Selling Green in a Down Economy: A Prescription for Success

With all of the statistics and research reports heralding sustainability’s growing importance in business management practices, one could reasonably assume that technology providers are successfully exploiting the connection that exists between being greener and improving a company’s operational and financial performance. However, the more I speak with industry analysts, clients, prospects and other technology executives it’s apparent that selling green in a business-to-business environment hasn’t necessarily evolved into a slam dunk.
Now some attribute the hesitancy expressed on the part of executives as a by-product of a struggling economy. But the inability to generate significant traction highlighting the environmental gains associated with different software applications and services has more to do with message and approach than the willingness of prospective clients to advance their commitments to sustainability.
A few weeks ago, our company president had the opportunity to address a gathering of technology executives on this very subject, talking at length about how to build a more compelling business case for sustainability. By and large, most corporations have the desire to conduct business in a more environmentally friendly manner – that I firmly believe – but as a technology vendor, touting green doesn’t preclude you from demonstrating that a solution or service is capable of generating financial and/or operational gains.
Most technology solutions fall into well-defined categories such as CRM, ERP and BPM. Whether these types of applications help improve internal workflows or manage customer data better, they’ve been designed to address a very traditional business problem. The notion that a software solution can be used to deliver measurable results against an organization’s green initiatives has only recently come to light. Yet because green is perceived to be ‘hot’ we see a lot of companies integrating it into their branding and product messaging, often to the detriment of a solution’s core value proposition. When it comes to building a compelling business case for sustainability, this is perhaps the biggest mistake a company can make.
Given the pervasiveness of this approach in the B2B arena – and what some would fairly label as saturation in the consumer market – there’s a heightened sensitivity to greenwashing. As a result, many executives are learning to view sales pitches through a skeptic’s lens. At the same time, it’s critical to remember that while awareness for the issues surrounding sustainability are becoming more common at the C-level, many of the individuals who bear the responsibility for evaluating and purchasing technology solutions simply haven’t been charged with incorporating environmental metrics into the decision making process.
So long as purchasing decisions continue to place the most emphasis on financial and operational gains, companies need to build the business case from the ground up and address the desire for greater efficiency, lower costs, improved service and market leadership. In reality, green shouldn’t even enter into the conversation until core ROI has been presented and understood. As companies begin to interject green into the conversation, consider – from a business perspective – how sustainability can contribute to (1) revenue growth, (2) shareholder value, (3) cost reduction and (4) innovation. Placing sustainability within the context of these areas places the green conversation in a language that every executive speaks.
Companies build financial models all of the time to prove out cost and process efficiency. In order to move sustainability up the proverbial food chain (faster), we need to begin applying that level of due diligence to creating models that not only illustrate financial savings but measurable environmental benefits as well. Using vague, generalized statements serves only to obscure genuine business and financial gains that can come in the form of reduced carbon emissions or electronic waste.
Granted there are a lot of factors that get thrown into the pot when deciding on one solution over another but I think it’s infinitely more difficult for companies to reject a solution with a demonstrable ability to create a six-, seven- or even eight-figure savings.
Whether we’re in a recession or not, the appetite for green exists. It’s just that executives aren’t likely to buy in just because a product or service can help them go green. We’ve moved into a new era where sustainability is now seen as a more strategic endeavor, and therefore given greater scrutiny, particularly in relation to its contribution to the bottom line. If technology providers want to forge genuine links between their products and sustainability, the value proposition has to be rooted in helping companies advance their financial and operational performance.
Trade Wings’ Chief Executive Officer and Founder Todd Adelman is passionate about driving business model innovation within the Telecom industry. With more than 20 years of supply chain and asset management experience, Todd leads a number of strategic initiatives designed to establish Trade Wings as a trusted authority on the development and implementation of reuse optimization strategies for network assets.

Solar, Wind Power Roll at Dow Jones, Menasha, Spruce and Prudential

Several business headquarters including those at Dow Jones, Menasha and Spruce Environmental Technologies, as well as office building complexes are adding renewable energy to their electricity mix.
As an example, Dow Jones & Company is installing solar panels at its corporate office in South Brunswick, N.J. The installation is part of a project to construct a solar-power system that at 4.1 megawatts will be one of the largest solar installations at a single commercial site in the U.S, according to the company.
The solar installation will consist of more than 13,000 solar panels covering nearly 230,000 square feet of parking space on Dow Jones’s Bernard Kilgore campus. The system is expected to produce the equivalent of 5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, which is enough energy to power the servers and computers that support the global operations of Dow Jones.
The system, which was announced in April, is scheduled for completion in the spring of 2011.
Also in New Jersey, Prudential Financial has installed solar panels on two buildings at its office complex in Roseland. The company also has installed solar panels in its Scottsdale, Arizona office building. Together, the panels will produce an estimated 2.3 million kilowatt hours of electricity annually and reduce the company’s greenhouse gas emissions by 3.2 million pounds a year.
The 2,678 panels installed in the Roseland buildings will generate approximately 4 percent of the power use in that office campus, with a peak power output of 500 kilowatt hours.
In Wisconsin, the Menasha Corp. plans to install five wind turbines at its headquarters and factory in Neenah, which is touted as the largest wind installation at a business in northeastern Wisconsin, reports JSOnline.
The five 20-kilowatt turbines will be purchased from Renewegy. At 115 tall, the wind turbines are one-fourth the height of new utility-scale turbines that were erected recently in Brown County, according to the article.
The turbines will generate enough power to provide for the basic office needs at the company’s corporate headquarters and its subsidiary, Menasha Packaging, reports JSOnline.
The company’s other sustainability efforts include upgrades for corrugators, high efficiency lighting and heat capture from the corrugators to heat other parts of its building.
Spruce Environmental Technologies recently completed the installation of a solar array to provide electricity for its Ward Hill, Massachusetts, headquarters building. The 78.8-kilowatt (kW) array was installed by Nexamp, and will supply one-third of the building’s electricity needs. It also is expected to offset approximately 137,150 pounds of carbon dioxide annually.
When Spruce is not using the solar energy generated by the system, such as during holidays or weekend, the unused power will be available to the National Grid

Facebook Can’t Satisfy Greenpeace with New Data Center Plans

Facebook’s decision to build its second data center in North Carolina shows that the company continues to see energy-efficient facilities as the best way to reduce its carbon footprint rather than building it near renewable energy sources, reports Data Center Knowledge.
Facebook has published several case studies of energy-efficiency projects that have reduced the carbon impact of the company’s data centers, according to the article.
At a recent panel session, Facebook’s director of data center engineering, shared tips on how the company has improved energy efficiency and cut costs at its data centers.
Facebook says it is currently building one of the most energy-efficient data centers to date in Prineville, Oregon. However, Greenpeace started a campaign in February to get Facebook to power the data center with renewable energy instead of coal.
Facebook signed a deal to source its energy from PacificCorp, which uses 83 percent coal in its energy mix, according to the Associated Press, reported Reuters, in September. But PacifiCorp said the number is 58 percent with the remainder from natural gas (20 percent), hydro (10 percent) and renewable energy (10 percent).
Greenpeace also said that Facebook plans to double the size of its data center, which translates into twice the energy use and twice the coal.
The new Facebook site in Forest City is served by Duke Energy, which has an energy mix similar to that in Prineville, reports Data Center Knowledge. In 2009, Duke Energy generated 54.7 percent of its power from coal, 27 percent from nuclear power plants, 12 percent from wind and hydro-electric power, and 6.6 percent from natural gas, according to the article. The utility expects its mix of renewables to improve when it adds additional wind power generation.
But Greenpeace is not happy. “Facebook has again chosen a location that will increase demand for dirty energy,” said Greenpeace energy campaigner Gary Cook in a blog post. “Good corporate citizenship involves more than setting up a webpage dedicated to green issues, or becoming members of green clubs, just as energy efficiency is only the first step to managing your environmental footprint.”
The Greenpeace statement is in reference to the recent launch of Facebook’s new “green” page that details what the company is doing in the environmental space, and its recent partnerships with the Alliance to Save Energy and the Digital Energy Solutions Campaign (DESC).
Cook said Facebook missed an opportunity to follow the lead of Yahoo, which has built hydro-powered data centers in Quincy, Washington and Lockport, N.Y., reports Data Center Knowledge.
Facebook says the North Carolina data center will use many of the techniques used to conserve power at its Prineville site. These could include the use of evaporative cooling instead of a chiller system, re-using excess heat expelled by servers to heat office space in the building, and foregoing traditional uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and power distribution units (PDUs) by adding a 12-volt battery to each server power supply, reports Data Center Knowledge.
The Facebook facility may have a lower carbon impact than other data centers reliant on an energy mix featuring coal due to its location near Duke Energy’s Cliffside Steam Station, which is readying a “clean coal” facility featuring lower emissions than traditional coal plants, reports Data Center Knowledge.

How the dirt below our feet can save us from extinction

The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change

Albert Bates

Reading like a detective story and marked by impressive scholarship, Albert Bates' latest book has placed The Biochar Solution squarely in the center of the global crisis. -Peter Bane Permaculture Activist


Conventional agriculture destroys our soils, pollutes our water and is a major contributor to climate change. What if our agricultural practices could stabilize, or even reverse these trends?


The Biochar Solution explores the dual function of biochar as a carbon-negative energy source and a potent soil-builder. Created by burning biomass in the absence of oxygen, this material has the unique ability to hold carbon back from the atmosphere while simultaneously enhancing soil fertility. Author Albert Bates traces the evolution of this extraordinary substance from the ancient black soils of the Amazon to its reappearance as a modern carbon sequestration strategy.



Combining practical techniques for the production and use of biochar with an overview of the development and future of carbon farming, The Biochar Solution describes how a new agricultural revolution can reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to below zero while increasing world food reserves and creating energy from biomass wastes. Biochar and carbon farming can:


Reduce fossil fuels inputs into our food system
Bring new life to desert landscapes
Filter and purify drinking water
Help build carbon-negative homes, communities and nations.

Biochar is not without dangers if unregulated, and it is not a panacea, but if it fulfills its promise of taking us back from the brink of irreversible climate change, it may well be the most important discovery in human history.


Bates has woven together a highly engaging interdisciplinary answer to climate change ... a lively page-turner that blends clear-headed analysis with nuts-and-bolts advice ... enough danger to wake us up, but enough opportunity to emerge feeling hopeful. - Tracy L. Barnett, The Esperanza Project

India pioneers global plan to green economy It will ensure that countries take into account the services provided by their ecosystems in economic planning

India will be one of the two countries to pioneer "a global partnership that will fundamentally change the way governments value their ecosystems", World Bank President Robert B Zoellick announced here on Thursday.

"We are here to do something that none has done before," Zoellick declared at a press conference on the sidelines of the October 18-29 UN biodiversity summit. That something is to ensure that countries take into account the services provided by their ecosystems — the value of the water stored underground because a forest allows more water to seep in, for example.

"This is a concept now widely accepted," Zoellick said. "Now we have to take the valuations provided by projects like TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) to Ministries of Finance and government economic agencies around the world."

If this is actually done, it may change the very classification of rich and poor countries. Zoellick said a recent study has shown ecosystems provide services worth US $44 trillion, of which US $29 trillion are in countries now classified as "developing".

"Our new partnership is to mainstream natural resources accounting into economic planning, starting with Colombia, India and then Mexico," Zoellick said. "We can overcome poverty only when we take ecosystem values into account."

Addressing the press conference with Zoellick, India's Environment Ministry Secretary Vijai Sharma said: "This will plug deficiencies in traditional accounting systems. India's national biodiversity action plan has already incorporated some of these concepts.

"In our country, we are moving towards a rights-based system of governance, as shown by the Forest Rights Act. Ninety per cent of our projects under the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme are for rejuvenation of natural resources. Apart from environment, there are the questions of health and safety we must look into. We have to build in all these angles and this partnership will help us do that."

UN Environment Programme Chief Achim Steiner said: "The link between economic policy, natural capital and human wellbeing is being increasingly understood. The idea of this project is to make the invisible, visible, and to ensure that we have accounted for the economy of the poor."

Vast Amber Deposit from India: New Trove of Fossils Suggests Global Distribution of Tropical Forest Ecosystems in the Eocene

A vast new amber deposit in India has yielded 100 fossil spiders, bees, and flies that date to the Early Eocene, or 52-50 million years ago. These arthropods are not unique -- as would be expected on an island (which India was at that time) -- but have close evolutionary relationships with fossils from the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The amber is also the oldest evidence of a tropical broadleaf rainforest in Asia.Bees, termites, spiders, and flies entombed in a newly-excavated amber deposit are challenging the assumption that India was an isolated island-continent in the Early Eocene, or 52-50 million years ago. Arthropods found in the Cambay deposit from western India are not unique -- as would be expected on an island -- but rather have close evolutionary relationships with fossils from other continents. The amber is also the oldest evidence of a tropical broadleaf rainforest in Asia.

The discovery is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We know India was isolated, but when and for precisely how long is unclear," says David Grimaldi, curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History. "The biological evidence in the amber deposit shows that there was some biotic connection."

"The amber shows, similar to an old photo, what life looked like in India just before the collision with the Asian continent," says Jes Rust, professor of Invertebrate Paleontology at the Universität Bonn in Germany. "The insects trapped in the fossil resin cast a new light on the history of the sub-continent."

est in Asia

Antarctica Melting News

The change in the ice mass covering Antarctica is a critical factor in global climate events. Scientists at the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences have now found that the year by year mass variations in the western Antarctic are mainly attributable to fluctuations in precipitation, which are controlled significantly by the climate phenomenon El Nino. Gravity data collected from space using NASA's Grace satellite show that Antarctica has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002. The latest data reveal that Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate, too. How is it possible for surface melting to decrease, but for the continent to lose mass anyway? The answer boils down to the fact that ice can flow without melting.








Antarctica is Earth's southernmost continent (including ice and underlying land), encapsulating the South Pole. It is situated in the Antarctic region of the southern hemisphere, almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle, and is surrounded by the Southern Ocean. At 5.4 million square miles), it is the fifth-largest continent in area after Asia, Africa, North America, and South America.

Two-thirds of Antarctica is a high, cold desert. Known as East Antarctica, this section has an average altitude of about 1.2 miles, higher than the American Colorado Plateau. There is a continent about the size of Australia underneath all this ice; the ice sheet sitting on top averages at a little over 1.2 miles thick. If all of this ice melted, it would raise global sea level by about 197 feet.

West Antarctica is very different. Instead of a single continent, it is a series of islands covered by ice. Because it's a group of islands, much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS, in the jargon) is actually sitting on the floor of the Southern Ocean, not on dry land. Parts of it are more than 1 mile below sea level. Pine Island is the largest of these islands and the largest ice stream in West Antarctica is called Pine Island Glacier. The WAIS, if it melted completely, would raise sea level by 16 to 23 feet.

Two areas in Antarctica are of particular interest because of their potential sensitivity to global climate change: the Antarctic Peninsula (which reaches up towards the tip of South America), and the Amundsen Sector of West Antarctica. The peninsula is currently experiencing a warming exceeding the global mean and the disappearance of large ice shelf areas. In the Amundsen Sector there are currently the largest flow rates and mass loss of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Glaciers can both melt and move or flow. Both results lead to a faster overall mass loss. Satellite images of more than 300 glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula have already showed that they were flowing some 12 percent faster in 2003 than they were in 1993. Current data indicates that the "flow rate" is increasing though not in a linear fashion.

In the latest study, the mass balance of both regions is reevaluated from gravity data of the satellite mission GRACE. As a result, the estimates were lower than those of conventional mass balance methods. "With the GRACE time series, it was for the first time possible to observe how the large-scale ice mass varies in the two areas due to fluctuations in rainfall from year to year," said the GFZ scientists Ingo Sasgen.

It has long been known that the Pacific El Niño climate phenomenon and the snowfall in Antarctica are linked. The complementary piece to the warm phase El Nino, the cold phase known as La Nina, also affects the Antarctic climate:

"The cooler La Nina years lead to a strong low pressure area over the Amundsen Sea, which favors heavy rainfall along the Antarctic Peninsula - the ice mass is increasing there. In contrast, the Amundsen area is dominated by dry air from the interior during this time.

El Nino years with their warm phase lead to precisely the opposite pattern: reduced rainfall and mass loss in the Antarctic Peninsula, and an increase in the Amundsen Sector field, respectively" explains Professor Maik Thomas.

The recording of the entire ice mass of the South Pole and its variations is a central task in climate research and still raises many unanswered questions. In principle, the study could show that the continuous gravity data of the GRACE satellite mission contain another important medium-term climate signal.