http://www.ssireview.org/articles/ Strategies, Tools, and Ideas for Nonprofits, Foundations, and Socially Responsible Businesses en nicholas_jenna@gsb.stanford.edu Copyright 2010 2010-02-24T07:00:54+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_tech_clears_the_air/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_tech_clears_the_air/ World Trade Organization protesters and other globalization foes may have one less fear to fret about. Although manufacturers in the United States are churning out more and more products, their smokestacks are belching out less and less air pollution — and not just because companies are making poor countries do their dirty work. Instead, green technologies are largely clearing the air, finds Arik Levinson, a professor of economics at Georgetown University. “A lot of [activist] groups think of the environment vs. economics as a zero-sum game,” says Levinson. “But in this case, manufacturing grew, and the environment also improved, mostly because of technological advances” that make industries cleaner, he says. In his fine-grained analysis, Levinson first broke down the U.S. manufacturing sector into 450 separate industries. He then tracked how much air pollution (sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds) each industry generated between 1987 and 2001. Finally, he traced changes in air pollution to three different causes: growth, technologies that reduce air pollution (such as scrubbers, which clean the gasses passing through smokestacks), and importation (rather than domestic production) of environmentally unfriendly goods. Levinson discovered that although U.S. manufacturers created 24 percent more goods, they emitted… Environment, Corporate Social Responsibility 2010-02-24T06:00:09+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/case_study_leed_the_way/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/case_study_leed_the_way/ Had the proto-green architect Frank Lloyd Wright lived in the 21st century, he might have built something like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) offices in Santa Monica, Calif. Although framed by a century-old structure, the retrofitted downtown site now includes the latest and best eco-friendly features. Reflective roofing and hanging plants cool its surface. Light wells suffuse the interior. Sensors allow artificial illumination only when rooms have occupants. A smart air conditioning system ignores areas that are already cool. Solar panels generate a fifth of the building’s energy, and wind farms provide the rest. As a result, the building’s total energy costs are 44 percent lower than those of a comparable 15,000-square-foot office space. As befits the NRDC’s mission to protect the planet, its headquarters’ materials are also of the greenest caliber. Named the Robert Redford Building, its wood comes from forestry operations that meet the highest sustainability standards. Its paint and other materials emit almost no toxins. And its renovators recycled all but 2 percent of the waste they generated during construction. For these many environmentally friendly specs, the nrdc headquarters received a platinum rating—the highest possible—by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. Created by… Environment, Corporate Social Responsibility 2010-02-24T05:59:42+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/sell_the_wind/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/sell_the_wind/ Many social changes hinge on good marketing. But what are social marketers to do when their target audience couldn’t care less about—or even despises—the change they want to make? That’s the situation we encountered in 2003, when we joined the Utah Wind Working Group, a cross-sector volunteer forum organized to inform stakeholder groups about wind energy opportunities for the state of Utah. The Utah Energy Office sponsored our group, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind Powering America program. This program supports working groups in states that face roadblocks in developing their wind resources, and it had targeted Utah as a priority. Our job as marketing professors was to lead an outreach campaign that would promote wind power to the people of Utah, as well as to state legislators who were considering a bill that would provide tax incentives for renewable energy. But most Utahns did not want wind power. At that time, the state relied almost entirely on inexpensive local coal for its electricity, and the state’s conservative politicians were not inclined to alter the status quo. Citizens perceived wind power to be an expensive, ineffective experiment that had failed in the 1970s. And state legislators did… Environment 2010-02-18T17:04:19+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/second_chances_and_a_third_bottom_line/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/second_chances_and_a_third_bottom_line/ Inside the steel and glass office towers of Chile’s capital, Santiago, computers, printers, and faxes hum. Out on the streets, business executives and taxi drivers chat away on some of Chile’s 14 million cellular telephones. Urbanized, well educated, and home to 17 million people, Chile is one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America. And as is the case in the United States, all its electronic gadgets are beginning to lead to a whole lot of electronic waste. The country currently discards 300,000 computers a year, and by 2020 it will be grappling with an annual pile of 1.7 million trashed computers, estimate Daniel Garcés and Uca Silva, researchers at Plataforma RELAC (the Regional Platform on E-waste in Latin America and the Caribbean, a project sponsored by a Chilean NGO). Worldwide, e-waste is the fastest-growing solid waste stream. This widening river of trash poses both human and environmental hazards. Each cathode ray tube in a television or computer monitor, for instance, contains several pounds of lead. Electronics also harbor mercury, cadmium, and other heavy metals. Many consumers and manufacturers dump these materials into landfills, where toxins leach into groundwater and poison people and animals. Even when people attempt to… Environment 2010-01-27T00:14:46+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/an_environmental_provocateur/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/an_environmental_provocateur/ Stewart Brand, author of Whole Earth Discipline, is described on the book cover as an icon of the environmental movement. He actually isn’t and doesn’t want to be. Brand (who, in full disclosure, is a friend) has always been much more of an iconoclast than an icon. In Whole Earth Discipline, he combines his deep concern for the environment, his pugnacious search for windmills to tilt at, and his technological optimism to produce an intriguing, confounding, utterly Brand-type book. By that, I mean a full-throated assault on conventional wisdom, laced with enough ironic riffs and personal confessions of his own past errors to disarm most critics. Brand came to public attention 41 years ago by publishing the wildly successful Whole Earth Catalog, a practical guide for back-to-the-land refugees from suburbia. The catalog questioned virtually every attribute of 1960s middle-class suburban America and offered a telephone directory-sized, annotated compilation of equipment for rural self-reliance. Ultimately, the back-to-the-land movement proved to be vanishingly small, over-fond of drugs, and stuck in a historical cul-de-sac. In Whole Earth Discipline, Brand examines and embraces the scientific basis of some of the principal problems that scare the hell out of environmentalists. Indeed, his bottom line on… Environment, Book Reviews 2009-11-19T06:00:00+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_urban_emissionscapes/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_urban_emissionscapes/ To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy: Every polluting city pollutes in its own way. Yet until recently, just how and whence Los Angeles, Bangkok, and eight other global cities exhaled their climatec-hanging vapors was a topic shrouded in mystery. Now, a 10- city comparison of greenhouse gas emissions per capita is showing metropolises “exactly where their emissions are coming from,” says Christopher Kennedy, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto and the study’s lead author. The research “could also help cities learn from each other,” he adds. Aside from the usual finding that North American cities are the heaviest breathers, Kennedy and his team reveal that each urban area has a distinct emissions profi e. (See these profiles on the graph below.) Mile-high Denver and temperate Toronto burn lots of fossil fuels to generate electricity for their businesses and industries, as well as to stay warm during their frostier months. At the same time, hydropower keeps Geneva’s electricity- related emissions low. Yet cold winters drive up Geneva’s heating oil-induced effluvia, as they do for New York and Prague. But New York spares the air many of its transportation-related fumes with high population density and good public transit, as… Environment 2009-11-19T06:00:00+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/out_greening_your_neighbor/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/out_greening_your_neighbor/ A few summers back, researchers went door to door in a Southern California neighborhood to see what it would take to get folks to turn off their air conditioning and prevent power blackouts. They tried appealing to greed (“You’ll save money”) and guilt (“It’s better for the Earth”). Neither message made a dent. But when residents were told that most of their neighbors were cutting back on the AC, energy use finally plummeted. Nobody, it seems, wants to be the biggest energy hog on the block. Utilities across the country are starting to use neighborly comparisons to convince consumers to curb energy use. Helping utilities apply this notso- subtle peer pressure is a start-up called OPOWER (previously known as Positive Energy). Privately held, for-profit OPOWER uses analytic software, demographic research, and social psychology insights to generate monthly energy report cards for utility customers. The centerpiece of each report is a simple bar graph, showing at a glance how a household’s energy consumption stacks up against 100 neighbors. “It works like clockwork,” says Ogi Kavazovic, senior director of marketing and strategy for OPOWER. Energy savings typically kick in about three months after customers start receiving reports, growing to a steady but… Environment 2009-11-18T06:00:00+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/qa_fred_krupp/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/qa_fred_krupp/ By any measure, Fred Krupp’s 24-year tenure as president of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has been a success. The organization’s budget has jumped from $3 million to more than $100 million, the staff has grown from 50 to 400, and membership has expanded from 40,000 to more than 500,000. More important, under Krupp’s leadership EDF has become one of the most important power brokers in the environmental arena. Krupp has accomplished all of this by relentlessly focusing on an important insight— that economic incentives can be used to entice businesses to behave in environmentally friendly ways. It’s like using the carrot instead of the stick to get people to do what you want them to do. This social innovation has garnered its share of critics, but Krupp is unwavering, and by all indications his approach is gathering momentum. In this interview with Stanford Social Innovation Review Managing Editor Eric Nee, Krupp explains why EDF is putting so much energy into getting a cap-and-trade bill regulating greenhouse gases on President Obama’s desk. Krupp goes on to discuss the lessons EDF has learned from its pioneering partnerships with corporations like FedEx and McDonald’s. And last, Krupp explains why EDF opened an… Environment 2009-09-30T23:58:00+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/a_nature_state_of_mind/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/a_nature_state_of_mind/ In 2009, the federal government is taking important steps to restore both nature and the economy. Congress is developing global warming and energy legislation. President Barack Obama is prioritizing green projects in the nation’s economic recovery plan. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that greenhouse gases may endanger public health and welfare. Yet true restoration—environmental and economic—will not come from congressional legislation, top-down stimulus money, or EPA rulings. Instead, restoration will come from a shift in the relationships between people and their ecologies, as well as from the businesses, policies, and cultural changes that will arise from this shift. Today, people everywhere face a convergence of economic, energy, social, and environmental crises on a scale and immediacy never before imagined. And people in many places can use capital, technology, and policy to stabilize the economy, tighten energy security, alleviate poverty, and improve environmental conditions. But reliable peace and prosperity will elude humankind unless we change our relations with each other and the environment. A good first step toward this lofty goal is to start thinking at the scale of “nature states.” Also called bioregions, nature states are defi ned by their social and geographic coherence, rather than by state or… Environment 2009-08-20T18:04:00+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/a_fine_green_niche/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/a_fine_green_niche/ Growing up in Guangzhou, China, in the 1950s and 1960s, Maria Yee dreamed of being a physicist. At the same time, her father, a professor of architecture, inspired in her a lifelong interest in design. But when China’s Cultural Revolution scattered Maria’s family across prisons, mines, and farms and sent her to labor in a rock quarry, neither physics nor design seemed to be in her future. She eventually wound up working in a machinery factory while studying mechanical engineering at night school. Years later, however, Yee immigrated to California. There, she combined her knowledge of engineering with her early interest in design to establish Maria Yee Inc. (MYI), an ecologically friendly luxury furniture company based in Santa Cruz, Calif., that uses traditional Chinese joinery techniques in unique home furnishings. Since its founding in 1988, MYI has become a $30 million-a-year business that distributes its goods through retailers such as Crate & Barrel, Room & Board, and Best Buy’s Magnolia Home Theater. The company also owns its two factories in China—a rarity in the furniture world and a source of competitive advantage for the company. MYI has also earned a reputation as a leader in green furniture manufacturing. The company… Environment, Social Entrepreneurship, Corporate Social Responsibility 2009-08-18T23:00:04+00:00