The New Green

The following article is the most recent installment of Calypso’s regular column in the Portsmouth Herald Business Monday section. It can also be viewed on Seacoast Online here.

“Sustainability,” as defined in the business lexicon, has evolved over the years. Today, its principles move small and large companies alike to proudly align what they make or what they do with progressive environmental and social practices, standards, and reporting measures. Today’s truly sustainable businesses, it seems, use less, reuse more, and take precise public measure of their “footprints” on society, striving to make a difference to the nature, and the nurture, of our planet.

The tired predecessor to sustainability, the term “green” and its palette of cousin colors and metaphors, have lost any real meaning. Companies have shamelessly attached the word to every level of environmental product, service, or strategy for decades now. Losing such a bandwagon term from common use would be far from tragic; companies and organizations will just have to be more specific in describing exactly how they protect resources, eliminating the clutter and cliché. Kids can again pick brown and black crayons for certain nature scenes. Most important, words that more accurately describe the environmental challenges we face may lead us to thoughts and strategies that do the same. As George Orwell said, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

So “green” will go the way of a lot of other clichés in the race to extinction — obsolescing water-cooler icons such as “value-add,” “no brainer,” and “synergy.” The list goes (painfully but thankfully) on. We all drank the Kool-Aid on the green trend; it’s time for better semantics. Perhaps our thoughts about the environment should be more color blind. With “green” no longer dominating environmental branding, we might come to see how even colorless places — landfills, coal mines, pulp plants, or poor urban neighborhoods, for example — are a vital part of both our society and our environment. We may soon agree that a business that’s healthy can only help the environment when its suppliers are open, its people at work, and its families and neighborhoods spending and contributing in a local economic value chain.

For these reasons and more, “sustainability” is worth saving, carrying with it real business sensibilities and an intuitive meaning for consumers and manufacturers. The term supposedly was introduced at a 1987 United Nations event to mean (roughly) ‘meeting present and future needs by using and preserving renewable resources.’ Since then, science, civilization, and advocacy have aggressively added requirements for human interactions to the definition. BP’s experience in the Gulf of Mexico likely will inspire even more editing. “Green” was paint-by-numbers; “sustainability” is a social and industrial genre requiring relevant context and meaningful language to communicate its value as a whole.

As a firm that works with environmental, energy, and “green” technology firms, Calypso will be glad to see the single-color mentality give way to a more integrative philosophy, even though many companies still covet the “green” label ( e.g. one billion-dollar power firm recently wanted a new tab for its website with ‘Green’ appended to the corporate name and then populated the section with a description of how incandescent light bulbs are regularly changed at headquarters and employees urged to shut down idle computers). More progressive companies take different approaches, many of them subscribing to strict standards for measuring corporate sustainability. According to the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (www.sustainability-indexes.com), corporate sustainability “is a business approach that creates long-term shareholder value by embracing opportunities and managing risks deriving from economic, environmental, and social developments. …”

Building a sustainable enterprise benefits far more than just the environment. Sustainability from both an environmental and operational standpoint maintains competitiveness, preserves brand reputation, meets ownership and governance demands, fosters loyal customer relationships, and protects and empowers your people, ultimately driving your company’s profitability. A sustainability strategy — dutifully enforced — keeps the doors open, the lights on, and the human and natural resources you need to run your business in healthy and abundant supply. As a viable business, your strategy can engage local neighborhood and philanthropic causes, supporting diversity, education, public health, and the environment as elements of a fully sustainable community.

Sustainability is a term that will last and a philosophy that will increasingly guide customers, regulators, stakeholders, and activists in choosing their support for business. Ensuring that your company has a defined and deliverable sustainability philosophy is a sound investment.