Theo Chocolate
We visited Theo Chocolate while in Seattle. Theobroma cacoa is the latin word for chocolate, but the active compound, theobromine has an interesting chemistry. It is the same compound that is found in people’s blood when they are in love. Theo Chocolate says that they are the only fair trade organic chocolate factory in the United States. I have a lot of friends in this space including organic chocolate pioneer John Taylor (Cloud Nine) and fair trade pioneer Dean Cycon (Dean’s Bean’s). Being organic and fair trade is great AS LONG AS YOU ALSO MAKE A DELICIOUS PRODUCT. I have tasted some organic chocolate that tastes more like the organic fertilizer used to cultivate the cacoa.
Interesting politics in fair trade with Starbucks promoting their fair trade coffee as a flavor choice like French Roast, Ethiopia Sidamo and Sumatra. As Dean points out it is not a flavor, it’s a way of doing business. For a company that charges $3 per cup on an item which has a raw material’s cost of less than 10 cents per cup, every one of their cups should be fair trade.
OK, you’re an adult and coffee is your drug of choice, so you don’t get too particular with your pusher as to the working conditions of the farm that produces the product to take care of your jones, but…well lets talk about chocolate.
Which chocolate would you buy? One chocolate is made from fair trade, organic beans. The other is made from commodity cocoa beans for which there are 5 layers of middle men involved in the transaction in between the farmer and the importer. The farmers of these commodity beans live below the subsistence level. Their children are hungry and must work to help support the family. They are also not healthy due to constant exposure to pesticides. [By the way, pesticides are biocides – they kill living organisms. And living organisms (including us) are made up pretty much of the same stuff – cells which contain cytoplasm which undergo respiration and nuclei containing DNA. They are largely equally effected by pesticides (see Rachel Carlson’s seminal work – Silent Spring].
So, when you buy an item that you don’t really need, like a delicious chocolate bar made from commodity beans, you can be pretty sure that the farmer who grew the beans and his children are poor, sick and abused by you.
You say I am laying a guilt trip on you? Absolutely. Don’t want to think about the poor, starving, sick children of the commodity cocoa farmer. Don’t buy the chocolate. If you care, be the change, Buy fair trade organic. By the way, my youngest Sadie loved her Theo Chocolate bar but even more, she loved the factory tour. She felt like she was in a real-life Willie Wonka Chocolate Factory. Next time you’re in Seattle, take the tour.
David Mager
Sustainability in Print continued
So, Green dudes and dudettes who are following the story so far, our publisher is telling us they may not have control over what the recycled content of our sustainability book is.
We wrote back…”As you may be aware, at Green Seal, we wrote the first voluntary standards for recycled paper in this country. I personally visited many of the paper mills and have worked with paper manufacturers like Mohawk which produces fine, archival and recycled papers with a facility that is 100% wind powered and which follows strict environmental protocols. Having contributed to the evolution of the life cycle analysis methodology I am familiar with the details of Canada’s initial recycled paper (where most of the post consumer content was shipped up north from the USA at great expense to the environment); the cloth versus paper napkin and diaper controversy and the current virgin versus recycled content wars.”
“With all of this said, there are environmental heroes and villains in the paper and printing industries, and there are always choices. One of the chapters of the book deals with the issue of procurement with the bottom line that small companies feel they are victims of bigger companies mandates.”
The truth is that the better bigger companies are always concerned about what they need to do to satisfy their smaller clients who, in total, generally represent the bulk of their business and who always represent the wave of the future.
As architect, visionary Bill McDonough says, when trying to be green, if you find yourself in a situation where you must choose between the lesser of two evils, the answer is wrong. Go back to the drawing board. There is always a sustainable option.
We’re grateful to the publisher for coming up with a 100% recycled content book printing option, but we’re even more excited about showing the publishers and prospective readers of the book the power that they possess to make the right choice for the planet and their pocketbooks.
David Mager
At the PTown “Peace, Love and GoGo Boots” Parade while working on the book at Wellfleet, Cape Cod.
The Results of the Title Survey
Thank you all so much for taking the time to participate in the on-line survey to help find a title for our book on sustainability. The originally proposed title, ‘The Road to Sustainability - How To Make Your Small or Medium-Sized Enterprise More Profitable and More Sustainable’, polled well but was not the winner. One suggestion was ‘Sustainably Yours’, which is how I now sign my emails after getting emails for years with this valediction from Sustainability Guru Terry Gips. Another sweet suggestion was “No Day, But Today”. One clever alliterated title that combined several of the candidate title themes was ‘Street Smart Surfing on the Sustainability Wave’. I really liked ‘Full Frontal Sustainability’ as the main and ‘As Deep Green As The Color Of Money’ for the sub title.
After all the results were tallied, the winning combination of Main and Subtitle is ‘Street Smart Sustainability – The Entrepreneurs Guide to Profitably Greening Your Organization’s DNA’. Joe Sibilia and I are very excited to be going forward with this title.
The book is progressing along wonderfully. There is still room for some more stories of your best sustainability practices. If you have a great story about how your small or medium-sized organization implemented a sustainability practice which successfully met its social/environmental goals and which also contributed to profit or savings, please call or email. It would be fun to include it in the book.
Sustainably yours,
David Mager
davidmager@comcast.net
(413) 247-0120
We have a title!
Street Smart Sustainability – The Entrepreneurs Guide to Profitably Greening Your Organization’s DNA
Thanks for all of your input. Our publishers have finally decided on a title that suits the mission of our book!
Another writing spot. The Garage.
Wellfleet, Mass. Where some of the book was written. Getting inspiration.
Sustainability in Print
My friend Gil Friend came out with a new book on sustainability. It’s pretty good, but it’s printed on only 30% post consumer waste content paper. Talk about a talk-do gap. If our book on Sustainability was printed on anything less than 100% post consumer waste content I’d say it was a hoax. We brought the issue up with our publisher. Below is what they said, but to summarize, ‘Blah, blah, blah, The dog ate my homework.’
“We are dependent on our regular printers to stock papers that they can sell to many of their customers—we don’t buy enough to be able to specify totally on our own what papers are available. The minimum orders (usually two carloads) and our desire for guaranteed availability for reprints means that we look to our printers to convince a number of their customers to agree on what they want to use for their books and what they can afford to buy.”
“Then, there’s the constraint that we prefer to print on archival papers, which must be acid-free. This means that only the highest-quality acid-free sources for recycled fiber can be used. Mixed recycling will contain newsprint and packaging that will wreck the paper for book purposes. Basically, the post-consumer fiber needed is in very short supply. And, as paper is recycled over and over again, by definition the fibers are broken down and therefore to maintain strength, new fiber has to be introduced into the system.”
“There’s also some controversy, not well documented by numbers, about whether recycled fiber takes more petroleum to move around than fiber from new trees, where the tree waste is used to power the paper mills. At present the Book Industry Study Group and the Green Press Initiative are studying the overall carbon footprint of book paper production, which is more complex than simply measuring post-consumer waste content.”
“So, our printers offer us paper that contains 30% post-consumer waste. The last Bush administration changed the rules so that the mills no longer have to specify the pre-consumer recycled content, so although that’s a component of the paper, the mills no longer tell us how much they use.”
“All our papers are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) or Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) to come from sustainable and responsible sources, whether it’s recycled fiber or sustainably-grown forests. It happens that all the forests in question are managed woodlands in the eastern US, so there’s no endangered rainforest or Canadian boreal forest at issue.”
“There is one printer in Canada that we use occasionally that at present stocks a 100% post-consumer-waste recycled book paper—to my knowledge the only such paper being milled in North America. We printed a book on it a couple years ago and the authors and many people at BK didn’t like it. We could use it again, and I’m happy to work with the printer in question. Johanna, see me about their constraints as to trim size and format before you make proposals about the book if you want to go this way.”
“Finally, all this is totally at the whim of the paper manufacturers. Literally none of the papers we were using three years ago are being made any more. The fact that China is buying up huge quantities of the recycled paper from the western US is changing the market here a great deal. I’ve become accustomed to the possibility that everything will change several times a year.”
David Mager
In Nature There Is No Waste
Just threw a dinner party in Portland, OR for 20+ friends at the home of Julie Lewis. Julie is one of the heroes of the sustainability movement. In Nature there is no such thing as waste and Julie understands that more than anyone. She created a line of shoes called Deja Shoes that transformed the shoe industry with so many shoe companies now copying her approach to material re-use. The soles for her shoes were made from recycled car tires and cork. The latter was sourced from decorked wine bottles at Portland area restaurants which had set up cork recycling stations.. She set up recycling programs at schools that collected the dried up felt markers pens barrels which were used in the manufacture of the midsoles. The foam from discarded seat cushions was used in the tongues and the uppers were made from the trim from disposable diapers, PET bottles, hemp and discarded jeans. The logo was made from recycled milk jugs. All in all she used 22 different materials in the manufacture of her shoe.
All of this was very cool for marketing, but it wasn’t about marketing. In nature, one creature’s waste is another creature’s food. In traditional business, waste is stuff whose raw materials you had to pay for, and then you have to use energy and labor to assemble and then you have to pay to get rid of it. Reduced cost of goods; more profit. Increased market share; more profit. Deja Show was eventually sold. So what’s up with Julie now. She even recycled the name Deja into Jade and is working on a shoe made from recycled materials that uses the energy from each footstep to ‘inhale’ – pump in air and sequesters the carbon dioxide. Go Julie!
David Mager
The road to The Road To Sustainability
The book series editor edited our 10 page proposal. Most of the edits were fantastic. One change they made though made us think that they still don’t get what sustainability is about. They wanted to title the Book - THE ROAD TO SUSTAINABILITY - How Your Small or Medium-Sized Enterprise Can Become More Sustainable Without Breaking the Bank.
“Without Breaking the Bank” As long as they think that Sustainability costs something; takes away from the company’s bottom line, they will only do as much as they think they can charitably afford. They really don’t understand. The subheading should be: How Your Small or Medium-Sized Enterprise Can Become More Sustainable Profitably.
When working with one of the countries largest automobile companies for the first time, I didn’t even talk about sustainability. All I told them was that I was going to help them save money. I pointed out to them that they take their retained earnings and reinvest them into manufacturing two kinds of products….intended products which they sell and unintended products which they have to pay to get rid of. By showing them that their cost of goods would go down if they stopped manufacturing products they have to pay to get rid of, they would make more profit. When they implemented that an interesting phenomenon occurred. When the employees stopped making one form of pollution, they felt better about their relationship with the company and their productivity went up. The community, through the Community Right-To-Know Laws learned that the company had reduced their pollution and they reduced their complaints and suits. Regulators seeing that the company had voluntarily reduced their polluting discharges eased up on implementing new regulations. The stock analysts saw that the company had reduced its long term liabilities and their subsequent reports led to an increase in the stock’s Price:Earnings Ratio. The division manager came to me and said, “Is this stuff environmental?” and when I said “Yes” he said “lets do more of this stuff”.
EVERYONE who implements bona fide sustainable practices saves money. When I pointed this out, the editor said “You’re right about the title – I goofed. I really do understand the point. Hell, you helped my company increase profits with your environmental audit!”
We will have to remain ever vigilant as the reflex to revert to antiquated paradigms persists.
David Mager
