Stephanie
Gleason
has a home-office business (e3strategies.
com) that provides educational consulting to
corporations, government agencies and nonprofits. In addition to reducing, reusing and
recycling, “the most unconventional thing I
do is use red wiggler worms [vermicom-posting] to convert my shredded paper
into ‘gardener’s gold’ for my plants,” says
the Sterling, Virginia, Costco member.
“I have a three-level indoor composter
with about 2,000 worms. They consume a pound of waste a day.
That’s 365 pounds of waste
a year that’s converted
to compost.”
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story
Costco members Bert and Patty Reslock of
Reno, Nevada, who designed and built Sun
Feather, their off-grid residence, where they
teach renewable-energy workshops (www.
essentialstrategiesllc.com). “It involved concerns about energy and our impact on the
environment, leaving a habitable place for
our descendants to live and finding solutions that, when combined, will accomplish
all of that.”
“It was a confluence of things,” says
Costco member Mike Ellis, president of EA
Logistics ( www.ealogistics.com), a freight
company in Bensenville, Illinois, that switched
to biofuels, instituted a “no-idling” policy for
their trucks and purchases carbon credits
through Carbonfund.org ( www.carbonfund.
org). “You can’t get away from the realities of
global warming and the potential implications for everybody. We started thinking,
‘What are we doing about the problem?’ ”
In a recent Retail Systems Research (RSR)
survey, 44 percent of retailers said that green
practices are a strategic initiative in their company. The survey found that motivations
behind green initiatives are strongly related to
retail performance: 67 percent of better-per-forming retailers cited ethical obligations
behind their green initiatives, while 76 percent
of lagging retailers cited only cost concerns.
“We thought that retailers would be in it
only for the potential cost savings,” says
Costco member Steve Rowen, partner at RSR,
a research company run by retailers for the
retail industry. “It turns out that better-per-forming retailers see this as both a cost initiative and a brand-building opportunity. They
believe consumers’ desire for green options is
not just a fad and are investing now to transform themselves into green brands.”
business is different; members are struggling to find myriad ways to manage food
waste, garbage, gas emissions involved in
long-distance transportation of food,
recycling and water conservation.
Costco member Dennis Brooks,
owner of Thai Sapa in Springdale, Utah,
agrees. “To source organic foods such as
beef, non-GMO [genetically modified organ-ism] tofu, farmers market and homegrown
veggies hasn’t been easy, and we pay dearly
for non-hydrogenated fry oils as well.
Recycled garbage bags, menus, dinner napkins are also more expensive, as are the wind-energy blocks of power we buy to supplement
the coal-fire electricity. Where we live we
even have to pay for our weekly recycle
pickup, not to mention the extra labor
involved for sorting and handling it.”
In the housing and development industry there is little oversight, and factors other
than cost, such as building codes, come into
play. “The ‘not easy’ part also comes in making choices,” says Costco member Katherine
Maxwell, whose husband is a green building
contractor in Kalispell, Montana. “With
insulation, for example, do we go with the
recycled blue jeans—four times the cost of
regular insulation—or settle for formalde-hyde-free fiberglass?
“We calculate the CO [carbon dioxide]
2
emissions of shipments we transport, and
purchase carbon credits for the amount of
those emissions—that money goes to environmental projects,” says Ellis. “But freight is
very much a price-driven business. So we pay
this expense ourselves, and provide it to our
customers for free.”
“I’ll spend about $4,000 to $5,000 more
per year [on green materials],” says Nancy
Milby of Laguna Culinary Arts, based in
Laguna Beach, California. “Yes, it costs more.
But do we really have a choice?”
that we’re green. And here we are, a taxi business, and we just won two Sustainable Quality
awards from the city of Santa Monica!”
“The press aspect has been phenomenal,”
says Bryan Kelley of Groove House Records,
who switched to 100 percent recycled packaging for its CDs and DVDs. “Many clients are
accessing this stock. Michael Brook [com-poser of the soundtrack for An Inconvenient
Truth] used us. We’re doing about 10 percent
more volume.”
“The costs of what we are doing are minimal and the returns, in terms of employee
morale, industry recognition and so forth,
have already paid us back,” says Ellis. “We’ve
picked up accounts specifically because of our
point of difference, and it’s already contributing to growth of our bottom line.
“It’s not about politics or ideology, it’s
about smart business and being part of the
solution,” he continues. “We prove you can do
both and make a healthy profit. This is what
the business world needs to hear.”
It’s not easy being green
To paraphrase a famous frog, it’s not
always easy being green.
The Green Restaurant Association says
that dining establishments find investing in
green technology difficult, especially as each
Green is gold
Despite the costs and challenges, everyone interviewed for this article has cited the
overwhelming rewards—from warm and
fuzzy “we’re doing the right thing” feelings to
hard, bottom-line statistics that prove their
green investments have paid off.
“We probably spend 5 percent
more than we have to on these
various green measures, but these
additional activities and expenditures are brought back to us
in the perception of quality
and enthusiasm they elicit in
our increased customer base,”
says Brooks.
“We have saved more than
$77,000 in fuel costs in the
past year,” says Radwan. “We
have been singled out by new
customers based on the fact
A sustainable hue
The promise of the green economy and
the clean-tech revolution is that not only will
they help to preserve and protect the planet,
but they will also bring a new wave of business opportunities at every point on the economic spectrum.
“It’s not easy being green, but it’s much
easier today than it was 16 years ago,” say the
Reslocks. “The products available today are
tremendously more efficient, user-friendly,
multifunctional and cost less than one-third
of what they did when we started.”
“Green is just the launching pad,” says
Radwan. “The finish line is sustainability.”
“When you add up the millions of small
changes that the business community can
deliver, you can only imagine the positive
impact on the world,” says Ellis.
And that means more green for everybody. C
Atlantic
Printing Company
“Many of the green aspects of our business
[recycling, use of soy ink and recycled papers]
have been in place for years,” says Costco member Robert Feldman of Atlantic Printing Company
( www.atlanticprinting.com), a commercial printer
in Needham, Massachusetts. “But the final and
most exciting was the transition to a chemical-free
process in our pre-press area. A process that once
included harsh chemicals for developing film and
printing plates is now totally chemical-free. We have
installed a state-of-the-art system for imaging plates
that requires no chemicals whatsoever!”
