Why Fair Trade Means Protecting the Environment, Too

Fair Trade USA | Monday April 30th, 2012 | 0 Comments

This is the first article in a series on “The Future of Fair Trade,” written in collaboration with Fair Trade USA. A 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization, Fair Trade USA is the leading third-party certifier of Fair Trade products in the United States. To follow along with the rest of the series, click here.


Organic Fair Trade bananas

When people think of Fair Trade, they might think of fair prices for farmers, better labor standards, or maybe even safe working conditions – but what people often forget about is that Fair Trade is equally invested in protecting the environment. Fair Trade not only helps improve farmers’ living and working conditions, but also helps them become better stewards of the land. Farmers who struggle to make end meet are often forced to engage in cheap agricultural practices that compromise surrounding ecosystems.

We at Fair Trade USA believe that in order to improve producers’ living and working conditions, their environment must also be clean and healthy.

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AB InBev: A Lean, Mean, Water-Efficient Brewing Machine

Leon Kaye | Monday April 30th, 2012 | 0 Comments
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Last week AB InBev released its annual CSR report.

Last week Anheuser-Busch InBev released its 2011 corporate social responsibility report. This latest annual disclosure by the beer giant comes as brewing companies have been touting responsible drinking for years, and more recently they have been paying more attention to social and environmental responsibility.

For all beverage companies, water stewardship is of increasing importance as they operate in regions where freshwater stocks are becoming depleted. As is the case with its competitors, AB InBev is driving down its beer to water ratio incrementally towards its goal of 3.5 hectoliter (hl) of water per finished product. The challenges AB InBev faces are similar to food and beverage companies that compete with local communities and businesses for reliable sources of water.

Highlights of the past year, from recycling to clean energy, include:

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Is It Time For Ronald McDonald To Retire?

Gina-Marie Cheeseman | Monday April 30th, 2012 | 0 Comments

About 17 percent of U.S. children aged two to 19 years old are obese, and since 1980, the obesity rate among children of those ages has almost tripled. Clearly, childhood obesity is an epidemic in the U.S. Do fast food marketers share part of the blame? Consider that Ronald McDonald, that childhood icon, is one of the most recognizable mascots in the world. Some people are even comparing him to the mascot of old, Joe Camel. An Adage article even asks, “Is Ronald McDonald the new Joe Camel?”

Joe Camel once was the advertising mascot used for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company’s Camel cigarettes. Camel was once the most recognizable brand among children. Within a year of the introduction of Joe Camel, Camel cigarettes became the third most popular cigarettes among children aged 12 to 18 years, and within three years, preference for Camel cigarettes jumped from 0.5 to 32 percent. Corporate Accountability International organized a Send Joe Camel Packing campaign in 1987. By 1998, R.J. Reynolds agreed to stop all advertising featuring the cartoon camel.

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As Earth Month Winds Down, Honest Tea Recycles Old Facebook Posts

Leon Kaye | Monday April 30th, 2012 | 1 Comment
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Honest Tea is launching a new innovative recycling campaign.

Last week Honest Tea launched a Facebook app that may just encourage you and your peers to recycle. The company is working with an ad agency to embed more sustainability thinking by bringing up your old Facebook postings.

The Great Recycle is part of Honest Tea’s campaign to recycle every bottle the company produces by 2020. This new campaign will kick off publicly tomorrow, when a 30-foot-tall bin in New York’s Time Square will arise in an attempt to collect over 45,000 beverage containers in one day–which is the company’s average daily sales in New York City.

Here is how the social media campaign works. First users have to join the Great Recycle app on Facebook. Users, of course, have to allow Honest Tea and its partners to access your information.

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Combined Heat and Power: Pros and Cons

RP Siegel | Monday April 30th, 2012 | 3 Comments

There is no perfect energy source. Each and every one has its own advantages and compromises. This series will explore the pros and cons of various energy sources.  Learn about other forms of energy generation here.

Combined heat & power (CHP) or cogeneration, is really not an energy source itself, but rather more of an energy multiplier, squeezing more usable energy out of each unit of fuel most everywhere it is applied.

According to the EPA, CHP is not a single technology, but rather, an integrated energy system that provides electricity and heat, usually in the form of hot water or steam. Heat is an inevitable byproduct of any power produced by gas or steam turbines, which would include all gas, coal, oil or nuclear power plants in use today. In these turbines, pressurized hot gas or steam is expanded across a turbine, which spins the blades that ultimately drive the generator. The hot gas needs to be cooled immediately after leaving the turbine for the system to work. This was traditionally done with a condenser or cooling tower, but using the heat to keep a building comfortable or drive a production process, with steam or hot water, will also do the job with little loss in efficiency. However, in order for the heating application to replace conventional cooling systems, the demand for heat must be continuous. Typical CHP system will reclaim upwards of 80 percent of the heat that would otherwise be wasted.

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Beginning of the End for Big Box Dominance?

Scott Cooney | Monday April 30th, 2012 | 0 Comments

With the announcement of the closure of 50 big box retail outlets, Best Buy recently added more evidence to a growing suspicion about the demise of the big box store as the dominating force in retail. The electronics giant becomes the latest in a series of big box retailers that is shuttering large storefronts in some volume, following Circuit City, Borders, Sears, and several others.

It may be viewed as a sign of economic turbulence, the shift to online purchasing, or even a revitalized interest in buying local, but the trend is pretty clear. With large footprints, giant stores have huge tax, energy, water, and rent obligations, and drops in retail sales can become strong enough motivation for companies like Best Buy to jump ship.

One of the biggest challenges with big box stores is their footprint. Almost by definition, they create suburban sprawl and communities that are not walkable. And once they’re closed, all those tax incentives given by city councils to lure in the company become tax burdens to the local community with no benefits in job creation or opportunity. So…with all these stores closing up, the question shifts to what we do with them. Julia Christensen’s book, Big Box Reuse, offers some ideas.

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White House Honors Corporate Environmental Sustainability Leaders

| Monday April 30th, 2012 | 0 Comments

What do you get when put a baker, an outdoor industry executive and a farmer together in the same room?  A diverse crowd of sustainability gurus honored by the White House this month with the Champions of Change Award for their efforts in the category of Corporate Environmental Sustainability. April is the month to recognize companies, organizations and individuals whose mission is to advance holistic sustainability practices in their community, business or organizational structure.

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Unilever Improves Supply Chain, Faces Challenges with Customer Behavior

| Friday April 27th, 2012 | 0 Comments

On Tuesday, Unilever released its first year’s progress report on the progress it made to meet its Sustainable Living Plan targets. The results so far are mixed. The report shows significant progress in many of the targets as well as real difficulties in others. For example, Unilever reports that sustainably sourced agricultural materials grew last year from 14 to 24 percent on the way to reach 100 percent in 2020. On the other hand, there was no progress in Unilever’s ambitious plan to halve its carbon footprint by 2020.

It’s not really surprising to see these mixed results given the fact that Unilever deliberately gave itself very challenging targets in the first place. “Many of our goals look as daunting now as they did when we announced them, but you have to set uncomfortable targets if you are to really change things,” explains its CEO, Paul Polman in the report. So taking into account the high bar Unilever set up in this plan, with goals like doubling its sales while halving its carbon footprint by 2020, my impression is that the Sustainable Living Plan is so far a success story.

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ALEC Lobbies EPA to Designate Carbon Intensive Palm Oil as a Biofuel

Gina-Marie Cheeseman | Friday April 27th, 2012 | 0 Comments

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has lobbied against climate change legislation, health care reform, and a host of other issues. Now ALEC is lobbying for the EPA to designate palm oil as a biofuel. The EPA ruled that palm-oil-based biofuels do not meet the greenhouse gas (GHG) requirements of the 2007 Renewable Fuel Standard which requires that biofuels reduce net GHG emissions by at least 20 percent compared to gasoline and diesel over their lifecycle.

ALEC filed comments about the EPA’s finding, The Hill reports. “The Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to restrict the trade of tropical palm oil marks an abandonment of free trade principles that have been so beneficial to so many,” ALEC said.

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Shareholder Resolution Filed With Duke Energy Expresses Growing Concern Over Coal

Leon Kaye | Friday April 27th, 2012 | 0 Comments
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Coal hauled on trains outside of Nashville (Leon Kaye)

Duke Energy will hold its annual meeting next week, and as is the case with other utilities, non profit advocacy groups will press companies for more information on coal risk exposure. The shareholder advocacy group As You Sow is asking that Duke disclose plans on how they will deal with coal price volatility, disclose the costs of environmental compliance and reveal problems related to the construction of new coal fired power plants to replace an aging infrastructure. The resolutions are on Duke’s agenda next week as more analysts show concern over Duke’s proposed $26 billion merger with Progress Energy.

If Duke and Progress combine, the result would be a company with about 57,000 megawatts of power capacity, and 42 percent of that would depend on coal. One in ten of those plants, for a total of 25 percent of the company’s coal capacity, lack the scrubbers necessary to prevent sulfur oxide (SOx) from entering the atmosphere. And that is just the beginning.

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4 Fast Steps to Put a Price Tag on Ecosystem Services

| Friday April 27th, 2012 | 0 Comments

Pavan Sukhdev and Jared Diamond chat onstage at Fortune Brainstorm Green

What’s business if not value creation? Take something that doesn’t cost very much, add value, and sell it for more, creating a profit. It’s only natural that many businesses do so using natural resources like land, trees, water, air, and fossil fuels as their inputs. Those components become the ingredients for the products, or they are the receptacle for waste created in the manufacturing process.

Either way, what was once a common good – air, water, natural resources – is used for private gain. The public good suffers at the expense of private benefit. So what to do about it?

At Fortune Brainstorm Green Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and UCLA Professor and Pavan Sukhdev, Fellow, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University sat down with Jib Ellison of Blu Skye Consulting to discuss the business case for ecosystem valuation.

Use it or lose it.
Pavan Sukhdev explained the problem pretty bluntly, “We use natural resources because they’re valuable but we lose them because they are free.”

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Interview: Dr. Michael Mann, Climate War Veteran

| Friday April 27th, 2012 | 12 Comments

If there was a medal for fighting the climate war, Dr. Michael Mann should probably get one. In the last decade he has been at the front lines of the fight over climate change, most noticeably as the researcher who created one of the symbols of this war, the hockey stick graph, as well as one of the heroes of the Climategate scandal. Now he has a new book coming out, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, describing his experience as a target of the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to sow doubt and thwart action on climate change.

Last week I met Dr. Mann for an interview at the Sustainable Operations Summit in New York. In an interesting coincidence, the New York Times (NYT) published an article two days earlier on a new survey showing that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter and last year’s blistering summer were likely made worse by global warming. One of the paragraphs caught my attention in its attempt to present the climate change debate:

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EPA Underestimates Emissions from Palm-Based Biofuels

3p Guest Author | Friday April 27th, 2012 | 1 Comment

Baby OrangutanBy Alexandra Stark
Scientific and environmental groups announced that they will submit comments to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in response to EPA’s proposed finding that palm oil should not qualify for inclusion in the EPA’s Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) this morning.  While the organizations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, World Wildlife Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the National Wildlife Federation, agreed with the EPA’s conclusion not to include palm oil, they argued that EPA’s analysis actually underestimates the greenhouse gas emissions of palm oil and the serious environmental problems that palm cultivation creates.

“The emissions of palm oil based biofuels substantially exceed the emissions from conventional petroleum diesel,” said Dr. Jeremy Martin, Senior Scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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Microloan Interest Rates in Impact Investing

3p Guest Author | Friday April 27th, 2012 | 2 Comments

Image from TaxBrackets.org

By: Lonnie Shekhtman
For those of us who follow microfinance news closely (I’m not the only one out there who gets “microfinance” Google alerts, right?) it’s been hard to see some of the trash talking about the industry in mainstream media in the last couple of years. Critics point to greed via excessive interest rates imposed on the poor, and inappropriate money collection methods by some  MFIs, questioning whether microfinance is even effective. Andhra Pradesh and Grameen Bank have been in the news so much, they’re practically household names these days.

The negative publicity could certainly give a brand new, wide-eyed impact investor pause. But I’m beginning to realize that the bad publicity feeds an important system of checks and balances, helping expose harmful practices for the benefit of the entire microfinance industry.

Also, what I’ve learned so far from talking to experts in microfinance is that there are bad apples here, as in every other industry; nothing about microfinance is black and white; and poverty alleviation is exceptionally complicated.

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