filter by author: Liz Gorman

Last month, Cone wrote about a beta tool called Sourcemap. Below, Cone’s vice president of corporate responsibility, Liz Gorman, takes a deeper look at Office Depot’s plans to offer more transparency to customers, and how it relates back to the company’s own environmental commitments.

In a recent article, Office Depot and one of its suppliers, New Leaf Paper, revealed plans to launch a new kind of app using Sourcemap, which will allow purchasers to trace the source of their 100 percent recycled office paper. The intent is to demonstrate that 100 percent recycled paper originates from a waste paper collection facility and not some pristine forest. For some consumers, accessing this app may be just the impetus they need to spend the premium for 100 percent recycled paper and have peace of mind. If you’re curious about how Sourcemap works to trace paper back to its source, watch the short video in this GreenBiz article.

One thing the Sourcemap video doesn’t answer is how 100 percent recycled paper (meaning it’s made from 100 percent post-consumer recycled content) stacks up against paper made from 100 percent virgin fiber or a blended mixture of virgin and post-consumer content. I think buyers will need to be convinced that 100 percent recycled paper has, when all is said and done, a smaller environmental footprint than other options. Personally, I’m convinced that 100 percent recycled paper is a better option, but I had to do some digging and turn to the experts to find out. Office Depot may want to consider this before officially launching Sourcemap later this year.

As Marc Gunther pointed out in his post, all of this is aimed at selling more recycled paper. Not only will this benefit the bottom line, but it may also help Office Depot demonstrate its environmental leadership around three stated commitments: Buy Green, Be Green and Sell Green. I did some probing to find out more about Office Depot’s environmental responsibility and how 100 percent recycled paper fits into the mix.

The first thing I discovered is that lots of things get tracked and measured at Office Depot, nearly 50 key performance indicators – everything from the estimated average pounds of CO2 per customer delivery, to the number of ink and toner cartridges that customers recycle. So I wasn’t surprised to see that Office Depot tracks its internal paper purchases, including the average amount of post-consumer recycled content that’s in the paper it uses. And guess what? The paper Office Depot used in 2009 for internal purposes contained, on average, 28.8 percent post-consumer recycled content – down from 32.4 percent in 2008. Not a lot of 100 percent recycled paper being used there. (No reporting available yet on 2010 purchases.)

Maybe I’m an idealist, but I do believe when a company pushes an environmentally preferred product by creating a special barcode on the package so buyers will watch a video on their mobile device and be convinced of the product’s benefits, then the company should make the same choice. But I’m also a realist, and I know cost is king, even when you want to be an environmental leader.

- Liz Gorman, Vice President

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. The 2009 topic is climate change.

Corporate managers are very used to working within budgets. They carefully plan for the costs associated with meeting their departments’ annual objectives and executing strategies. Their budgets likely include the costs of employees traveling across the country or around the world. But what about the carbon emissions associated with this type of travel? Who’s accounting for these?

If emissions associated with corporate travel were regularly included in carbon footprints, they could account for some 20 percent of a company’s total emissions. In fact, Motorola included business travel in its most recent carbon footprint. If my math is correct, the company’s business travel accounted for 20.5 percent of its overall footprint.

Today, most companies calculate their carbon footprints by only including direct and indirect emissions from their manufacturing facilities and internal operations – known as Scope 1 and Scope 2 – while not including emissions from corporate travel, which falls into Scope 3. But things may change soon, as new emissions regulation and carbon disclosure standards are on the horizon.

For now, corporate managers may want to start rethinking how they budget for employee travel expenses by including a cost associated with travel-related carbon emissions. The city of San Francisco is ahead of this curve. Last February, the mayor ordered all city departments to not only declare how much they plan to spend on air travel, but to also pay 13 percent of their air-travel costs into a city carbon-offset fund, which will be used to pay for local emission reduction projects. This is a good tactic that may actually work to trim corporate travel – and related emissions – in the future.

- Liz Gorman, Vice President

The other day I was chatting with a reporter who was doing a story on the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) latest efforts to crack down on companies that make bogus “green” claims about their products. Specifically, the FTC is going after Kmart for claiming that its American Fare private label brand of paper plates is biodegradable. The FTC challenged Kmart, not because it questioned whether the paper plates actually decompose. Instead the complaint was issued because of the way Americans typically dispose of their trash.

Enter TerraChoice’s list of greenwashing sins. The FTC called Kmart out because it says the biodegradable claim is irrelevant, sin number five of seven common offenses. 

At issue is the mindset of consumers and whether they assume the paper plates will actually decompose after use. When the plates are tossed in the trash, as the FTC believes they will be, they will likely be sent to landfills and buried in deep holes where they won’t see the light of day. Without exposure to the elements of nature, they can’t possibly decompose in a reasonable period of time.

I have to wonder what Kmart was thinking. Perhaps Kmart sees a future when curbside pick-up of household organic compostable waste is the norm. This service already exists in a handful of municipalities in the U.S. Along with garbage and recycling pick-up, some residents are getting their yard, food and biodegradable paper waste also collected and sent to compost facilities where these materials are turned into soil enrichments for gardens.

But maybe Kmart was simply doing what other brands do when they claim their products are “eco-friendly.” According to TerraChoice’s 2009 research, 98% of the green product claims being made are vague, unsubstantiated, conceal any unpleasant trade-offs, use bogus certification labels or are just plain fibs. All of this has consumers confused and often misinterpreting the claims that companies are making, Cone found in its 2008 Green Gap Survey.

Kmart may be the victim today. But as the FTC continues to investigate instances of greenwashing, we can expect that more brands will receive the same treatment. It may take some time to bring order to the green marketplace so consumers can actually trust the products they purchase. Until then, I suggest that consumers beware!

- Liz Gorman, VP