Here's something fundamental to remember when thinking about any company's efforts to get greener: No business is in the business of going out of business.
In other words, no company that plans to stick around past next week, no matter how well meaning and eco-friendly, will enact programs that put its bottom line in danger. And in general, the smaller the company, the more important that rule becomes because insolvency is never far from the minds of small-business owners.
When Wal-Mart recently began its push to promote compact fluorescent light bulbs last year, adding a huge amount of inventory and giving CFLs higher visibility in stores, only a small part of their calculus was the environment. The main part was business. This was a way for Wal-Mart to save its customers money – on energy bills – while making money for itself. To expect any company to act differently is to fundamentally misunderstand its reason for existing.
But where going green dovetails with greening the bottom line is where you'll find change that isn't just "greenwashing," and that's where businesses can have the greatest impact.
Take Richmond's own Ellwood Thompson's. The local supermarket has been committed to sustainability for years, buying wind credits that offset 100 percent of its energy usage (www.renewablechoice.com). Now the store is going even further to promote sustainable practices. It's hired a "green consultant" to help guide it through its new "GreenPath" campaign.
The most visible part of the new ET green push will begin in 2008. When it opens on Jan. 2, Ellwood Thompson's will have done away with plastic bags.
"They're made from petroleum. They wind up in landfills. They don't biodegrade," said ET marketing director Lesley Johnson, ticking off the plastic bags' rap sheet.
The plastic bags will be replaced by bags made of bagasse, a byproduct of sugar production. Bagasse is the biomass remaining after stalks of sugarcane are crushed to extract their juice. Besides bags, it's also used as a tree-free alternative for making paper. The process requires no bleaching and the end result is more biodegradable.
Johnson said ET will encourage customers to put the bagasse bags in their compost piles at home because they'll likely biodegrade faster there than in a landfill.
Like many supermarkets, ET also encourages customers to buy and reuse mesh bags that it sells at checkout. ET is even looking into a bag swap program where customers would take canvas or mesh bags home and then return them to be used again by other customers.
Johnson said this system has had success in Europe, but she talked to one supermarket in California where it didn't work as well.
"People would rather just buy at low cost their own bags. They like having their own," she said.
Ukrop's also recently began a push to get customers to buy its reusable mesh bags, which cost 99 cents apiece. CEO Bob Ukrop said in late November that they've sold 31,000 so far, a number that continues to grow.
But ET has gone many steps further and is proving that these green measures don't necessarily hurt business.
Johnson said that while "financially there was really no reason to make the change," the price for the bagasse bags was "very reasonable." With the $1.99 canvas bags, she said, the company isn't making much money, just passing along the cost of manufacturing, shipping and related overhead.
Still, Ellwood Thompson's is a business like any other. It can only afford to help sustain the environment up until the point that its green measures cut into the balance sheet. That's business, and it means that if they can do these things so can others.
"This can be done," Johnson said. "The products are out there. It just requires a little bit of research and educating your customer base while you're making changes.
"Personally I think all [supermarkets] should [do what Ellwood Thompson's is doing]. ET is committing its dollars to moving toward more sustainable, greener practices. It's something we think is the right thing to do. The more people use these products. The greater demand there'll be and the prices will come down."
ET's this-can-be-done approach should be instructive to other businesses struggling with how to get greener without hurting the bottom line. In many cases, alternatives are out there, but inertia is a powerful force. Compact fluorescent light bulbs have been around since the 1980s, but are only now going mainstream, aided recently by Wal-Mart's efforts. People, like businesses, can be resistant to change, even when that change helps the earth and the wallet.
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What are you doing to go "green"? Leave your comments below.