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Going for the Green
04/04/08
Where were you when the lights went out? Did your lights even go out?
At 8 p.m. on March 29, beginning in Christchurch, New Zealand, and moving westward, people around the world switched off their lights for an hour to draw attention to the link between energy use and climate change. Were you one of the tens of millions of people around the planet the World Wildlife Fund estimates took part in Earth Hour?
Whether you were or not, it's a fairly safe bet there are people on your campus who turned off the power for that hour. It's also a good bet there are more of them now than there would have been even a couple years ago. After many false starts, the green movement has finally gone mainstream and is affecting the way many people live and shop, especially among the college-age demographic.
The CAMEX educational session Being Green: Meeting the Needs of Your Socially Conscious Customers, presented by Darrell Kane, general merchandise manager, University of Waterloo Retail Services, Waterloo, ON, Canada, and Tom Larsen, CEO of Shoreline Cases, Grass Valley, CA, addressed what stores can do adjust to this new customer outlook and potential new revenue stream. It's a lot more than paper vs. plastic.
Larsen, whose company makes laptop jackets and sleeves from 100% recycled water and pop bottles, said to begin by getting rid of preconceptions. Sustainable living is no longer perceived as the domain of aging hippies or wild-eyed survivalists. Wal-Mart is the world's largest purchaser of organic cotton. Wal-Mart also just rolled out what it called the "most comprehensive environmental sustainability campaign" in its corporate history. If the über-big-box retailer is seeing green, you know which green that is: money.
Wal-Mart has probably also seen the green writing on the wall and wants to change customer perceptions to keep them from turning elsewhere. Larsen noted that if you're not assertively asking your customers to recycle or doing whatever you can to minimize your impact on the waste stream, it may only be matter of time before your store is labeled as part of the problem.
He recommended the web site www.grist.org (which bills itself as "doom and gloom with a sense of humor") as a good one-stop learning source for basic information, news, and commentary on green issues. Also useful are the site Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (www.lohas.com) and the corporate strategy book Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage by Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston.
"Green is a different language," Larsen cautioned. "A virgin piece of paper can be labeled 'eco-friendly' or 'recyclable' simply because you can recycle it. That's not necessarily everyone's definition of eco-friendly or everyone's hope for recyclability."
Find partners on campus. Every school is home to clubs and organizations, some of which have a green inclination or mission. "The expertise is already on your campus," Larsen said. One possibility is that your school's alumni association may offer eco-tourism trips with which you can become involved.
You can start small. One way is by recycling batteries for the electronic devices you sell. The nonprofit Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corp.'s Call2Recycle program (www.rbrc.org/call2recycle/) is a free and easy way for college stores to collect for recycling old cellphones and rechargeable batteries of the sort used in cell- and cordless phones, laptop computers, camcorders, and digital cameras. Stores that register with the program receive free, pre-addressed, postage-paid collection bins.
Larsen noted that battery recycling isn't always a matter of choice. In California and New York City, retailers that sell rechargeable batteries are required by law to provide collection and recycling of those batteries at no cost to the consumer. In California and Maine, similar laws mandate that retailers selling cellphones have a system to collect used phones for reuse, recycling, or proper disposal.
At the University of Waterloo, Kane admitted that only a few years ago there really wasn't any market for his campus stores (a bookstore that only sells course materials, plus stores specializing in computers, art supplies, clothing and gifts, and stationery, respectively) to go green.
But his personal outlook was shifting in that direction. "I kind of believe if you talk the talk, you've got to walk the walk. You can't just bring this stuff in, sell it," he said. "You have to believe in what you do." So when he found a source for totebags made from recycled materials that fully biodegrade 90 days after they hit the landfill, he ordered them for his stores. To educate customers, he had the tagline "This bag leaves a smaller footprint on the Earth" printed on the bags. "We knew each bag was going to cost us more money, but that's OK because those bags aren't going to be here in 2067," he said.
Kane got very lucky. Between ordering the bags that February and actually taking delivery of them in July, the film An Inconvenient Truth was released. That put sustainability issues front and center. And it put Kane's stores ahead of the curve.
He began implementing other steps. His receiving department banned the use of Styrofoam packing peanuts. After Kane found a company in Nova Scotia that recycles batteries, he decided to stop selling disposable batteries entirely.
"It's kind of a risky thing," he admitted. "You're going to lose some sales. But I think it shows leadership, stewardship, and it was the right thing to do. If we're going to sell green, we have to be green. I mean, your customers are smart. If you're not authentic, they're going to smell it a mile away."
Kane sent out a press release on his green moves to inform faculty and staff, then got the message to students in a center-spread advertisement in the student paper. At rush, the bookstore gave away 10,000 of the totebags. The campus student-to-student group sent him a letter commending the stores' actions and asking how their organization could get involved. Other partnership offers followed.
Ordinarily, Kane said, the only time somebody wants to partner with the campus bookstore is if they want something ("Give me a hoodie." "Give me a gift certificate."). "This happened because our message resonated with them and they saw value in that," he noted.
In one partnership, Kane hooked up with a digital media course on campus to create a video highlighting the green campaign. The project gave students real-life experience working for a client. And the message went out as content created by students for students.
This fall, Kane's stores will cease giving out plastic bags except at the gift store, which still has totebags to get rid of (and Kane refuses to simply throw them into the landfill, even if they will biodegrade quickly).
A student focus group told Kane that his stores were doing a poor job of identifying their green products. To remedy that, he's creating "little niches" of green products throughout the stores, prominently identified with a sign bearing Retail Services' green logo with a leaf forming the "G." The logo also appears on the signature of every e-mail the stores send.
"We're all in a time of change as far as course materials go and textbooks and where we're going to continue down the road," Kane said. "We have to do something so everyone understands that we're an integral part of their campus. Doing something like going green brings your value out so you're not just selling stuff—you're partnering up with them. You bring value to everyday life on campus. You create loyalty with customers who believe in this issue."
At the same time, he warned that there are plenty of cons to go with the pros of going green. Examination may reveal that while in one respect a given product may be sustainable, another aspect of it expands that same product's carbon footprint.
"Your stuff that is Fair Trade, made over in Africa—how does it get here? Flown across the ocean? More CO2 emissions. You OK with that?" he asked. "We can't do everything 100% right the way that we want to do it. We've got to make tradeoffs."
But there are basic steps, fairly tradeoff-free, that a store of any size can easily undertake, such as using recycled paper and having recycled (even biodegradable) pens available for customers to sign forms at checkout. "You don't even have to have a green campaign to do that," Kane said. "It's just changing the way you do business. It's just smart."
Be sure to get your staff to buy into your store's sustainability message. "If they believe you, if they think you're credible, that's viral marketing that's going to spread to all their friends and keep going," he noted.
"You determine your level of greenness," said Larsen. "It is a lot of work. Going green is not a destination. It's a forever process."
Gains will often be tiny and incremental, at least at the beginning. Between the start of classes last September and the date of his CAMEX session, Kane said his stores sold 6,400 green items, those sales totaling about $30,000. He acknowledged that $30,000 isn't a lot. "But it's something and it's a start," he added.
He reminded his audience that every week at least one new coal-fired power plant comes online in China. "You can't do anything about that. That's out of your sphere of influence," he said. "But offering recycled products and changing your business patterns—not for financial gain, but for environmental gain—you can do that."
For a look at Kane's stores' efforts, go to www.retailservices.uwaterloo.ca/green.
—Michael von Glahn
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