I think the best way to alienate people from what you are about to say is to start with “in my day”. Well, today is “my day” and I don’t like filling it with unnecessary information and wasting time on menial chores. I have a friend who remembers everything – no matter how unimportant. Used to win all his pie in that trivial game with answers to obscure questions. But did he know about melamine in milk based products and candies from China? Grocery shopping used to be a simple task and we were more brand focused – trusted brands. More families, more doctors, more vets trust Brand X. That trust made shopping a little easier, not necessarily fun, but certainly not fraught with angst. Why angst? Well for one thing, not everything is what it seems and I want to have a positive impact through my purchasing power.

If a product is great, I want them to keep making it. I dislike the feeling of being tricked into buying something for reasons that don’t make sense. I don’t buy dish liquid that’s great for my hands (because I wear rubber gloves when I do that hated chore) and I want the stuff that gets the dishes clean – I will use hand lotion for my hands if I need it. I can use common sense to tell me that’s not a factor for my purchase, but for instance, I am not sure about the true biodegradability of many cleaners – how long does it take? And under what conditions? Do I long for the day when things were simpler? Not really, because from what I hear most people had to walk 20 kilomters to school, uphill both ways. No, I just want better tools to figure out the truth. ( ok – I hear Jack Nicholson telling me I can’t handle the truth and sometimes he’s right – look up “cashews from Vietnam” and tell me you still want those buttery nuggets soaked in the tears of forced labourers in drug reform camps where an overwhelming percentage of the world’s cashews are processed.)

I remember spraying aerosols around like there was no tomorrow (pun intended). It was fun – I liked the sound and the even spray. I actually enjoyed dusting and cleaning windows and all of that spraying stuff. Yes, I know some people’s parents used vinegar and newspaper. No fun at all. But then there was a hole in the ozone layer and boom – bye bye CFC’s. Hello pumps. Early versions really sucked too – big thick irregular splats, little hose tubes that didn’t reach the product on the bottom that you could clearly see but not use not matter what angle you tilted it to. Those have definitely improved.

On the food front, I would say the mighty chicken and its proverbial eggs did come first. I crossed the road to get the free run eggs. I paid more but the benefits of the eggs were really simple to grasp. Then they started to offer free run organic eggs. So then I had to wonder – were my free running chickens chased through pesticides and eating chemicals? Okay so Organic it is -more money, better tasting eggs, no poison for me or the earth. Again, clear benefits. And then there is the Humane Society stamp of approval that has started in the UK and is spreading to points here. New question: was my free running organic chicken treated well? Killed kindly? How could I not want this too? But here’s where the angst comes in – all these eggs sit beside each other on the shelf with their various price differences, and I see people taking the regular, tortured, poisonous, cooped chicken eggs and I think about them. I wonder if it is a budget issue – poor person has to eat those eggs because they haven’t got much money and can’t pay $6.99 for a dozen eggs or else you might think – evil person, doesn’t care – just to save a dollar his chicken is tormented and forced to do drugs.

I can’t expect everyone to feel the same way I do about making decisions in the aisles of the grocery or drug store. But if you know fully what goes into things, it really helps make the decision clear about whether or not to buy them. I don’t think it’s too much to ask – tell us what it is and where it came from. Not who it’s “imported by” because that is not “where”. When we heard about the melamine it didn’t take any time at all for us to say no to that. But can I know every ingredient and what its affects are? Should I know the reputation of every company that makes the products and should I be on top of any regulations that come along? Can I spot green washing and green halos on products that don’t deserve them? There is this great opportunity to take a stand on things right where it counts – at the checkout counter – and I feel horribly under-informed about the options. And I don’t have time to study every product, not to mention that they keep changing them so they are “new and improved”.

When I first discovered the Good Guide app for my iphone, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Here is a free app that lets you scan a product barcode with your phone and reveal a rating for some 140,000 products from personal care to pet food based on the environmental, social and health aspects of the product, plus it has additional filters you can select to indicate what matters to you most from fair trade to nutrients to scientifically proven hazards, energy efficiency and so on. Wow. I reviewed the website, looked at how the ratings were derived, noted that they give companies the opportunity to contest, with evidence, their rating and that they do not appear to be guided by advertising. A quote “Use our ratings to help make purchasing decisions that match your preferences for healthy, green or socially responsible products. Our ratings provide a credible way to easily rank products and companies, enabling you to pick the best in a category or identify alternative products you could switch to”. The biggest problem with this app is that it works on the standard UPC codes of US products.

I thought the whole point of Universal Product Codes was to make them universal. The universe is smaller than I thought. I scanned dozens of products in my home and in the store. Not found. “There is another bar code called EAN-13, which is commonly used in Europe and other countries. Since Canadian products are coded using both systems, the scanner will not work with everything on the shelves” according to Mia Gralla, Marketing Manager, GoodGuide, Inc., who responded very promptly when queried, “Currently, we are focusing on profiling products that comprise most of the market share in the U.S. There is a possibility to expand to other countries such as Canada in the future, but we do not have any concrete plans.” This is disappointing not only to me, but too many of the folks rating the app in the iTunes store. While we can’t effectively scan in Canada or Europe or anywhere outside the US at the moment, you can still bring up the items currently rated in categories such as personal care and hope that you recognize some labels on your local shelf that have a decent rating. It’s a good start, GoodGuide.

I’d like to see it really bloom – maybe using those cute little QR (Quick Response) codes that are popping up. They take up less space than UPC and offer thousands of pieces of information in one quick scan. They are being used to send scanners to websites for details on everything from upcoming movies, new product launches, real estate listings, feature comparisons for electronics, and more. Maybe in Our Day we will have a tool like this and can use it to make some real social and environmental change. After all – we got rid of the CFCs, and hopefully the melamine, maybe we can get rid of grocery store angst too.

When arguing for the three pillars of sustainability, we often site business cases where there is a failing on the planet/environmental and/or people pillars that has or will render a business unsustainable. But is there an ultimate test of this theory? Something on a more grand and global scale? After all, one could argue that China demonstrates that exponential economic growth is possible regardless of social and environmental conditions.

China has become the manufacturing giant of the world and has had unprecedented economic growth at 8-10% annually for the past 20+ years. As the second largest global economy, and rapidly closing the gap with the United States, China is expected to become number one, using the old GDP model, by 2020. Can this be sustained?

The massive scale of this experiment challenges the belief that sustainable economic growth is not possible without providing people with a good quality of life and without ensuring a healthy environment. Perhaps, through a combination of engineering and technology, we can harness nature and control people in a manner that allows us to keep growing unhindered. As happened with industrialized nations, and now with developing nations, economic growth is dependent upon two key factors: extraction from natural resources and abundance of cheap labour. So let’s take a look at these in terms of China’s growth.

Natural Resources

In 2010, China’s Ministry of the Environment noted that over 40% of its water is only suitable for industrial purposes due to pollution. Chinese Academy of Engineering and Ministry of Environmental Protection reported that 25% of China’s underground water is polluted. The province of Hubei’s Environmental Protection Bureau announced that more than 50% of the province’s lakes were severely polluted: 53% could only be used for industrial production and recreational activities, so long as there is no direct human contact. Further degradation is predictable as China’s new 5 year plan for renewable energy gets underway with the construction of more than 60 large-scale hydropower projects.

Labour

Nankai University reported that in 2009 China had nearly 90,000 “mass incidents” (protests of 100 or more people). Many of the incidents were over environmental concerns while the remainder was mostly political or working conditions related. These incidents are causing the authorities to respond. For example, a toxic spill at the Zijinshan Copper Mine, the biggest gold producer in China, led to the arrest of 2 former Fujian Province environmental protection officials in 2010. While at the same time the city of Dalian ordered the shutdown of a paraxylene (a toxic chemical used in plastics and synthetic fibres) chemical plant in response to tens of thousands of residents protesting over pollution concerns.

Since human rights do not appear to be at the forefront of China’s growth strategy these rare responses are unlikely to curb growing social unrest. There are even reports that the “one child rule” has caused a decrease in the female population so substantially that the disproportionate male population is frustrated, aggravated, and more susceptible to uprisings. Reports of women being kidnapped from one village to another are increasing and have historically led to internal social conflict.

Global think tanks such as STRATFOR predict there will be a collapse in China due to thin profit margins, its dependence on continued Western consumption, and a birthrate that will lead to qualitative and quantitative labour shortages. Others argue that credit excesses in China will lead to its collapse. Some predict 2020 will be the breaking point, however, even they do not fully account for environmental and social degradation.
As a major test case in the sustainability equation, let’s keep an eye on whether the assumption that sustainable economic growth does in fact need environmental and social stewardship. Given the exponential changes being witnessed this century, the Arab Spring for one, at Greenomics we will be bold and propose the experiment will unravel within the next 5 years unless the world intervenes in some way – but after Kyoto and Copenhagen, you know where we are putting our money.

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The Costco Conundrum

by Karen Peterson

The Green Eye takes a look at the struggles we face every day trying to do the right thing. The path toward sustainability requires a conscious effort to change, especially as a consumer. There is more pressure on us now, much self inflicted, to think about “what becomes of things once consumed” and we are also ever more mindful of the old adage “you are what you eat”.

Short of time, and sometimes money, we find ourselves in the impossible position of trying to:

• get good value for what we spend,
• enjoy the things we like, deserve and want, and
• do the right thing for the world, our families and our futures.

It shouldn’t be as hard as it is to sort this all out- 20 minutes in front of the dish soap aisle at my local grocer is an unreasonable amount of time to spend deciding between price points, ingredients, trusted brands, and assessing environmental claims against green washing. The Green Eye grows weary of weighing out chemicals, colours, fragrances, biodegradability, natural, organic, and everything else. Fragrance was a dirty word for a while but now there are scents in absolutely everything again. Are they ok now? What’s changed?

It should not be surprising that the first time you read the Green Eye it focuses on why it might be time to chop up that Costco card. I have to start somewhere, and Costco, I am sorry – but it has to start with you.

Beyond the fatiguing experience of concrete warehouse aesthetics, the disbelief at the till tape before the bouncer at the door runs a felt pen through it (maybe they didn’t remember that 4 gallon jug was $3 off?) and beyond the knowledge that I have never escaped with just what I came for and a bill of less than three hundred dollars, there must be a reason that I continued to go there. I have stood in the aisles with an overwhelming sense of doom under looming stacks of products that are all going to end up in the landfill or recycling bins or in the ocean somehow. Does the excitement of getting a good deal really override my conscience that tells me – this kind of shopping is wrong?

When you buy things in volume, you become the warehouse. Your fridge and freezer, your cupboards and shelves. All overstocked. And the oversupply of products renders their use a little bit haphazard. Because you want the cupboard door or the fridge to close, you may use more product, more recklessly than if it were, say, the last toilet paper roll instead of one of 48. Interesting just how few squares you can get away with when you know your supply is limited. And when you have a vat of anything with an expiry date – you better find a way to eat all of it before it goes. And it goes…. down the drain, in the toilet, in the garbage and sometimes in the compost.

While many say “Costco is great for a family” I am pretty hard pressed to meet anyone with more than one or two children these days, if any. Do they need loaf sized blocks of cheese or cereal boxes so big they don’t fit in the pantry? And incidentally we are all so sick of a brand or flavour by two thirds of the way through the mega size that we might just throw its stale remainder out after a month or so.

I have found that juice boxes, toilet paper, and just about everything else, go on sale in the regular grocery store often enough that with an only moderately watchful eye, you can save money, have variety, and waste far less. The other big plus is that Safeway, IGA, Whole Foods and all the others are wising up to consumer demand for local and organic, refillable, enviro-packaged, and all else more in keeping with the way we should be headed.

We still have some decisions to make in the aisles – there’s a lot of choice out there, but I believe that by keeping the products in your home and office in a manageable, human scale, you will use less and make wiser choices. If you pay a bit more, maybe you will treat things as just a little less disposable and a little more precious. If sustainability’s biggest hurdle is change in behaviour, then this little change could mean a lot for old mother earth and for your sanity.

Sorry Costco – snip snip.

Next Month
Examples of Greenwashing, and the “Good Guide”

Sunshine Coast, Gibsons and Sechelt, B.C. – a new kind of workshop is happening on the Sunshine Coast that reveals the Business of Sustainability as an economic driver. Taking the lead in sponsoring an upcoming half day workshop being held in two locations, one by simulcast, are the Sunshine Coast Regional District and Lehigh Materials, both of whom understand the importance of connecting the local business community to the opportunities that come with a sustainable approach.

This workshop encourages the Profit pillar in the three P’s of People, Profit and Planet and acknowledges that without that strength, the jobs and health of the region will flounder just as the environment can without due care with our resources.
“Coming from the business perspective, leading workshops in BC and as far away as Turkey, Greenomics is a good choice to deliver the message and provide businesses the tools they need to become more sustainable.” said Greenomics President, Erich Schwartz, “Businesses that embrace sustainability now will gain the competitive edge they need to thrive in a rapidly changing economy”.

“The SCRD recently adopted a region-wide Sustainability Plan that highlights the important role businesses play in supporting a sustainable Sunshine Coast. It is important to provide opportunities, like this workshop, for business owners and their staff to delve deeper into business practices that are good for people, the planet and the bottom line “ says Johan Stroman, Community Energy Manager with the SCRD. “Reducing business costs and saving energy while providing the same or better service is where this workshop can help. Workshops like these also help encourage networking and collaborative problem solving.”

Being in the extractive business puts a lot of focus on companies like Lehigh Materials to be good stewards with the environment, but the responsibility doesn’t stop there and being part of the economic viability on the coast as a major employer means they have to keep an eye on People and Profit, too. “Our organization recognizes the value of the triple bottom line approach. Extracting a non-renewable resource is not sustainable. We have been working hard with our partners to develop innovative ways to return the disturbed land to a usable state even if the cost of doing so is greater than the standard industry approach.” says Mike Latimer, Lehigh Materials Mine Manager. “You can do a lot within an organization to empower your people to help you spot the ways in which you can reduce waste, conserve energy and maximize opportunities, at work.”

Other sponsors, such as the District of Sechelt, IGA Gibsons, and the Gibsons and District Chamber of Commerce, want to be a part of the plan and encourage businesses to look for ways in which they can improve employee retention and engagement, energy use, supply chain optimization, and more, while reducing internal costs through efficiencies and smarter choices.

Greenomics will be presenting its overview of “The Business of Sustainability” to the Pender Harbour Rotary Club in Pender Harbour, British Columbia, at the Garden Bay Hotel.

Date: October 21, 2011, starting at 12:00 PM.

Join us for traditional pub food with a Sunshine Coast flair and beverages, and engage in a lively discussion of how businesses can proper by pursuing sustainable business practices. Discussion will be led by Greenomics president Erich Schwartz.

Registration Not Required