You’ll hear from Tami Willadsen from The Nature Conservancy, and their big Earth Day event “The Hoochie” that supports conservation in Georgia. We’ll also learn from Tammy Bates from the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper about how to clean up the Chattahoochee in a unique and fun way.

Tweet this episode #EarthShareGABADTV and follow @EarthShareGA!

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WATCH IT HERE!

This video is the first episode in a monthly series that will focus on the great work EarthShare of Georgia is doing to make our state sustainable. Guest host Lewis Perkins will introduce you to Executive Director Madeline Reamy. She’ll tell you all about the ways EarthShare of Georgia supports local non-profits dedicated to keeping your air, land and water healthy.

You’ll also hear from Celia Tully of Natural Body Spa and Shop about their commitment to sustainability and why she encourages her employees to support EarthShare of Georgia.

Stay tuned for future videos where you’ll hear more about the big plans for this year’s Earth Day celebration and how you can get involved.

Tweet this episode #EarthShareGABADTV and follow @EarthShareGA!

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Trusting my relationships with business partners and trusting my belief in myself to do good work, over the past year I began to shift more and more meetings to online. Particularly for those preliminary “meet and greet” coffees or breakfasts where the point was to talk about what we do or how we might assist one another in business. For many of us, these meetings could take up all of our time. I love to mentor and be mentored. I enjoy meeting new people. I like to assist others in their career goals. But being able to prioritize face to face meetings is an important skill of the independent freelance consultant or entrepreneur.

This past year, I set aside my Prius, which already gets 45 miles to the gallon in town, for increasing the number of online meetings using technologies which would allow face time and voice – and even the ability to record the calls. I am not saving I have given up face to face meetings all together. Of course not. I spend lots of time in client offices and working along side partners. I attend professional meetings and networking opportunities (although I have greatly reduced those as well due to time and environmental savings objectives). One way I have been able to do this is about being more strategic and selective about where I do show up. Once worried that people would judge me for opting to not meet in real presence for meeting over online video conferencing – I soon realized that others were just as grateful to shift meeting styles and lower their environmental impact. Less fuel used and less pollutants released in the air of our city was a benefit in addition to the savings of hours a week I could dedicate to reading, running or yoga. I had reclaimed my life by using technology. And had lowered my carbon footprint. I slept better at night knowing that I was getting more done and taking care of myself in the process.

Now that’s what I call being sustainable! Taking care of the planet and myself at the same time. Not to mention the cost savings that adds up from not driving and all those $2 coffees.

Catch me on the “Up in the Air” Panel at South By Southwest – Monday, March 12th // 10a-2p at SXSW

PGi and iMeet Give Next Gen Flair to Collaboration with #shiftSXSW

“Up in the Air”: On the Move with the Working Nomad

According to Forrester Research, 66% of information workers in the US and Europe already work remotely. Evernote CEO Phil Libin, PGi Digital Nomad Cora Rodenbusch and corporate green strategist Lewis Perkins discuss the implications of that trend and tools that have emerged as a result of this shift.

Featured panelists will share personal experiences, successes, failures, lessons learned and where they believe the future is heading. Attendees will participate in an open dialogue about working remotely, unconventional workspaces, business travel, and corporate sustainability.

During this decidedly unique experience, we will spark both conversation and creativity. We want to build collaborative relationships amongst peers and create a fun environment where we can share an elevated dialogue about the work we produce. We hope you will join us in Austin.

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This year’s Green Summit, titled “The Sound of Social Change” moved beyond the industry and expanded to conversation to several of The Recording Academy’s corporate partners and leaders in community engagement and communication. Again, Waste Management, an official sponsor of The GRAMMY Awards, stepped in to present this informative summit on the many ways businesses are going green. The panel participants were Bridgette Bell, Global Sustainability Manager for Yum! Brands, William Brent, EVP of Weber Shandwick’s Cleantech, Michael J. O’Brien, VP of Corporate and Product Planning at Hyundai, Jennifer DuBuisson, Assoc. Manager of Global Sustainability at Mattel, Tim Sexton, founding partner at Sexton Group and Greg Baldwin of the Environmental Media Association. Each company was able to dialogue about the ways in which their business and partners are incorporating a more long term business view when development products or services that meet the needs of an evolving consumer – be that a reduction of packaging waste with toys or a more fuel efficient automobile with Hyundai. For a review of that discussion on GRAMMY.com go here: It’s East Being Green.

Wanda Williams, Director of Alliances and Industry Relations at Waste Management introduced the panel and clearly articulated her company’s continued commitment to the greening of partnerships and their partner organizations. The company continues to be in a strong leadership position as the largest recycler in North America. For Waste Management, the ability to expand their vision of sustainability depends greatly on their corporate partners and alliances. It’s not unlike Walmart’s commitment to ensuring their sustained growth of it’s partners in reducing environmental impact, knowing that teir impact is reduced as their supply chain responds. For Waste Management, these alliances mean increasing their mission beyond waste collection and growing the business of single stream organics, waste-to-energy and landfill gas-to-energy with their facilities across the USA, China and Europe. As they state, “being on the back end of waste collection means that Waste Management is the deciding factor in where every piece of it’s customers waste stream goes, what life it will have and what role it will play in an increasingly technology reliant supply chain.”

Each of these company representatives on the GRAMMY Green Summit panel commented on the strong power of partnership in order to advance developments in sustainability. The nature of the work of both Shandwick Weber and The Sexton Group is to elevate the communications around sustainable initiatives for their clients or business sectors as a whole. Which brings us to why each of these companies see the value in bringing their story to an official GRAMMY sponsored event. I suspect most of us are well aware that we live in a culture where entertainment news leads. When we can couple our stories of change with an artist or music related event, then social and environmental change is a sweeter pill to swallow. Tim Sexton spoke of the long term relationship between celebrities and social cause – and their ability to rapidly elevate perceptions and recognition of need in the world. Sexton’s participation as producer of events such as LIVE 8 and Rock the Vote, have given him a front row seat – literally – to directing and witnessing the strong impact of the entertainment industry on social change.

Another leader in environmental change was present at the panel that morning – Allen Hershkowitz - Senior Scientist with the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC). Hershkowitz and I spoke prior to the Green Summit panel discussion. From him I learned about the various ways NRDC collaborated with The Recording Academy to green the show and week of events. The NRDC provided a team of volunteers attending all events to ensure Environmental compliance including:

1. ENERGY: The entire production of live broadcast at the 54th GRAMMY Awards was powered by 100% renewable energy

2. FOOD: The GRAMMY celebration featured reusable china and glassware. The menu included locally grown and produced meet, produce and dairy. All seafood was sustainably sources. Leftovers donated to local food banks.

3. RECYCLING: Waste Management provided recycling bins throughout the LA Convention Center for the pre-telecast and official after-party. All plastic, aluminum, bottles and paper were collected for recycling at both the Convention Center and Staples Center. Organic Waste was composted.

4. PAPER: All incoming ticketing requested handled electronically. Many of the GRAMMY week invitations and RSVP were handled electronically to reduce paper waste. Any paper used was between 50 and 100% recycled content

5. DECOR: Most furniture and set pieces on staged were either rented or reusable.

6. TRANSPORTATION: The Recording Academy partnered with RideAmigos (http://www.rideamigos.com/) to provide sponsored rideshares for award attendees.

You can learn move about the GRAMMY’s commitment to green and their sustainable offices on their website: http://www.GRAMMY.org/green.

My question to other corporate sustainability leaders and clean tech entrepreneurs who may be reading this article is how are you finding your widest audience, and elevating the work of your partnerships and alliances? Finding new outlets to communicate your social and environmental change and successes helps all of us continue the commitment to evolving our own businesses, amplifying our stories to increase awareness. While change will occur in the hands on consumer behavior, the greatest level of redirecting the ship occurs at the level of large scale business. And large scale business tooting it’s own horn, potentially at The GRAMMYs.

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Filter For Good

This past February, I had the honor of introducing a panel for the Grammy’s (The Recording Academy) and Waste Management on the topic of the “Greening of the Music Industry”. One of my more recent Fast Company posts highlights part of this event and the themes discussed. As I previously introduced Drew McGowan of Brita, I spoke about his role with the company’s sponsorships of concerts and music tours. A simple google of “Filter for Good” and you will see dozens of examples of how the brand has interacted with some of the best music performers of our day–Dave Matthews, Jack Johnson, Willy Nelson Cheryl Crow and Lady Antebellum among them. A few weeks back, I was able to track down Drew and speak with him in further details about the company’s involvement with filtered water trends and education–specifically the company’s interest in moving the next generation away from single-use plastic bottled and toward a continued filtered water practice. What better place to do this than at a music concert or campus event.

If you have paid any attention to environmental or corporate social responsibility news over the past few years, you will know that bottled, tap and filtered water industries have all played a part in the delicate dance of producer responsibility, distribution and marketing in this country. In my conversation with McGowan it was clear that Brita wants to fill a market need for a water consumer who prefers the taste of filtered over tap and perhaps the lower environmental footprint of filtered over bottled. The are no grand and sweeping claims than demonize tap water or try to convince consumers that they are poisoning themselves every time they brush their teeth. The war here (if there is one) is on the vast amounts of consumer packaging in the form of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) that ends up in U.S. landfills or perhaps worse, our rivers and streams, each year. Recently, I met with Dr. Marcus Erikson, marine biologist, and learned more about the 5 ocean gyres of floating plastic around our globe. Talk about an ecological crisis. This topic deserves more attention, but I”ll leave that to he bloggers over at E Magazine or Mother Jones.

So, sticking to the corporate responsibility topic, what’s so great about Brita’s campaign? As referenced above, it partners with college campuses and concert tours which reach the youth market to influence all kinds of sustainable behavior change. The rise of the green music tour allows for more socially and environmentally responsible clothing, food, and concert promotion to influence a rising generation of decision makers. The best example is Brita’s “hydration stations.” These stations allow concert goers to refill their reusable water bottles with filtered water on site. When traveling for concerts and events, these station are portable trailors. Back home, businesses can now install these stations into their facilities to help provide clean filtered water to employees, customers and other guests. Raising awareness of the next generation of American consumers and giving them the tools to make better environmental decisions is the way we will bring about compounded positive change.

There is no doubt that recycling plastic bottles is still very important global initiative and we all want to encourage as everyone along the bottled water life cycle to get those bottles out of the trash and into recycling, so companies like Coca-Cola and Nestle Waters North American can push forward with a stronger closed looped process for PET recycling. I love the vision of a bottle back to bottle world. But remember that it still takes an amazing amount of energy and resources (in the form of coal, petroleum, water and human capital) to produce bottled water in the first place–let alone collect, transport, sort and recycle those PET bottles once we are done drinking from them. And today, only 25% of the PET bottles out there are making it back to recycling. That means the other 75% go to waste. With Brita product solutions, at the end of the concert or any other special event, we reduce the vast volumes of bottles to be collected and sorted as part of the clean up. Let time, less waste.

The future of concert memorabilia will now include a Tour Branded refillable water bottle. And the next trend will be a reusable bottled with a Brita filter included on the lid? This year, Brita launched the all-new Brita Bottle featuring a filter inside allowing consumers to enjoy Brita-filtered water anywhere, anytime. The reusable bottle is BPA-free, dishwasher-safe and recyclable, but I plan on keeping mine for a while.

Yesterday, as I walked into my chiropractor’s office, he announced to me that he is no longer using the bottled watered provided to him by the gym where his office resides. Instead had made an investment in this latest technology from Brita. He is doing his part to reduce his impact, even if it is just in the gym where he works. But he is also influencing others. His small business is working to change behavior of his customers by exposing them to a new way to thinking about hydration while working out. I think I will be the next in line to carry my Brita Bottle in for my next work out.

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Join Lewis Perkins and Karen Solomon (Opportunity Green) as they present a panel to discuss the greening of the music industry for the Grammys to include Waste Management, Sony & Universal’s music/ electronics divisions, Clorox Music Touring Sponsorships, Music Industry Veteran Kevin Lyman & Rohan Marley from the House of Marley. The conversation with be an in-depth discussion on how the industry has embraced sustainability through key innovations and partnerships – and what’s next. For more information on the event, contact lewis@lewisperkins.com. Event: Friday, February 11, 2011 – The Conga Room, The Conga Room, L.A. Live, Los Angeles, CA.

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Reposted fro Fastcompany.com
BY FC EXPERT BLOGGER LEWIS PERKINS
This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert’s views alone.

As a consultant, speaker and blogger on corporate social and environmental sustainability, I am often asked about the embedded or hidden costs of “going green.” While many companies are manufacturing products made from plant or corn based polymers, others are quick to point out that the corn industry may use as much – if not more – petroleum in the process of growing, watering, harvesting and shipping the corn as they would if petroleum based plastics were used in the first place. There are other perceived hypocrisies, such as electric cars which run off a coal burning grid or Compact Florescent Light bulbs (CFL) and solar panels which are manufactured without environmental regulations in China or other countries on the other side of the planet.

In response, I am reminded of the Voltaire quote oftentimes used around environmentalism, “don’t make better the enemy of the good.” Is it too easy right now to become gridlocked on decision makes because we are worried about what move is the best? Most companies are undergoing the process of determining the life cycle analysis (LCA) of the products they manufacture and the services they provide – so they can actually attach a unit of energy or water to a specific product or service. If a true LCA is conducted, they will look at the entire life of the product right back to where they sourced the raws materials for production. In this case, you would include all aspects of impact. In doing so, we can reveal the best solutions, such as corn over petroleum, CFL’s from china over incandescent light bulbs running on a coal burning grid – or my personal favorite – should I dry my hands with the hand dryer (using electricity) or the paper towel (using paper from trees and creating waste which could go to landfill)?

My opinion is that we continue to shift to more environmentally friendly business practices and push forward to gather all of the information on environmental footprint. Full disclosure from manufacturers will eventually reveal the best possible answer. In the meantime, my concern is that if we do not begin to change our behaviors and reduce our impact with what we can do, we will be “throwing the baby out with the bath water.” Progress and innovation comes from moving forward. Sometimes those decisions are not the best ultimate answers, but they move us forward. Without moving into action, we having nothing to learn from. Even our mistakes are part of the process. As long as we push companies to continue mapping their footprint – including the entire supply chain – we will ultimately move the needle forward much faster than if we sit still out of fear of making the wrong decision. What do you think?

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This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert’s views alone.

Over the past few years, I have been watching the role of women increase at the global level. Corporate initiatives such as that of Cisco, Nike, and The Cola Cola Company have embraced the position of women not only within the corporation, but also within the communities they operate. Micro-lending is done predominantly to women with the knowledge that bringing women into the world economy is the predominant ingredient in developing a community, if not a nation. Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank, said in 2005–”soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women.” Corporations such as Whole Foods Market have followed this model with the mission of the Whole Planet Foundation which provides micro-loans to women in global communities where they source products for their stores.

I mention The Coca Cola company above as last month the company announced at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) annual meeting that it was “committed to boosting economic opportunities for some 5 million women entrepreneurs in its business system by 2020,” according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle (9/21). “In Africa, Coca-Cola wants to grow its ‘micro distribution centers,’ an independent network of entrepreneurs who distribute Coke’s beverage products to retailers, often by bicycle or pushcart.”

Last Fall, I wrote a Fast Company article (or post) on Bonnie Nixon, Former Director of Environmental Sustainability and Corporate Citizenship. HP–Interview With A Corporate Green Hero. In the process of interviewing Bonnie, I was very aware of a set of skills she brought to the table in mitigating issues with the corporation’s stakeholders in all parts of of the world. That skill-set includes having empathy and understanding for the humans behind the issues. It also includes having a “worldview” perspective that grasps the connectivity of each person to the greater operation of the organization. That greater operation oftentimes includes “the greater good” as companies serve to solve social and environmental issues through the nature of their relationships. Traditionally, women tend to embody the concept of oneness and connectivity as it related to this corporate “greater good.”

Last year, I was inspired to create a blog (or more of a project) which addresses the global nature of women within social and environmental solutions. This project, called Women Are Saving The World Now has led me to interview many corporate women, from Anisa Telwar (president of Anisa International–a company that manufactures cosmetic tools in China) to Hital Muraj (a leader for Cisco in Kenya who manages the company’s relationship in Africa with CGI). In all of these interviews, I see similar traits of empathy and connectivity.

I am writing about this issue today as I believe we are just beginning to see the shift in balance as more women step into a position of leadership within corporations, not out of equality but out of necessity. I don’t mean to say that women have the corner on “heart,” as men certainly posses the ability to lead with heart, but it is women who are more readily able to comprehend the complete balance of the triple bottom line: people, planet and profit–and to put the balance of all three ahead of the profit component alone. To me, this understanding is beyond “doing the right thing” and is more about creating corporations which will survive and even thrive in the current world economic condition. After all, isn’t the true definition of the word “sustain” to hold, carry, nurture, nourish and grow. And, hasn’t this always been the great strength of our women?

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Lewis Perkins was invited by the White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair, Nancy Sutley, to create and lead two panels to inspire audiences at the 2010 GreenGov Symposium.

Panel 1: “Public/Private Partnerships: Engaging the Community” will be held on Tuesday, October 5th from 1:45 to 3:15

Panelists: Kevin Green (Clean Air Campaign), Bonnie Nixon (former Director of Sustainability, Hewlett Packard), Chris Mills (Department of Homeland Security, St. Elizabeths Program Manager), Lewis Perkins (New House LLC)

Panel 2: “Igniting Inspiration: Communication and Organizational Culture” will be held on, Oct. 6 from 1:45 p.m. – 3:15 p.m. in Lisner Auditorium. Lisner Auditorium is located at 730 21st St., NW.

Panelists: John Marshall Roberts (Worldview Learning), Mohammad Asfour (Founder, JGBC), Lewis Perkins (New House LLC)

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