Street Smart Sustainability: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Profitably Greening Your Organization's DNA

This book is for leaders of small and medium-sized organizations who want to take the steps necessary to achieve environmental sustainability in a practical and cost-effective manner. No business on the planet meets all the criteria of a fully sustainable enterprise. The fundamental challenge for any small to medium-sized organization is determining how much time and money to take away from day-to-day operations and invest in becoming sustainable. But, as you will see from the many examples offered, it makes business and environmental sense to implement as many of the recommendations found in this book as possible—even in challenging economic times.

It has taken forty years since the first Earth Day for sustainability to become an “overnight success.” Today, after years of scientific evidence, protest marches, consumer boycotts, growing public demand, successful lawsuits by public interest and environmental groups, increased shareholder value to companies that embrace sustainability, and environmental causes championed by celebrities and thought leaders, the idea of sustainability in business is almost universally accepted.

Recent polls show that 80 percent of the American people are motivated by environmental issues1 and 95 percent of shoppers are open to green products.2 The Era of Sustainability has arrived. Centuries of spending the earth’s capital as if it were in endless supply and exploiting the environment as if it were one’s private profit center have given way to enrolling all stakeholders in environmental decision making. Combining this with the evolution of environmental technology, we are approaching the point where sustainability is an economic driver and a competitive advantage.

Street Smart Sustainability: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Profitably Greening Your Organization’s DNA provides the reader with practical best practices to create a sustainable enterprise in a cost-effective manner. We’re not merely making the case for sustainability. Our book is designed for those who have already accepted sustainability as an initiative worthy of their time and effort. It provides the leaders of small and medium-sized organizations with simple tools to make continuous, cost-effective improvements in their sustainability practices—practices that diffuse into the organizational DNA and become fixtures, shifting the prevailing corporate culture.

Many how-to books build your skill set from one chapter to the next. By the end of the book you can put the new skills into effect. Street Smart Sustainability takes a different approach. Individual chapters are designed to act as standalone sets of action steps on particular topics. They can be read and the recommendations implemented sequentially, or they can be read in random or impulse order. The book takes advantage of your intuitive understanding of the principal functions that any organization must engage in, such as facility selection and maintenance, energy and water use, purchasing, and waste disposal. It is supplemented by a Web site that acts as a repository of information on all the topics, searchable by key word, with interactive question-and-answer functionality in a usergenerated module. We hope to collaborate with other efforts on the topic to ensure the most comprehensive resource available.

Each chapter provides a series of action steps on a particular initiative and is designed to inspire new business opportunities. For example, your waste can become another enterprise’s raw materials and a cost savings could result in an income-generating collaboration. Each chapter also ends with a summary listing some recommended opportunities for cost-effective sustainability.

Most small and medium-sized businesses operate without the luxury of management depth and outside advisors and they need to make progressive changes over a period of time. Read the chapter on purchasing or carbon footprint, and you may implement those recommendations while managing your enterprise in a day-to-day manner. Do everything in all the chapters, and your organization will become much more sustainable. The book also includes tools to allow you to measure progress and savings.

Street Smart Sustainability is designed to be a road map to the sustainable “low-hanging fruit.” Following the 80/20 Rule, this short book cannot be a comprehensive guide to sustainability, but it should provide 80 percent of the guidance that a 1,000-page book on the subject would provide. How to make your organization sustainable may seem like too big of a topic to squeeze into a small book, but we, as the authors, have been extremely lucky to have had a medley of life experiences that have greatly helped us tackle such an audacious goal.

While attending Stuyvesant High School in New York in 1968, David got involved with Students for Environmental Action and ultimately ended up being a co-organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970. Since that time he has helped over 300 companies become greener profitably. A pioneer in performing comprehensive sustainability audits, David audited and did other environmental work with a large number of Social Venture Network (SVN) companies, including Stonyfield Farm, Aveda, Tommy Boy Entertainment, Motherwear, Blue Fish Clothing, Mal Warwick Associates, Rhino Records, and Eileen Fisher.

David was also the director of standards of the first U.S. environmental certification and labeling organization, Green Seal, where he oversaw the development of standards for energy-efficient lighting, waterefficient fixtures, recycled paper, rerefined engine oil, household cleaners, paints, appliances, and other consumer products. He also worked with the environmental-standard-setting bodies of other countries to globally harmonize environmental product standards.

He represented the United States and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in the creation of the global ISO 14000 standards for environmental management systems. He also worked with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other environmental scientists from around the country in the creation of the life cycle analysis (LCA) methodology. David is also a partner in Meadowbrook Lane Capital.

Joe did not wake up one day and say, “I’m going to pursue sustainable business principles and practices.” His has been a gradual evolution from street kid to social entrepreneur. Joe started a company with an innovative and environmentally superior way of dispensing fruit juices as fountain drinks. The creation of this technology, as well as new formulas, resulted in the elimination of bottles, cans, packaging, and refrigeration and in 1994 alone saved 50,880 trees, 20,966,400 gallons of water, 9,974 cubic yards of landfill space, 12,579,840 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy, and 179,712 pounds of potentially air-polluting effluents. Since then, the technology has positively impacted the environment beyond expectations, and the Pepsi Cola Company has purchased the formulas, technology, and brand for distribution and integration worldwide.

Joe created Meadowbrook Lane Capital, a socially responsible investment bank, which was, as the Wall Street Journal described, the “White Knight” in the Ben & Jerry’s Unilever transaction, preserving ten of the social and environmental initiatives of Ben & Jerry’s.3 Through Meadowbrook Lane Capital, Joe has bought and sold nineteen businesses. For each successive business he improved his sustainable practices, culminating in the purchase of CSRwire.com as a vehicle to distribute and archive sustainability news and reports, organize the world’s sustainability information, and act as an opensource platform for innovative financial instruments and structures to demonstrate that business...