GreenSmart Notebook - Tom Larsen

Inspiring evolution through eco design? What does that mean?

Last week, we finally selected a phrase that describes our Company; Inspring evolution through eco design. Knowing that this type of phrase has the ability to excite as well as turn-off, I thought I’d take a moment to help define what we mean.

Of course, any phrase like this needs to be rooted in a philosophy. We have one, people, product, planet, and we wrestled with how to convert the practices we utilize in operating our business, into a different statement that describes what that process means for the Brand and for the consumer.

Our Brand lives in a world of products that we think up, produce and sell. Through that process, we’ve created a certain set of “new” considerations as to what we are willing to create and what we are willing to produce. That process is what constitutes our whole people, product, planet philosophy. Adding this layer to our already long design consideration of what is possible, reasonable, realistic and sellable, makes the process somewhat more cumbersome. It also becomes more exhilarating, knowing we’re working harder to create even more deeply thoughtful products. This is the essence of eco design – design with an awareness of the eco consequences, both social and environmental, of the decisions inherent in the design.

We see this as the evolution of the process of design. This process is most vividly seen in LEED certifications of buildings. Take the concept of landscaped roofs as seen on the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Putting pots with plants on a roof is a wonderful idea and has been done for centuries. Integrating a full landscape on a roof for all the energy and other possible advantages is a very different story. Just accommodating the added weight, ongoing maintenance, overall roof access, is a significant change to standard considerations for a roof.

 

And if the design is strong, and the execution is done well, that building will serve to inspire people who visit or even see it. Not that they go home and re-think their roof, that’s extreme. But, maybe they come away with a greater appreciation of what is possible. Maybe a solar panel, maybe a rain barrel, maybe they think differently about storm drain runoff. Who knows, but, the point is, by stretching the boundaries of design, the building acts as a longstanding symbol of changing norms.

 

Changing norms are what evolution is all about. We do the same thing with our bags. Twenty years ago, who would have thought we could grind up plastic, make it into fabric and make great looking products? Twenty years ago, I bet there weren’t even enough plastic bottles to matter. Now, the volume of bottles staggers the mind, not just in the U.S. either.

 

Twenty years ago, who would have said Google (what started as a search engine only) would turn out to be part of an online evolution (and a verb, no less). They accomplished that task through design, not just what we see, but, the code they wrote to make it happen. GreenSmart is writing that same type of code, in the work that we do, for bags. We’re applying different thought processes to how we source and create, how we execute and manufacture and finally, how we tell our story. We sincerely hope our work inspires others. It inspires us, and maybe that’s all that matters.

 

GreenSmart defines Being Green, Starts with People

I promised to make this a series about how GreenSmart goes about it's business. If you've been to our website, you've seen that our first element is People, so that seems like the best place to start.

There are a number of different ways GreenSmart thinks about people. There are the people who make our products. There are the people that work for the Company. There are the people that buy our products. And lastly there are the people who finance the Company. All of these constituents" for lack of a better term, are integral to our ongoing practices.

At the beginning are the people who work for or on behalf of our Company. All of these folks have an enthusiasm for our Philosophy. We try to instill in this collection of folks a 360 degree view of their work; an upstream and downstream viewpoint with an awareness that every choice over the course of even a single day, has ramifications. Someone wants something “rush”. Does that really mean tomorrow (air shipment), or just ASAP (ground shipment)? Reuse an inbound carton from Staples for an outbound shipment means getting the carton from our office to the warehouse which are not contiguous. It’s not hard, it just has to be staged for a later transfer next time someone is headed to the warehouse.

These efforts are pretty classic reduce, reuse, recycle (to which we might add reconsider) and need to be instilled in folks whenever possible. Making no assumptions and asking questions to seek alternatives is all it really takes. All the folks connected to GreenSmart, we hope, have this mindset. To many it’s new. To others it’s natural. Being thoughtful with every action seems like a normal attitude, but, it’s really amazing how much of our day or our work is simply done by habit.

We've found that many people that become associated with GreenSmart wind up incorporating this vantage point into other areas of their life/work as well. An employee will become a home recycler. A supplier will phase out bubble wrap or reuse cartons. Each of these seemingly small steps are collectively very valuable and typically have a positive effect on the bottom line of their business, or their life.

The folks who make our products are another location where we pay very close attention to people. Every choice we make in product design has ramifications in the places where products are made. Every choice we make in factory selection has ramifications for those that work there. The choices we make here may have profound effects on people. Working conditions and overall employee morale have a great effect on quality. The higher the quality of production the fewer quality control rejects (waste) created. Working to ensure that our factories are operated in such a way as to provide for the needs of the workers is critical. Are housing, food and healthcare available onsite? We make sure our partners train their employees in safety, that everyone gets break time, that they are not working 6 days a week, that overtime is properly documented, paid for and not compulsory. Through a collective respect for the work and the people that do the work, along with our effort to ensure that the factory is properly paid for the work it does, we can monitor the positives and negatives and have an influence in ongoing improvements wherever we see opportunity.

We also work to consider what effect our choices have on the people who are entrusted to making them. Eliminating toxicities or even potential workplace hazards, reducing extraneous hardware, thoughtfully looking at executions, processes and practices helps us maintain a workplace sensitivity, not just for where we work, but, where those charged with producing what generates our incomes work as well.

Seeking "lowest prices" almost always means making a compromise somewhere. We all see it in the quality when we buy something "cheap". But, there are also other considerations involved that are not apparent on the surface. It costs money to properly dispose of waste. It costs money to provide housing and meals to workers. It costs money to take the time to establish these mutual benefits and then to do what is necessary to be sure that these standards are embedded. All of these become added “costs” to the product, but, I would argue they are real costs that are simply neglected or ignored in more typical vendor/customer relationships. We don’t neglect or ignore them and neither do our partners.

We think that it is worth the effort. I'd like to think gone are the days when denuding the forest for railroad ties is acceptable. I'd like to think gone are the days of dumping waste unconditioned in the river. Yet, in some parts of the world, these practices still exist. Hopefully waning. There are better alternatives. We just need to apply our heads to bring to light the alternatives, not just for their eco-consciousness benefit, but, for all the reasons that these choices are better for entire communities.

Next time, I'll get into the other two people constituents to GreenSmart, the consumer and the investors.

Go Green to Be Green to create eco-progress

In the last few weeks, I've been to the LOHAS conference in Boulder, the Outdoor Retailer in Salt Lake City and last week, the SF Gift fair, all the while reading my Google reader for all the interesting articles from all the wonderful sources. That's a lot of contact with the retail and eco-spheres. In this short period of time, combined with the reception from the green community for our new neogreene material, I've been provided wonderful insights as to the expectations of the concept of Green.

For some time, I've been of the mind that Go Green is a rather simplistic marketing tool that many companies are using to claim green credentials to entice consumers to buy their products. To me, it's always been about Being Green, which, in my previously limited mindset, was the ongoing practice of making decisions with green as a high priority consideration. Thanks to Deb today, I've come to realize that to Be Green is to graduate from the more simplified Go Green on/off switch, to the more complex Be Green, the process of greener decision making.

Here's an example from our life. When we moved into our house 3 years ago, should we replace all incandescent lights in our house? The Go Green approach might be to say yes and go encourage the economy by acquiring a houseful of CFLs. Our Be Green decision was to look at the needs fixture by fixture. If we only replace the bulbs in the fixtures that are on a lot of the time, and save the bulbs we remove for the linen closet or the hallway, where we almost never turn the lights on, we may have 100 years worth of incandescents, replaced in a significantly smaller number of fixtures by the higher efficiency CFLs.

There are those who would support "replace them all". There are those that would say "don't buy CFLs, they have mercury" which is true. Somewhere between "replace them all" and "don't buy them" is where we found what to us made sense. We are now saving electricity, have lots of bulbs for the future and will deal with disposal of the CFLs when the time comes. We think that's being green.

Another person's answers to the same questions may be different. The criteria or situation may be different. Those answers are not wrong, just different. The important thing is to apply some thought. Go green is to make a single choice. Be green is to embrace a thought process that includes considerations our culture has not considered important for years, maybe forever (the West was to be tamed, the forests consumed, etc.).

All of us, asking more questions of ourselves, of each other, of our employers, of the stores we shop and the brands we buy, of our politicians, will lead us to an overall reconsideration of the assumptions that have led us to where we are. In an era of possibilities of overwhelming transparency via the web, we need to find what matters to each of us and Be Green about it.

To go a step further, tell others. That's what we now see as being GreenSmart. To be GreenSmart is to be grounded enough in your green decision making to be able to help others to understand what and where they have options they had not seen before. Where are you in the process? Act - Think - Teach.

For us to make eco-progress depends on everyone to be a teacher and everyone to be a student. Because Green is not a final destination, there will always be more to learn.