The Clean and Green Club

Well, this is certainly different! A Big Media (CBS) radio station that appears to break from the mold.

This station, 94.7 FM, is a long-established classic rock number serving the Washington, DC market. About a year ago, it rebranded–still a classic rock station, but with a very clear focus on environmental issues–and a promise to play music beyond the hits.

What does it mean to have an environmental focus? The station’s press release announcing the February 2,2007 changeover notes,

The Washington D.C. station will operate using renewable energy to power its 50,000 watt signal. This move will contribute to lowering the threat of global warming through the purchase of energy resources generated by wind.  Additionally, station vehicles will be replaced with hybrid models, and 94.7 The Globe will further its “green” focus by taking a number of steps on and off-air to consistently promote ways for listeners to live an eco-friendly lifestyle.

In keeping with this new focus, the station website offers quite a bit of Green content, including eco-tips compiled by station staff and also submitted by listeners.

The station’s mission statement doesn’t specifically address environmental issues, but it quite cogently promotes the station as an alternative to the sound-alike hitmakers around the country. It notes the importance of musical diversity, promises that DJs have a voice in the programming (a rarity at many corporate radio chains these days), and insists it will be receptive to listener ideas.

And I know, some may call this “greenwashing”–but I prefer to think that it ight be a laboratory for exporting new ideas into the very, very tired and bland commercial radio band.

There is, after all, quite a bit of precedent for large corporate entities developing product lines that offer more individuality and social consciousness, and integrating some of the best practices corporate-wide. Saturn, to name one example, is a unit of General Motors. And Saturn’s low-pressure buying experience has migrated not just to other units within GM, but across the entire industry.

And like most stations these days, you can listen to it on streaming audio.

Reasonably priced, environmentally responsible, data-secure service for getting rid of techno-junk. I’d try Freecycle.org first, since my junk may be someone else’s treasure–but this looks like a good fallback.

The FAQ page notes,

We refurbish what we can and recycle the rest. Inkjet cartridges get remanufactured and, when possible, cell phones and some computers get refurbished. Material that has no further operating life is broken down to its smallest components (metals, plastics, etc.) and used in the manufacturing of new products. Unlike some recycling companies, all of the material that GreenDisk collects is reused or recycled. No hazardous materials or obsolete components go overseas to be processed or disposed of.

It also discusses the risks of improperly-disposed, insecure data, and the steps it takes to eliminate that risk.

And this is a socially responsible company that chases away business if there’s a more eco-friendly solution available:

You should not use GreenDisk if there is a local drop-off that legitimately recycles your equipment. We believe this service should be offered in your local area to conserve energy and be more cost effective. Unfortunately, businesses in most local areas have not stepped forward. So, we started this service at the request of those who had no local vehicle to recycle their equipment.

I find the information on GreenDisk’s About page very cool: the firm was founded on Earth Day, 1993, originally to help software companies dispose of unsold software. With its commitment to sustainability, GreenDisk went around forming partnerships with existing recyclers–and with nonprofit agencies that employ workers with disabilities–around the country, rather than building new capacity.

Materials that Greendisk recycles are turned into Green office products: Diskettes and CD-RWs, CD packaging, technotrash collection stations (how’s that for a closed loop!). I had to wonder, though–who’s actually still buying diskettes?

In fact, I wondered enough that I picked up the phone. It was answered on the first ring by none other than David Beschen, President and Founder; he says all six employees answer the phone. I asked who buys floppies these days. It turns out the military and other government agencies still buy them–and NASA even still buys 5-1/4 inchers.

For up to 30 pounds of non-computer “technotrash,” e.g., CDs, cords, mice, cell phones, and printer cartridges, just $6.95. Disposal of entire computers, including wiping the data beyond recovery and recycling what components can be recycled, starts at $19.95. The largest job the company handled filled 26 railroad freight cars; the smallest was a single DVD. Rechargeable batteries are acceptable; alkaline, unfortunately, are not–but the company is working on it. “It isn’t that they can’t be recycled, but that it’s extremely expensive,” Beschen told me. “But we’re working on that.”

Since I had him on the phone, I conducted a brief interview:

SH: How do you get people not to just throw electronic parts away.

DB: There’s a huge segment that does want to recycle, and we make it more convenient. They just don’t know what to do with the stuff. We’re not missionary with people who don’t want to recycle, but the general conversations are starting to bring more people to realize [that proper disposal is important]. If you go back in our culture, we didn’t throw stuff away. Planned obsolescence is a relatively recent, and that mentality is changing. We have cars now that don’t need a tune-up for 100,000 miles, instead of rusting hulks in a junkyard.

SH: How are you different?

DB: One of the key rules of environmentalism is don’t make it [if you can use something already in existence]. We use resources already in existence, including postal trucks that would otherwise come back empty. We’ve asked nonprofits that employ people with disabilities [to do the work]; they have 70 percent unemployment: those are two huge resources. Now we’ve integrated FedEx, and less-than-load tactics with all the trucking companies, so we can move stuff without making a special trip. And we can get work done without taking it offshore. To make the diskettes, we bought down-time from people who make the software. And companies will pay a premium for recycled materials.

SH: Is this type of cooperation unusual?

DB: I’m the former head of corporate communications for Microsoft. The software producers were doing all kinds of joint ventures, sharing information that marketing people would have killed each other for disclosing. I said, “do your marketing people know?” It wasn’t a conspiracy, for once. I come from the marketing world. When you create a soluton for people, you’re marketing. Companies that think only of themselves don’t tend to perform well over time.

You might remember fair-trade organic coffee roaster Dean Cycon of Dean’s Beans from my profile of his company in the February, 2006 Positive Power Spotlight.

Dean’s just come out with a fascinating book: Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee.

Most Americans and Europeans in the coffee industry have never met a coffee farmer, and certainly haven’t traveled to the remote indigenous communities where coffee is grown. Dean has traveled the world, meeting growers, processors, shamans, government ministers, bouncing his way down rutted goat trails, learning a few phrases of the local language (or what he thinks is the local language), getting stomach-sick on a regular basis–and having a great deal of fun. He often finds that not only is he the first coffee buyer to visit these isolated places, but often the first white man.

In the U.S., he spends a lot of time hectoring coffee executives at Starbucks and elsewhere to commit more to fair trade and to fund development projects–which he’s able to accomplish for a tiny fraction of the money a large bureaucracy would need, by using methods initiated and designed by local communities using local resources to meet local needs, in the spirit of E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful.

He leaves a trail not only of Dean’s Beans t-shirts and “Make Coffee Not War” bumper stickers, but a legacy of vast improvement in the lives of the villages he visits. Clean-water wells, education centers, community-owned coffee processing plants, simple hand-operated depulpers that allow coffee farmers to capture much more of the value of their crop…some of these are projects he funds directly, and others come out of the cooperatives’ share of coffee profits, made possible by the fair-trade price he pays, sometimes three times as much as the “going rate.”

Dean sums up his philosophy in the closing words of the book:

I have never been fully comfortable with what I, when I know in my heart that things can be better, more respectful, more loving, and frankly, more exciting. It pains me deeply to see cultures crumble and blow away under global pressures (or simply for lack of water), or kids’ lives go unfulfilled for want of a pencil or notebook. Javatrekking allows me the vehicle to explore my own relationship to these things and to take responsibility where I can. These may be small contributions in the greater scheme of things, but as an old Indonesian farmer advised me…”Add your light to the sum of lights.”

Dean has clearly taken that advice seriously. His many initiatives include forming the Coffeelands Landmine Victims Trust, which works in Central America and Vietnam, co-founding Cooperative Coffees, an association of 23 local coffee roasters around the U.S. and Canada who offer fair trade organic coffee, and simply funding scholarships for individual children of coffee growers in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea.

Dean Cycon is living proof that it is more than possible to use business as a force for positive social change, while at the same time see the world and have a terrific time.

Published sustainably on recycled paper by Chelsea Green (publisher of my own book Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World), Javatrekker is full of well-told stories and includes some great color photos. It’s available from Dean’s Beans or from the publisher.

Dean Cycon, who happens to be a signer of the Business Ethics Pledge, has pledged to donate 100% of the profits to coffee farmers.

Photo: Jeff Armstrong (left) greets Shel Horowitz following Shel’s keynote address at the Noteworthy USA convention, Las Vegas, October 5, 2007.

Shel Horowitz’s Positive Power of Principled Profit, Vol. 5, #2, October 2007

When you deal in other people’s money, you very quickly butt up against the perception that your company is likely to be crooked. Through his actions in his own business and his education of his peers, Jeff Armstrong of Armstrong Capital is doing what he can to change that. Starting with the very first line of his website: “Straightforward, Honest, Fair….The Way It Should Be.”

Armstrong, based in the Los Angeles area, deals in real estate notes—for example, buying an owner-financed mortgage from a seller who needs an immediate large infusion of cash, and selling it at a profit to a securities company that can convert it into stock and offer it to its investors.

An early supporter of the Business Ethics Pledge, Armstrong came to my attention because he consistently generates new signers of the Pledge through the link on his website. Most of the people who have generated a larger-than-average number of signatures for me have done so through a single newsletter article–but with Armstrong, it’s ongoing, year after year. It turns out he’s been buying my books since the 1990s, starting with Marketing Without Megabucks, and he told me this is because even before I wrote a book about it, he sensed my strong commitment to ethics in marketing from those earlier works.

He also happens to edit the newsletter for NoteworthyUSA, his industry association, and consistently uses this “bully pulpit” to advance an ethics agenda. And when I heard him address the 300 attenders at Noteworthy’s conference, he stressed both the practical and the moral imperatives of being ethical. He’s not ashamed to admit that he has self-interest as well as altruism as his motives; if enough honest people crowd out the crooks, it’s less likely that government regulators will choke off his industry.

If the group I met when I was hired to keynote Noteworthy’s conference is any indication, Armstrong is having a significant impact. I got a lot of thank-yous from people who said I was reinforcing what they already knew was the right way to run their business, and giving the marketing ammunition necessary to help them prosper with it. Others told me my strategies for attracting and keeping clients through ethics are already working well in their business. And I met a few who are in the business specifically to advance a social change agenda: one woman works to provide capital to women fleeing abusive relationships and starting their lives over; a retired professor couple use their note business to fund water development projects in developing countries. All in all, an impressive group.

It does not surprise me in the least that Jeff Armstrong is quite successful in his own business.

Armstrong Capital: https://www.armstrongcapital.com
NoteworthyUSA: https://www.noteworthyusa.com

I’ve known about inkjet and toner cartridge recycling businesses for more than a decade, and never paid them much mind. But when I met Karl Tur, of Inkjet Solutions, at a Chamber of Commerce mixer, I was impressed that the first thing this young man said to me, before he knew anything about my background, was about the positive environmental impact we could all have by recycling our cartridges–before he even mentioned the price benefits. His reasons for starting this business, with locations in Amherst and Northampton, Massachusetts, are all about doing something right for the earth.When I walked into the store he’s just opened in Northampton, I was once again impressed with this small company’s commitment to the environment, as that was the key message of many of the posters and other point-of-sale marketing materials. Also, the website not only has a page about the environment as its third link, but devotes most of the space on the who-we-are page to its environmental mission as well.

And again, when I had him as a guest on my one-hour radio show, he spent at least half the time talking about the environment.

At my current age of 50, I find it very exciting to find 20-somethings who are starting businesses with a wider social agenda, and not just to get rich. I’d expect him, as the old Quaker saying goes, to “do well by doing good.”

Positive Power Spotlight, July 2007: Rocky Mountain Institute

Back in 1977, Amory Lovins published a groundbreaking book called Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace. I stumbled on it a year or two later and was blown away by the idea that not only didn’t we need nuclear power, but that the whole idea of mammoth, centralized power generation using fossil fuels, uranium, or other non-renewable fuels was basically dinosaur thinking, and that as a society, we not only needed to move beyond that, but could easily do so, using the sun and wind as our primary power sources.

Lovins has been a hero of mine ever since. He has gone on to write or co-author several other very important books, including Natural Capitalism. And to establish a profit-making consulting firm, the Rocky Mountain Institute, based out of the ultra-energy-efficient model home he built for himself in Old Snowmass, Colorado, in 1983. How efficient is ultra-efficient? So efficient that the 4000 square foot luxury house paid back the entire cost of all its energy saving features in just ten months (at a time when fuel was a whole lot cheaper than it is now so today’s payback would be even faster). A few years ago, Lovins told an audience that the residential portion of his house (not counting RMI’s offices) had a $5 average monthly electricity bill–and that despite living in the snowbelt just outside Aspen, he was keeping the house warm enough to grow bananas.

RMI makes its living in part through selling informational resources about soft energy technologies–but more importantly, by consulting on energy reduction.

And by looking holistically, the savings can be huge. RMI has helped with projects such as…

• A house in a city known for extreme temperatures (up to 113 degrees Fahrenheit) that doesn’t need an air conditioner or central heater
• An industrial piping system that is not only 92 percent more energy efficient, but is also lighter, quieter, cheaper to build, and easier to maintain
• A prototype SUV that compares favorably with today’s models in comfort and storage capacity, but uses only as much energy for everything as the typical SUV uses for air conditioning

In short, RMI can be an international model for developing sane energy use patterns that don’t interfere with our lifestyle, and earn a healthy profit.

Note: a longer profile of Lovins and RMI appears in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

Click to visit Rocky Mountain Institute

Here’s a 10-point program for greatness:

1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

These are the core values of Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, “a customer service company that happens to sell shoes.” Lots of shoes, at that: 1,080 brands, 155,725 styles, and 2,885,850 separate products–including, for instance, 15 pages of vegetarian-friendly shoes containing no leather! And it’s easy to navigate the site, drilling down for example from shoes to men’s dress shoes for wide feet in just a couple of clicks.

Add to this huge selection a low-price guarantee, free shipping on both purchases (overnight, at that) and returns, a one-year return policy

Zappos is a powerful example of delivering such a good experience that people have to tell their friends (something I discuss extensively in my award-winning sixth book, <a href=”https://www.principledprofit.com”>Principled Profit: Marketing that Puts People First</a>).

In fact, I learned about the company because of a post in the LED discussion list (highly recommended) by listowner Adam Audette, who happens to manage the Zappos discussion list. Thousands of people learned about the company from that post, or from a blog post on voodoventures.com about touring the company and discovering such perks as a blow-off-steam room, a substantial lending library, as well as extremely accessible senior management (often another hallmark of successful ethical companies.

Does it work? The company expects to break $1 billion next year. I’d say that’s pretty good!