A greener White House, cutting water use in Wal-Mart’s Chinese supply chains and America’s eco car awards
White House goes solar
The White House is bringing solar back. A group of campaigners, led by Bill McKibben of 350.org, drove to Washington as part of the PutSolarOnIt campaign to persuade Barack Obama to reinstall one of former president Jimmy Carter’s solar panels atop the White House. They were rather publicly rebuked, but the administration made a sharp U-turn just a week later by announcing it would add solar panels and a solar hot water heater to the famous residence.
Obama’s people claim the development was not a reaction to outside organisations’ pleas. Rather, the mandate is part of a wider government push to reduce CO2 emissions and promote renewable energy.
But 350.org likes to believe it had something to do with the turnaround, collecting more than 40,000 signatures in support of solar on the White House. Along with the highly covered road trip, 350 says it showed the administration that the American people want clean energy alternatives.
“Clearly, some more important steps have been taken, including a big portion of the stimulus dedicated to energy efficiency and the recent opening of two huge chunks of public land for industrial-scale solar arrays,” says Phil Aroneanu, co-founder of 350.org. “But like the solar on the White House, those are first steps. We need a price on carbon and significant efforts to reduce CO2 to the safe level in the atmosphere – 350ppm.”
The PutSolarOnIt campaign is continuing to rally world leaders to switch to solar, and is making real strides. Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives, just installed solar panels on his roof. And the Indian parliament building will be also be retrofitted with solar panels.
Hershey’s supply chain falters
The month of October, when millions of children go candy crazy for Halloween, could have been sweeter for Hershey’s. After releasing the company’s first corporate sustainability report, a contingent of NGOs responded by releasing a counter report, Time To Raise the Bar: The Real Corporate Social Responsibility Report for the Hershey Company.
Authored by Global Exchange, Green America, the International Labour Rights Forum (ILRF), and Oasis USA, the report describes the maker of beloved candies like Hershey’s Kisses and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups as “a laggard in terms of its supply chain responsibility practices”.
Despite Hershey’s having a 43% US market share, candy rivals like Mars, Kraft, Nestlé and Cargill are taking the lead by implementing programmes that secure a sustainable supply chain.
The report highlights four distinct areas where Hershey’s falls behind: sourcing, lack of transparency about its cocoa suppliers; no third-party certification, and greenwashing by stressing its philanthropic efforts while it still lacks robust, sustainable supply chain practices. The report goes as far as to say that in west Africa, where Hershey’s sources a large percentage of its cocoa, there are recurrent incidences of child labour, forced labour and trafficking.
While the report highlights the company’s shortcomings, its main aim is to propose solutions. “I hope that CSR professionals will read reports like ours and see that we are looking to working together towards positive solutions for workers, farmers and the environment,” says Tim Newman, campaigns director at the ILRF. “We expect companies to be doing serious supply chain accountability and working with suppliers to set up systems that are accessible and accountable to workers to end abuse and create decent work opportunities.”
General Mills palm oil commitment
General Mills, maker of Cheerios and Häagen-Dazs, is boosting its efforts to help end deforestation resulting from unsustainably sourced palm oil.
General Mills is the world’s sixth largest food company. It says it uses just a 0.1% of global palm oil production. But the company’s new statement on responsible palm oil sourcing stresses its commitment to respecting indigenous communities, preventing further destruction of already dwindling rainforests and peatland, and is integrating responsible palm oil production into its assessment of suppliers. General Mills has also set a goal to use 100% responsible and sustainable palm oil by 2015.
“Our work with environmental organisations, including Rainforest Action Network, helped focus us on this important issue,” says Jerry Lynch, chief sustainability officer of General Mills. “By addressing it very directly in a publicly stated policy, we hope to provide leadership with peers and with our suppliers on the need to source palm oil in an environmentally and socially responsible way.”
Wal-Mart helps Chinese suppliers
One of the globe’s biggest retailers has made a commitment to improving its supply chain practices in China.
Discount giant Wal-Mart has more than 10,000 Chinese suppliers. With that much purchasing power, Wal-Mart’s decisions have significant reverberations both in China and on a global scale.
Some might not realise the serious impact textile manufacturing has on the environment: it can pollute as much as 200 tonnes of water for one tonne of fabric and uses harmful chemicals and loads of energy in the dyeing and finishing processes. That is particularly the case in countries such as China and India, which have weaker environmental regulations.
Wal-Mart is using the Natural Resource Defence Council’s (NRDC) Clean by Design project as its barometer for a more sustainable supply chain. Clean by Design seeks to green the global textile supply chain by promoting ten best practices that textile mills can easily implement to help cut water, energy and chemical use.
By implementing these practices, the NRDC predicts that textile mills can reap both environmental and economic gains in eight months or less, cutting roughly 25% of water usage and 30% of fuel use.
On a macro level, if 100 small to medium-sized textile mills adopted the Clean by Design practices, the NRDC says China could save 16m tonnes of water and 1m tonnes of CO2 annually – roughly the emissions from 170,000 homes.
Wal-Mart has selected several mills to test-run the programme, which will start by gathering data on water and energy to benchmark usage and monitor improvements made along the trial period.
“Wal-Mart can send a signal to manufacturers that there is a market out there for textiles made using cleaner practices, while also making a direct impact by requiring improved practices at their own mills,” says Courtney Hamilton, media relations associate for the NRDC.
Gap recycles the blues
Gap is helping to warm homes in needy communities with pairs of jeans. For the second consecutive year, Gap has partnered with Cotton Incorporated for its Recycle Your Blues campaign, where people can drop off any pair of used jeans at 1,000 Gap stores across North America and get 30% off a new pair of Gap’s 1969 line jeans. Gap’s Facebook fans do even better and get 40% off. The jeans will be turned into UltraTouch cotton fibre insulation and donated to homes in disadvantaged communities.
Last year the campaign was a huge success, collecting a whopping 270,000 pairs of jeans in two weeks. Those jeans were used as insulation in 500 homes and prevented 200 tonnes of denim from being discarded in landfills.
“We love this partnership with Cotton Incorporated’s ‘Cotton From Blue to Green’ drive because it merges the ideas of fashion, environmental sustainability and helping others,” says Marka Hansen, president of Gap North America.
This year other denim retailers are participating in Cotton Incorporated’s programme, including Rock & Republic and True Religion, which are hosting denim drives in their New York stores.
Greenest car in America
Honda has kept to its winning streak to be named America’s Greenest Automaker for the fifth consecutive time by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
The ranking evaluates carmakers’ environmental impact by assessing their average per-mile smog pollution and global warming emissions, across the entire fleet of vehicles sold. So that means that while Toyota’s Prius hybrid is massively successful the company still manufactures heavy emitting trucks and SUVs, all of which contribute to its fleet-wide average.
Contrastingly, Honda primarily focuses production on smaller vehicles, including hybrids, performing 13% better than the national average.
Toyota and Hyundai fell directly behind Honda in joint second place, while Volkswagen took fourth. The bottom three performers were American born Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, whose performances fell 8-13% below the national average.
The upside for everyone, though, is that all the carmakers involved have been improving their performance since UCS began the ranking. That is in no small way due to both the government and consumers’ push for stronger emissions regulations and cleaner cars.
“One of the analysis’s clear findings is that clean car policies work,” says Jim Kliesch, a senior engineer in UCS’s clean vehicles programme and the author of the rankings report. “There’s great ingenuity in the auto industry, and better products are already beginning to reach the market. In the coming years, stronger standards will guarantee that consumers reap these benefits.”
US e-waste bill
A new landmark bill proposed in the US Congress aims to crack down on supposed recyclers of e-waste, who are in actuality shipping the waste off to developing nations such as China, India and Nigeria. Once there it is improperly disposed of, endangering the health and safety of the local populations.
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, 85% of electronics are discarded as trash, rather than recycled. Although 23 states have e-waste recycling laws in place, the Responsible Electronics Act 2010 will forbid the export of hazardous and non-functioning electronics at the federal level. The loophole, though, is that functioning and non-hazardous electronics can still be exported.
The 2010 Act was conceived by two members of the House of Representatives: Gene Green of Texas and Mike Thompson of California. Unsurprisingly, the bill has the strong backing of environmental NGOs, as well as several big-time electronics companies including Apple, Dell and Samsung.