Students pursuing MBAs are looking for courses able to provide them with environmental perspective. And while the average business student seems to be interested in working for socially responsible employers, there is also an element of practicality involved.
Just a few years ago, corporations weren't specifically worried about greening business practices. There has been a rapid transition in the consumer psyche, and greener companies have had a marketing edge. Now, running a business in a sustainable manner has become essential rather than a marketing gimmick. Students have paid attention to this change and have realized that they have a lot to learn to join capitalize fully on the sustainability revolution.
Students have made a push for including environmental classes into business school curricula. No longer do they have to head off for special programs to learn environmental stewardship. The Aspen Institute has even started ranking schools on the basis on their environmental curricula — Stanford University holds the first spot on the institute's 'Beyond Grey Pinstripes' list.
According to a poll by Experience Inc., 81 percent of students say that it is important to work for a green company and 79 percent say that they would be more likely to accept a job offer from a green company over other options, assuming the offers were similar. Up until now, the real question has been whether those students -- with brand new MBAs in hand -- would be able to find the sort of socially responsible jobs they hoped for.
These days, though, there are no questions. Corporations need to fill positions that didn't exist ten years ago — jobs like environmental consultant, corporate governance specialist and ethics officer — and they're turning to students to take on the challenge. In only the past four years, the number of CSR jobs has grown 37 percent, according to Net Impact.
The number of educational opportunities available to students interested in the field could still use a little improvement, however. Because of the relative youth of the field, internships are often limited. Many schools are still working to implement green curricula, and quite a few are still in the absolute beginning stages of the process. Many students are looking for educational options with more depth than those offered on many campuses. They're looking for classes that cover environmental issues on a macro level: how alternative fuels might affect shipping options, the costs and benefits of carbon offsets and similar issues. These students want case studies, facts and figures, and even textbooks. MBA programs are still working on providing them.
Consumers have begun to look for more accountability from the fast food industry, and it looks like they may get it. Menu changes are becoming visible — one of the major issues with fast food has been the question of health. More restaurants are providing healthy eating options, like salads.
While consumers' health issues are important, though, a new question of accountability is growing. How do we know if a given fast food chain is making an effort to protect the environment?
Ellen Kennedy, a senior social research analyst at Calvert Group, identified four issues that investors should consider when looking at fast food chains: the company's environmental footprint, workplace issues, animal welfare and product safety, and marketing to children.
In an interview with WhatPC?, Kennedy expanded on that list: "Like Wal-Mart, large fast food companies can influence whole categories of suppliers by virtue of their purchasing decisions. So one way to think about fast food operations is to start with each ingredient and follow it through the supply chain to disposal or recycling. For example, we know that global seafood supplies are predicted to crash in the 2040s. Does the company sell fish species that are threatened? Does the company have good seafood supplier standards that are independently monitored? Does the company source shrimp that have been farmed with high levels of pesticides or antibiotics? How is the fish processed, transported, and refrigerated? What does the company do with trash and organic waste?"
It isn't just investors who are keeping an eye on fast food chains, though. Consumers are looking for more and more transparency from their favorite eateries. Groups like the National Restaurant Association are making an effort to help lead fast food restaurants to greener practices. "Some of the most clear-eyed critics of the industry are the long-time NGO advocates who have developed relationships with companies over years, or even decades," Kennedy says. "They often have a sense of which companies 'you can work with' and which ones give the run around."
The process remains fairly slow. While the number of certified green restaurants has been growing, they still make up only a fraction of U.S. restaurants. Not all restaurants recycle, make their buildings energy efficient or even refuse to use Styrofoam containers (about 40 percent of restaurants currently use Styrofoam take-out containers). To date, there isn't even a definitive guide showing which restaurants are green. But progress is underway, aided by the fact that consumers want sustainable fast food and will support it with their purchasing power.
Washing your car in the driveway uses as much as 150 gallons of fresh water, and washing it at a conventional car wash uses between 20 and 50 gallons according to estimates from Travis Kimball. Kimball is the director of marketing for Splash & Dash, a car wash that uses a mere eight gallons of fresh water per car serviced.
Splash & Dash is located in Sacramento, California. The entrepreneurs behind it, including CEO Jason Johnson, hit on a formula that combines inexpensive service with environmental practices to convince customers to clean up their cars the "green" way. Splash & Dash has been certified as sustainable by the Sacramento Business Environmental Resource Center -- the first car wash to get the designation.
One of the big factors separating Splash & Dash from its competitors is the car wash's impressive water reclamation process. The process reclaims 100 percent of the water it uses in washing cars. The soapy water is run through a filtering process — the equipment has a $30,000 price tag -- that makes the water clean enough to re-use. The only fresh water Splash & Dash doesn't reclaim is eight gallons for the final spot-free rinse.
Splash & Dash has gone green in other ways, as well: the company uses only biodegradable and nontoxic soaps. Competing car washes, as well as most of the folks out in their driveways with a hose, use toxic soaps that don't break down after they reach the sewer system. These chemicals can harm both wildlife and the employees expected to work with them.
Not all of Splash & Dash's customers come for the biodegradable soap, however. The basic car wash costs an affordable $6 — cheaper than many nearby car washes. I'm certain that Splash & Dash is able to charge less for the same reasons they received a green certification: the company uses less water. Many car washes face astronomical water bills, high enough that a $30,000 device able to trim operating expenses is worth the up-front cost.
I suspect that the environment isn't really Splash & Dash's primary concern. But the fact that these entrepreneurs have found a way in which to drop expenses using sustainable methods has made going green a smart business move. It's interesting to note that the company doesn't place a price premium on a green product, as other companies have. Instead, Splash & Dash focuses on providing a competitive product and using sustainability as a marketing bonus. I see this as the real future of green marketing. Where eco-friendly qualities are present, their main purpose is to help make an overall great product.
The Republic of Singapore is renowned for, among other things, its fastidious cleanliness.Bubble gum is highly restricted because of its potential to be discarded in an unsanitary and unsightly manner.Strict, often corporal punishments are handed out for vandalism, despite it being considered a minor offense in much of the rest of the developed world. Even small satellite dishes are banned from private residences, to prevent a cluttered urban aesthetic.
Singapore’s elegant solution to waste disposal is a unique, and thus far very effective combination of controlled offshore dumping, and land reclamation. While both practices have historically been tremendously harmful to local ecosystems, the transformation of Pulau Semakau from a small island to a massive landfill was carried out with meticulous care; nearby corals were protected by silt screens as the seabed was raised, and a combination of waterproof membrane and clay linings have prevented any seepage from escaping the landfill thus far.
Conditions on the island landfill itself are far from what you’d expect to find at your local city dump.By breaking the whole project down into smaller cells, landfill officials have been able to cap and cover much of the island with lush vegetation and scenic views. Those cells that are still open receive a consistent flow of seawater, which keeps toxins from building up.Mangrove plots, both natural and relocated, thrive on the island, and tremendous biodiversity exists at the site; some of Singapore’s most endangered plant species are found at only Pulau Semakau.
While the project is impressive, especially given the ecological time bombs created by most large-scale landfill projects, a tremendous amount of Pulau Semaku’s success is derived from Singapore’s practice of incinerating most of its waste before burial. While the ash is treated carefully, shipped to the landfill on barges under tarps, the particulate and heat-trapping emissions released by the incineration process may heavily negate the environmental damage mitigation of Pulau Semaku.
Those concerns aside, though, the project continues to be received as a massive success, as sport fishing, bird watching, nature walks, and other recreational activities have been opened and encouraged on Semakau. The landfill provides much-needed green space for the densely populated city, and is now the Singapore’s only garbage dump. It is expected to remain open until 2040, and with careful management and technology advances, could serve the city’s waste disposal needs for years after.
To many environmentalists, nothing symbolizes the drive toward a cleaner, more sustainable and more environmentally friendly future as well as the modern wind turbine. Pristine white, lean, elegant, and minimalist, it is such a ready summation of all the things many clean-energy advocates desire that their appearance in green-oriented advertising—even for products unrelated to wind power—is hard to miss.
However, while high-profile, and a major, viable step toward a future powered by cleaner energy, wind power might not be the cure-all it is sometimes made out to be. Some conservation groups oppose wind turbines in certain locations, citing their visual disruption of natural views, and interference with local wildlife in rural areas. Additionally, demand for wind turbines is drastically outstripping manufactures ability to produce the iconic power generators. It’s clear that other options must be exercised in moving worldwide energy production toward sustainable sources.
In a simplified model, the way cap-and-trade works is that a government sets a cap on how many greenhouse gasses a country can emit in a given time period. It then sells or auctions off licenses to produce these emissions. Revenue generated from these sales can be “recycled,” so to speak, into subsidizing cleaner sources of power, like wind turbines, funding research into new clean energy sources, or furthering the development of existing technology.In short, it makes energy that contributes to global warming expensive, while making energy that doesn’t fairly cheap.
Though many object to cap-and-trade plans on a philosophical level, because they essentially allow large companies to buy the right to pollute, they do soothe one of the most frequent arguments against greener technologies—namely, their comparatively high cost. By adjusting the price of various energy sources to account for their environmental impacts, cap-and-trade gracefully intertwines the market system that drives the world economy, and the environmental protection that is of growing concern to consumers.
While cap-and-trade plans don’t create the motivational and attitude-adjusting vistas of a regiment of wind turbines, they have arguably had the largest impact in reducing human-produced climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1996 by most of the developed world (the United States failed to ratify), began imposing a cap-and-trade system on many notable greenhouse gas producers in 2005, and its successes have inspired even more ambitious programs to curb climate change.
It's an unfortunate coincidence: The developed world is finally coming to realize the destructive power of its heavily-industrialized economies just as the rest of the world is beginning its widespread adaptation of modern production methods.
This time around, though, there are new catches for the would-be industrialist. We are now well aware that the world’s resources are finite, and knowledge abounds of the planet’s limited capacity to absorb industrial pollution, on both a local and global level. And there are already 150 years — roughly a century of them completely unregulated — of accumulated industrial damage to mitigate.
Furthermore, as if the stakes needed to be any higher, the huge size of the populations involved in this upcoming wave of industrialization makes its potential environmental harm nearly limitless.
The currently proposed solution — in India, at least — seems to be a delicate tightrope walk between the two undesirable extremes. India, which currently produces only 4% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, plans to continue exploiting its inexpensive, heavily-polluting coal resource to meet the current 8-9% yearly growth of its economy.
The environmental check to this expansion will be to keep per capita warming emissions in line with already-developed nations. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh explains that "despite our development imperatives, our per capita [global warming] emissions will not exceed the per capita [global warming] emissions of the developed industrialized countries.”
While the compromise looks good on paper, and certainly has tremendous potential to succeed, simply undercutting the per capita global warming emissions of developed nations may not be a strict enough control.Already, pollution is limiting crop yields in a nation that desperately needs food, and with the introduction of the Nano, an ultra-compact, ultra-affordable car in 2009, emissions could skyrocket before improved living conditions have a chance to curtail the ever-increasing population growth rate.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) put a stop to all solar projects being built on public land. This is curious policy for a variety of reasons (explained below) and has the potential to greatly harm the solar industry, which is already on pins and needles waiting for the renewable energy Incentive Tax Credit to be renewed.
I can't see any reason to stay thousands of solar projects across the U.S. for the purpose of conducting environmental investigations. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has never been enforced this way ever before, even in industries with established records of environmental destruction. Normally, Environmental Impact Statements (EIS), analyses of project impacts and mitigations, occur on a project-by-project basis. It's unclear how the BLM can even conduct a nationwide EIS, as it intends to do, since projects will have different impacts on different habitats.
With solar, the negative environmental impacts are minimal and the environmental benefits are tremendous. Unlike mountaintop removal mining or oil drilling, solar does not inflict major environmental damage. There is no footprint to speak of. The solar arrays we are talking about are likely to be built up off the ground, angled to catch the most light (as pictured); the impact is as serious as installing a bunch of poles. Having worked in wildlife conservation and fought for NEPA enforcement, I really don't see solar projects as the type NEPA was meant to slow or block.
Some of the best land for solar projects is on public property, in the wide-open stretches of abandoned pasture or uninhabited desert. Deserts have high ecological value, but much of the wildlife that depends on that habitat lives underground. A solar array wouldn't disrupt migration patterns, for instance, like oil drilling and piping does. You won’t ever have a solar spill wreaking havoc on Alaska, or solar subsidence after the earth has been mined out from under the people living on it.
In short, I believe that the BLM’s sudden great concern about the negative environmental impacts of solar is suspect, with little or no merit. My prediction is that the bureau's giant environmental impact statement will return a “FONSI,” or “Finding of No Significant Impact.”
The BLM claims it will take two years to complete the study. This is an unusually long timetable for an EIS, which can be completed in eight months or less by motivated consultants. I would hope that halting the progress of an entire industry would be sufficient motivation to ensure a speedy process.
This entire plan fails the sniff test. It is the type of news that fuels cynicism. To the best of my knowledge, the BLM has never demanded so much environmental responsibility from fossil industries. The approach seems counter-intuitive, as normal project-by-project analysis would be sufficient and more accurate at assessing impacts and assigning mitigation. Legislative Analyst Holly Gordon of Ausra Energy told The New York Times “It doesn’t make any sense… This could completely stunt the growth of the industry.”
Enterprising solar trade agencies should pursue equal protection claims and challenge the policy under the Administrative Procedures Act. The policy makes so little sense that it neatly fits ‘arbitrary and capricious’ -- the standard for reversing administrative decisions. If the freeze stands, it would amount to an enormous setback to clean energy so desperately needed by this country to temper energy prices and free us from the shackles of foreign oil.
Keeping with California’s record as one of the most environmentally progressive states in the country, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) this week proposed sweeping new global warming regulations. If passed, these unprecedented measures will slash deeply into the state’s production of heat-trapping gases, and serve as a fantastic model for the rest of the nation, as the U.S. finally faces down the problems of its current carbon footprint.
The proposal, a thick read at 75 pages, details an impressive, comprehensive plan for dealing with California’s production of heat-trapping gasses. The first line of attack seems to be against non-renwable and dirty fuel sources: the report recommends increasing the percentage of the state’s energy that is drawn from clean energy to be increased to a full 33 percent by the year 2020.
As Dan Kalb, a policy coordinator for the Berkeley office of the Union of Concerned Scientists notes, “California has a wealth of renewable electricity potential we aren't tapping into yet. Shifting to clean, safe sources of carbon-free electricity is a win for the environment, the economy and consumers.”
While I agree with this statement, the Air Resources Plan seems not to delineate any penalties for companies that do not comply with the 1/3 clean energy standard.Because the current energy market still undervalues clean energy, while not fully forcing utility companies to bear the brunt of fossil fuel use, a system of monetary incentives to back this plan would be an immense help in ensuring utility companies’ compliance with it.
Comparing the clean energy standard to CARB’s stance on consumer vehicle purchases may better highlight my point. While non-fuel efficient vehicles penalize their owners at the gas pump, the net negatives brought upon society by their use go far further: global warming, smog, excessive demand for gasoline, and a greater percentage of the state GDP spent on a largely imported resource all negatively affect the entirety of California. And these negative impacts easily exceed the few extra dollars a month SUV drivers spend on gas.
To compensate for this, California has created a “feebate” system, which CARB aims to expand upon with this proposal. These “feebates” consist of one-time surcharges for gas-guzzlers, and one-time rebates for high fuel efficiency machines, which both help the state compensate for the damages caused by less fuel-efficient vehicles, and make purchasing cleaner vehicles more alluring to cash-strapped consumers.
While brute force legislative mandates — such as the clean energy standard dictated by this latest proposal — have their place in creating a more sustainable United States, I feel that the most effective changes will come about by manipulating the market forces that have always driven our economy to accurately reflect the environmental impact of purchasing decisions.
People in the United States have rarely suffered for lack of food.It has been hypothesized that the first humans to settle permanently in North America over 10,000 years ago followed massive herds of big game animals. The first Europeans to arrive on the continent in the 1600s found the soil so bountiful that they created a holiday—colonial records tell of three days of feasting—quite a remarkable feat for a colony of religious separatists dissatisfied with the purity of the existing English Church.
Even in the depths of the Great Depression, when many people were still unable to afford food at record low prices, soup kitchens and other aid organizations kept starvation in check; though many went hungry, almost none starved to death. Even now, American harvests are so plentiful the the government pays many of them not to produce, to keep prices high and farms profitable.
With this great prosperity and supply has also come tremendous diversity of food options. The United States’ status as a melting pot nation has brought cultures and cuisines from all over the world to its cities and towns. Along with different foods have also come different methods of production; while a vast majority of foods eaten today are produced through environmentally-unfriendly industrial agricultural practices, a new movement is offering perhaps the lowest impact of any farming method yet devised.
It’s called veganic agriculture, and it acts as a sort of fusion between existing organic farmingand a vegan diet.Throughout the farming process, no animal matter is used, not even manure for fertilization. Instead, composted plant matter is used to provide the soil with vital nutrients.The movement traces its roots to Europe, where smaller agricultural plots and a closer connection between producer and consumer have always garnered more interest in food production methods.
The practice has been popularized in the United States through the efforts of local farmers, like Don Bustos, of New Mexico, who reveled to the Associated Press that he was initially inspired by a former US Secretary of Agriculture. “"He was talking about ways to protect the safety of our food system,” recall Bustos. “But to me you still have things like e-coli and salmonella from manure. Now, I use no manures, no bone meals, blood meal, no pesticides, nothing."
Aside from reducing the threats posed by microbial organisms in animal-based manure, veganic farming also prevents hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals manure-producing animals in confined animal feeding operations are exposed to from passing into vegetables, or running off into local water supplies. Veganic methods also provide an effective model for agricultural carbon reduction, as no feed is required to produce the green manures that fertilize veganic crops.
If you’ve been watching the news lately, you’ve probably been steering clear of tomatoes.Salmonella poisoning is a serious medical issue, and while some companies, such as fast-food giant McDonald’s, have concluded that the danger has passed, the more cautious among us might remain wary for days or weeks to come.
In a world as full of industrialized agriculture as ours is , food scares are hardly new. Beyond the media frenzy over the link between Mad Cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, cases of everything from e. coli contamination to the ever-present specter of bird flu are now commonplace on news reports, even as confined animal feeding operations, commonly referred to as CAFOs, consume eight times the antibiotics used on the human population.
But as pressing as these potential hazards in our current agricultural system might be, they remain just that: potential.By far the most currently pressing negative aspects of our industrialized agricultural sector are not health risks, but the facts of global warming emissions. Each year, millions of tons of carbon dioxide are produced in the growing, harvesting, shipping, and refrigerating of produce alone.
Fortunately, the ingenuity and willpower of a handful of local business owners and farmers may provide insight into how our agricultural future can be made both healthier and more sustainable. In fields outside of Kalamazoo, MI, on the eastern fringes of the American Midwest, the growing season is fairly short, featuring long springs and cold, harsh winters. Yet using basic, low-impact technology such as high tunnels, also known as hoop houses, local growers like Dennis Wilcox of of Blue Dog Greens is able to grow crops well past the normal season, with some hardy plants growing year-round under their new-found protection.
“Without supplementary heating, the crops are protected more from snow and other elements than from the cold," Wilcox explains. But even so, the small amount of shelter lets Wilcox get an edge on the spring planting season as well. In warmer regions, too, the tunnels can be useful, protecting extremely fragile crops from the first frosts of the year.
But local, low-impact, organic agriculture is only part of the solution.It takes local businesses dedicated to serving fresh, local foods to make these crops viable products. Businesses like the Food Dance Café in Kalamazoo, which serves fresh, local produce year-round, creating demand and introducing the larger populace to the improved taste and safety of non-industrial agriculture. As Julie Stanley, head chef at Food Dance notes, “I started buying locally produced ingredients, which was unusual in Kalamazoo. My focus then was on flavor and freshness, which is still my top priority. But now I'm also satisfying a growing demand for local foods.”
Students pursuing MBAs are looking for courses able to provide them with environmental perspective. And while the average business student seems to be interested in working for socially responsible employers, there is also an element of practicality involved.
Consumers have begun to look for more accountability from the fast food industry, and it looks like they may get it. Menu changes are becoming visible — one of the major issues with fast food has been the question of health. More restaurants are providing healthy eating options, like salads.
Washing your car in the driveway uses as much as 150 gallons of fresh water, and washing it at a conventional car wash uses between 20 and 50 gallons 
The Republic of Singapore is renowned for, among other things, its fastidious cleanliness.
To many environmentalists, nothing symbolizes the drive toward a cleaner, more sustainable and more environmentally friendly future as well as the 
It's an unfortunate coincidence: The developed world is finally coming to realize the destructive power of its heavily-industrialized economies just as the rest of the world is beginning its widespread adaptation of modern production methods. 
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) put a 
Keeping with California’s record as one of the most environmentally progressive states in the country, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) this week 
People in the United States have rarely 
If you’ve been watching the news lately, you’ve probably been