to using sustainable materials and plans to reach a 90% recycling rate.

Their efforts don’t stop there. They are launching a number of programs and initiatives. Their Replay program helps people pass their no longer used Lego bricks to new kids that could use them. One of their bigger initiatives is to manufacture all of their bricks from sustainable materials by 2030. Today more than 80 LEGO elements are made from sustainably sourced polyethylene, including all the pieces used in a recently released treehouse building kit. Although these 80 pieces represent just 2% of the 3,600 elements available for designers, it is the first important step out of many on the journey towards Lego using sustainable materials by 2030. They are also working to reduce their CO2 impact, eliminate waste, and move towards sustainable packaging. To keep these initiatives on track Lego has partnered with the WWF to be part of their Climate Savers Programme, the organization’s global platform that engages business and industry on climate and energy.

Patagonia

The Patagonia brand is nearly synonymous with environmentalism. Its founder Yvon Chouinard is the driving force behind the company’s focus on sustainability. When Yvon Chouinard founded Patagonia in 1973, the 34-year-old climber focused on making better tools and clothes for climbers. But as his company grew Chouinard began orienting both consumers and other businesses toward his mission: enjoying and saving the wild. In Chouinard’s own words, “I’m in business to save the planet,” he says. “It sounds corny, but that’s the reason.”

That “corny” company goal has garnered a loyal following. In our recently published ebook, “Working On What Matters,” Patagonia was brought up by several contributors as a brand they looked up to for its efforts around sustainability.

It’s easy to see why. The company has a dizzying amount of programs aimed at fulfilling its founder’s mission. They support grassroots environmental activism efforts with the Patagonia Action Works program. They have self-imposed an Earth tax on themselves through a program they call 1% for the Planet. This idea has grown into a wider movement with other companies joining the pledge with over $225 million donated to environmental nonprofit organizations to date. They have recruited athletes across a myriad of outdoor sports to join their Global Sport Activists program, aimed at driving positive social and environmental change.

These are just some of their externally focused efforts. In addition to these programs and initiatives they also produce their own products with every effort being taken to ensure sustainability. For Patagonia, environmentalism is central to their purpose. Some brands celebrate their efforts on Earth Day. Patagonia’s commitment runs much deeper.

Ben and Jerry’s

Ben and Jerry’s has understood that the greenhouse gas footprint of producing ice cream is significant. More importantly, they are taking an active role in creating solutions for sustainability.

The iconic ice cream brand has taken efforts to measure the amount of carbon emitted in the production of their goods, finding that each pint of ice cream generates roughly 2 lbs of greenhouse gases. Beyond just being vocal about the issue of climate change, they’ve worked hard over the years to reduce their emissions at all levels of their supply chain. They installed a solar array at a Waterbury, VT factory that generated one third of that plant’s electricity. They’ve installed a bio-digester at a Hellendoorn factory in the Netherlands that turns ice cream waste from the manufacturing processes into clean energy that helps power the plant. They’ve even helped pioneer technology for climate friendly (i.e. HFC-free) freezer cases.

Taking sustainability one step further, they have even gone so far as to adopt a climate goal across their entire value chain. The goal is part of a growing movement called the Science Based Targets Initiative, a collaboration between CDP, the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), World Resources Institute (WRI), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and one of the We Mean Business Coalition commitments. The SBTI helps companies set targets in line with the latest climate science, so that the business community can do their part to keep warming well below 2ºC.

Like many companies making these types of commitments, Ben and Jerry’s has been incredibly transparent in their efforts. They have published their findings from a life cycle analysis of some of their flavors as well as made public commitments to climate justice. Would Unilever be willing to do the same?

Terracycle

You might not have heard of TerraCycle yet but this brand is making big strides on its mission to eliminate the very idea of waste. It’s the type of big thinking and ambitious goal setting that the real challenge of climate change needs if we are ever to find a solution.

TerraCycle was founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky, then a student at Princeton University. Over the years TerraCycle has grown into the global leader in collecting and repurposing hard-to-recycle waste: operating in over 20 countries, engaging over 80 million people, and recycling billions of pieces of waste through various innovative platforms.

Their solutions cover many of the most challenging areas of waste management. They have a free recycling program, funded by brands, manufacturers, and retailers around the world to help you collect and recycle hard-to-recycle waste. They have also incentivized these recycling programs so that organizations can earn rewards for their efforts.

Terracycle has also created the Zero Waste Box platform which allows you to recycle almost any type of waste, from your coffee capsules to complex laboratory waste. Consumers choose the waste stream they’d like to recycle, purchase the preferred box size, collect their waste, and send it to TerraCycle to be repurposed. Shipping is even included.

Their latest creation, Loop, offers your favorite products in beautiful, counter-worthy containers that can be refilled again and again, changing the way the world shops. Consumers can buy the brands they trust but reimagined in durable packages they can be refilled and reused. The best part is that they pick up your empties and ship the new ones back to you when you’re done.

Unlike most of the companies on this list, TerraCycle is in the business of saving the planet as a primary objective. We expect more of these types of businesses to start as the world continues looking for innovative solutions to some really challenging issues.

Less Marketing Fluff, More Action

There are countless companies working to solve the climate crisis and we’ve only touched on a handful of them here. Companies of all sizes should be applauded when they make good faith efforts in sustainability. However, treating Earth Day only as a marketing campaign won’t cut it. We deserve better.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash