So it’s always good to go back and look at some of the pioneers in this latest wave. Some are household names, such as Ben Cohen and Jerry Silverman of Ben & Jerry’s. Others quietly go about their work of making the world better through business.

Arnold Hiatt, now 92, is one of the latter. When he became president (and later, CEO) of the Massachusetts-based shoe manufacturer Stride Rite in 1968, he created a bully pulpit that leveraged the business to spread good to the workers, the communities, and the industry. And he pioneered many initiatives that were adopted later by other social entrepreneurs.

Right from the start, ten years before Ben & Jerry’s was even founded, he limited his salary to 15 times that of his lowest-paid full-timers (p. 49). He instituted professionally-run on-site daycare with subsidies for his employees and spots for community members in 1971 (pp. 70-75)—and actively evangelized for this within the business community and in front of government hearings. Later, he started an intergenerational daycare where elders in need of companionship and desiring to feel useful became caregivers and skill-sharers for kids (p. 85). He created a program to fund Harvard and Northeastern educations for deserving inner-city kids who committed to public service (pp. 75-81); one of the kids he funded was Dr. Priscilla Chan, who became a major philanthropist after marrying Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (pp. 77-78). He upped corporate giving from 1% of pretax earnings to 5% (pp. 68-69). Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

And was this ever good for business! In the 24 years Hiatt headed the company, Stride Rite had only one year without earnings growth—the year it acquired Keds at a significant cost. It had 40 consecutive quarters with record growth. Investor’s Business Daily named it one of the three most successful public companies in the US. Of companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, Stride Rite was in the top 1% from 1972 to 1992. The stock grew 14 times as valuable in his final eight years (all on pp. 62-63).

Once Hiatt stepped down, his successor unfortunately moved away from social commitments. But Hiatt himself was only just getting started. A few among many examples:At some personal risk, he actively and successfully campaigned for the release of South Korean dissident and former president Kim Dae-jung, sentenced to death on sedition charges. Eventually, Kim settled in the US, and then returned from exile years later to once again serve as president (pp. 109-112).

He helped found Business for Social Responsibility, which for decades now has touted the virtues of business activism (pp. 97-98). He has provided fundraising, strategic consulting and other assistance to causes ranging from to Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential run (pp. 37-46) to the Jewish progressive organizations JStreet (which he co-founded) and New Israel Fund (pp. 154-56; disclosure: I have donated to both these organizations as well as several other progressive groups in Israel). He even got involved with a Patriotic Millionaires, group of very wealthy people who championed the much-maligned estate tax (p. 133).

He worked with former Irish president Mary Robinson on a global business-human rights initiative they tried to get through the United Nations (pp. 149-151). He funded schools and other services in places like Haiti and Guatemala (and leveraged his status as an investor and employer in those countries to pressure the governments for human rights and labor rights. And his deepest involvement was in the decades-long struggle for campaign finance reform, which he saw as key to all the other issues of his heart.

In short, if you’re running a social venture, you will find lots of validation. If your business is not yet involved in social betterment, you’ll find inspiration (and if you want help with that process, please contact me—it’s what I do).

The authors see two broad categories of purple goldfish: increasing value and reducing friction—which you find out by identifying 1) opportunities to create wow experiences, and 2) fixable gaps or errors in the customer experience (p. 196). Within those two big tents, at least 10 subsidiary categories fill the fish tank: adding gifts, personalizing the service, reducing wait times or making them a lot more fun, etc. Sometimes, one purple goldfish crosses many categories: Disney uses RFID wrist bands to greet restaurant customers by name and have their orders ready when they walk in, dispense with line-waiting for tickets and photo IDs, and eliminate several other customer annoyances (pp. 123-124). This sets a pretty high bar for the theme park industry.

Maybe not! The Christmas holiday causes millions of trees to be cut down before they are anywhere near their full carbon-sequestering potential. And then you have to factor in transporting them large distances on diesel trucks. Finally, many of these trees, now perhaps covered with tinsel, candle wax, bits of wrapping paper, and other non-recyclable trash, are thrown in landfills.

So, as a society, we have some work to do. Fortunately, this industry is really easy to make as eco-green as its iconic product’s color. All we need is to change the way we think and act. We have to start thinking of Christmas trees as a crucial part in an international reforestation campaign that would be one of the most effective things we could do to sequester carbon and reverse catastrophic climate change.

First, grow the trees in pots. No need to cut them for harvesting. Simply pick up the pot and bring it to the resale point. Farmers could even run their operations like pick-your-own apple orchards.

Second, part of the purchase deal is that the farmer or retailer takes back the potted tree after the holiday. The farmers and retailers partner with local highway and parks departments as well as apartment complexes, landscape architecture companies, college campuses, hospitals, and other institutions, to find new permanent homes for these trees and get paid again for their work. Each year, millions of new evergreens would join the existing tree canopy. Maybe they even collect and unweave the wreaths too, and use them as indoor air fresheners, then compost them.

And if we start this journey now, we could have a very much more eco-friendly holiday season as soon as 2020.

When I sent this article to my Virtual Assistant, Jeannette Tibbetts, to set up this newsletter, she was excited enough to send these comments (used with her permission). I consider her a co-author of this piece, and am pleased to share her insights with you, since she IS a Christmas insider.

I loved your main article…I’ve always thought about the ridiculous practice of trucking so many trees to areas where there are so many trees!

One idea is: BUY LOCAL…there are many tree farms in our area in Western Massachusetts; you go for a lovely walk and pick out your tree, so it’s cut down specifically for you. No thousands of trees left to die in those disgusting parking lot tree shops.

I’ve always wanted a live Christmas tree but the problem with potted trees is they cannot stay in the house for very long (i.e., only a couple of days); they dry out too much and will die. Also, you must dig a huge hole before the ground freezes so you can plant it right away. But it is definitely a great idea with some planning.

One more thing–discarding the tree: ALL cities/towns should collect trees to turn into mulch. It’s a logical and helpful solution for everyone!

First, there was the meta-level: an anthology that isn’t so much discrete articles as a coherent, collaborative whole. Many chapters draw on the previous ones and hint at the content to follow. And those authors include C-level and senior management at Unilever, Procter & Gamble (two of the largest consumer packaged goods conglomerates in the world), and SUEZ (a major global player in waste management), as well as equally heavy hitters in thinktanks and government (from the World Economic Forum to the former head of the EPA).

Then, of course, the rich and informative content; I took six pages of notes! I learned a lot about how products are recycled, what some of the issues are, why careless “recycling” by well-intentioned consumers trying to recycle more does the opposite of what they think and consigns huge quantities of material to the landfill; the whole batch is considered contaminated. And finally an answer to something that I’d wondered about for years—WHY black plastic isn’t recyclable: because the optical scanners recycling facilities use to separate the waste stream can’t read the number indicating what type of plastic it is, and different kinds of plastic shouldn’t be mixed (p. 100). The inability to recycle black, often extremely durable material that should be able to be repurposed, has always bothered me.

And I also learned some things about how to think about packaging from an end-of-life perspective, and how to incorporate those insights at the design phase—so right from the start, packages can be designed to be easily collected, reused, and/or recycled (pp. 85-87, among other sections).

Ultimately, pretty much anything can be recycled, even used disposable diapers and menstrual pads (p. 72). But what we recycle depends on what end products we can sell profitably. And that has to do both with whether recyclers can find or create ready markets and with how much energy, how many processes, and at what cost to process the waste into something recyclable. And that makes me wonder: Is it really worth doing something like P&G’s project collecting beach plastic, running it through a dozen or more processes, and surrounding it with layers of virgin plastic in order to make a shampoo bottle (pp. 228-237)—or are the energy and infrastructure costs and the product compromises too great; is it really just greenwashing for a significant PR benefit?

• If the issue with black plastic is optical, couldn’t there be a work-around, such as human sorting or a different type of sorting machine that tests through electronic analysis of the chemical structure?
• Rather than doing something like P&G’s beach plastic project, would it perhaps make more sense to develop enzymes that can digest plastics, and figure out a way to use the digested residue?
• Why do we lose usability with every recycling iteration, when nature has true self-sustaining closed loops?

I think I first came across the idea of fractional resources in 1975, when I discovered that a small intentional community in Yellow Springs, Ohio (where I went to college) had chipped in on a communal tractor instead of every household buying a separate lawnmower. And when I moved to an intentional community in Philadelphia five years later, the community had two cars available as needed for a per-mile fee (decades before Zipcar, Uber, or Lyft). Their motivation was as much reducing their environmental impact as saving some bucks, and I was struck by the way a co-op in any sector could achieve both goals.

Within the corporate world, the idea of fractional shared resources has been around at least since all those timeshare condos started springing up in the 1980s. Now, you can buy fractional interests in private jets, industrial equipment, and other things. I used this model (but not this language) in 1987 to organize a co-op of four business owners that purchased a laser printer together, back when they retailed for $7000. I found a remaindered one for $4500 and since I did the research and organized the fractional purchase, the printer lived in my office.

I had already been renting time on someone else’s laser printer, at a dollar a page. Having the machine on-site was a game-changer for my business because I could now offer while-you-wait resume services, and that gave me enormous competitive advantage in that portion of my business. I was eventually able to stop typing term papers and move on to far more interesting and better paying work as a marketing copywriter for individuals and small businesses/community organizations. This in turn gave me the space to develop much deeper levels of marketing consulting and eventually focus on green and social change businesses. So, in a sense, the business I operate today was made possible, or at least vastly easier, because of that decision to buy that printer fractionally.

This is the first time I’m reviewing a presentation rather than a book–but I have reviewed the occasional movie or other non-book resource in this space.

Visit https://vimeo.com/328548993 and you’ll find a presentation called “Carbon Drawdown Now,” by Chris Magwood, Ace McArleton, and Jacob Racusin, given at a Northeast Solar Energy Association conference in July of this year. Magwood is the author of Making Better Buildings (2014) and Opportunities for Carbon Dioxide Removal and Storage in Building Materials (2019).

This hour-and-a-quarter video looks at the relationships of soil productivity, buildings that sequester carbon, and economic justice/social equality. More importantly, it shows us how we can take carbon out of the atmosphere and into the materials we build with, step by step–using a whole-lifecycle approach. Although the presenters have extensive technical knowledge, they kept this presentation very accessible, with lots of helpful graphics and understandable language.

Using their methods, it’s possible to build structures that have lower carbon emissions over their entire lifetimes than conventional buildings of similar size and purpose emit just from their construction, even before counting the carbon impact of the operations (heating, cooling, lighting, etc.) over the building’s useful life. This often involves using materials such as hempcrete that store more carbon than was emitted during the hemp’s agricultural “career.”

The other reason I’m recommending this talk right now is to give more context to the fascinating book on environmentally friendly packaging issues that I’ll be reviewing next month. In some ways, these two resources are very complementary. Stay tuned for the December issue to find out more. Meanwhile, get your builder and architect friends to watch this.