We’ve been aware of the problems with the industrial food system for a number of years. We’ve watched documentaries and read books about nutrition, the food industry, and corporate power in the fundamentals of life. This film pulled together the three elements in a way that hopefully makes an impact with people who are just opening their eyes to the problem.

When we leave a theater our conversation usually starts with, “what was your favorite part?” I was at a loss on this one. There were so many enlightening, fun, confusing, or disturbing elements.

Enlightening:
The segment on how Monsanto is enforces their patents on seeds in the courts. There was a feature on a professional seed cleaner who is paid by local farmers to process their harvest for planting the next season. This process is apparently illegal if the seed (or possibly seed from adjacent farms) is a patented Monsanto product. This poor guy was blacklisted, his friends and clients turned against him, and he was run out of business because of the extent of his legal expenses. What is wrong with our world?

Fun:
An small-scale organic farmer Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms provided thoughtful, whimsical, and grounded insight into his life and methods. I was quick to underestimate him when he first came on camera. But it didn’t take me long to figure out that I had a lot to learn from him.

Confusing:
I don’t know how I feel about the segments featuring Stoneybrook Farms and Walmart. Obviously I make my living by helping businesses play a role in driving sustainability. But it was still difficult to reconcile the massive scale and profit driven business models discussed in the film. The camera also took a stroll through a natural foods trade show and highlighted that many of the natural and organic brands that line the shelves of Whole Foods are now wholly owned by conventional corporate giants.

Disturbing:
The segment on industrial chicken producers. These massive and inhumane operations grow chickens in something like 45 days. These are like pathetically malproportioned and unhealthy versions of real birds. So sad. There were also disturbing images of cattle and hog operations that will make you want to forsake fast food.

This documentary is a must see for anyone interested in learning more about our food supply. Like my favorite farmer said, “People would feel differently about the food they eat if the meat processing facilities had glass walls.” (approximation) This film gives you a look inside.

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Social entrepreneurship

As part of the programme, students get a one-year carpentry course and are taught the design process. The good looking planters, garbage bins and benches are made out of reclaimed wood and the frames are made locally.

The workshop activities provided include model-making, teaching basic computer design software skills and visits to timber yards. It’s a way to give the students and their customers a complete environmental focus.

Students can design the benches, work on the graphics and colors and see the concrete results when the products are purchased. And it’s not just a charity–a city council in north London bought ten benches. Says one of the organizers “We use local labor, our frames are made locally, and we have an environmental focus. You’re not doing us a favor. You get a competitive product.”

And they are making money and the trainees are getting jobs. All of them so far have gone on to continue their education and one is studying furniture design at a university. They want to extend the programme now to include fencing and metalwork.

It has been defined as a “halfway house between profits-driven businesses and charities” that can “take the profit motive to parts of the voluntary and public sector that have in the past been hostile to it.”

The gateway to a livable future is found in our communities. Seek it out.

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Source: Treehugger

Now there is another opportunity to build a positive future for our city. The Metropolitan Area Planning Agency (MAPA) now has a Long Range Transportation Plan survey available for the public to complete. The responses from this survey will be used in updating the Long Range Transportation Plan for the Omaha-Council Bluffs metropolitan area for year 2035.

Go to www.mapacog.org and find the link for the survey at the top of the homepage. The 15 question survey covers a multitude of transportation topics and respondents can use this as a platform to make suggestions about the future of transportation in the metro area.

The MAPA Long Range Transportation Plan will provide a vision for the metropolitan area’s future transportation system. Additionally, projects must be identified in the Long Range Plan to be eligible to receive federal funding.

Please take a few minutes to help out. Thanks.

I thought this was fun. Be wary if you are sensitive to swear words.

Thanks to No Ride Just Drive for the link.

Geekhouse:

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Danny MacAskill:

This thing is awesome. I’ve been obsessed with gardening tools for the last year, and since we expanded our planting area this year I really needed something for cutting into untouched soil. In a catalog last year I saw an Italian Grape Hoe being used and really wanted to find something like it. None of the local stores carried anything nearly as burly as I wanted.

Easy Digging grub hoes (Azadas) from Bellotto of Brazil. The head is solid and simple, and the company includes a strong handle and even a file for keeping it sharp. I’m impressed.

I got it out in the garden yesterday and tilled about 300 square feet in an hour. The technique is easy to adapt to and the head sliced right through my hard clay soil with ease. I had a pickup load of aged manure and another of sand delivered. That’s what I’m tilling in now, down to about 6 inches. Next I’m going to double-dig the bed before laying out the plan and beginning planting. There is still a lot of work but I’ve got a ton of springtime energy to keep me going.

So how can companies who are taking sincere environmental initiatives market themselves credibly?

Junxion Strategy has some advice. The company is a consulting firm focused on the human dimension of sustainability. Their team has worked on a range of projects from informing the public about the truth behind “clean coal” to the branding and messaging for Forest Stewardship Council Canada.  They mentioned a few ways responsible marketers can promote environmental initiatives and products:

The Do’s

• Consider from all angles why consumers or clients purchase your products. But don’t go right to the green features; understand all of the attributes that matter to them. Weave your brand story from there.
• Move away from the language of sacrifice. Find ways to talk about how your product or service is easier, healthier, more convenient or lower maintenance. Be positive and solutions-focused.
• Align your claims with both the product and the way your company operates. People are not that naïve. They will see through disingenuous claims quickly. Or an NGO will. Case in point: the biodegradable credit card.
• Use your environmental challenges and trade-offs as a way to engage your customers. In fact, an open approach can potentially turn some of them into brand advocates for you. Sherwin-Williams sure could have used this advice with their ‘eco-friendly’ paints.
• Don’t overtrump the facts. For example, Husky garbage bags once touted their garbage bags as biodegradable. The problem is that the bags don’t biodegrade in landfills. In other words, err on the side of modesty. Remember, language is a powerful device and has the power to lead millions of consumers astray. So when you say ‘fresh’ or ‘organic’, mean it. Check out what Larry Light, chairman-CEO of Arcature, says about marketers using sustainability language to confuse rather than to clarify consumer decision making.
• Find ways of linking your brand to related causes. Mountain Equipment Co-op has a national partnership with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Association, an effective non-profit wilderness protection organization. It is a sensible partnership since the co-op’s purpose is also wilderness-focused.
• Involve employees in identifying ways to reduce your product’s environmental footprint to tell your green story. After all, they want to align their personal values at work and feel good about their employer.

The Don’ts

• Don’t trumpet the fact that “we’re green now”. No one will buy that you’ve had an overnight corporate epiphany and nobody likes PR stunts anymore.
• Don’t use vague messaging or images of mountain valleys and flower petals if they have no credible relationship to your product; it just looks gratuitous. Instead, be specific and meaningful.
• Don’t talk about commitments; rather, talk about achievements and real, measurable (and preferably third-party verified) outcomes. As a next step,  Joel Makower suggests translating environmental data into accessible and relevant language.
• Don’t overlook leveraging the web and positive word of mouth. Green consumers tend to be better-educated, more web-savvy and more networked. So, turn your customers into brand advocates – online and off.

More companies are taking further steps to have a higher standard of corporate social responsibility reporting for their stakeholders and thus add another level of credibility.

Interface is the first North American carpet manufacturer to complete an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) for one of its product lines. EPD provides detailed information on the materials within products, resources required by products, recyclability of products, and the environmental impacts over a product’s life, from production to use and disposal.

Interface received wide publicity for cleaning up their manufacturing processes and working to reduce the environmental impact of their business since 1994. The company not only significantly reduced their impact, but also increased financial returns for their shareholders in the process.

As people become more educated consumers and as the green economy grows, credible green marketing strategies can effectively put you ahead of your competitors. The right messages and visuals will reflect your values to make green work in your favor.

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Source: Ecopreneurist

In short, the company has learned a whole lot about what it takes to make clothing and other outdoor gear recyclable, but it’s unlikely Patagonia’s entire catalog will be recyclable by fall 2010. However, it just might make all its apparel recyclable by then.

The Common Threads program collects only certain Patagonia products or types of clothing; the company takes back only what it knows it can recycle.

It All Started With Underwear

The first product collected and recycled through Common Threads was Patagonia’s polyester-spandex Capilene underwear, chosen because underwear is simple, has no buttons or zippers and isn’t typically handed down.

Teijin, a Japanese textile company, developed a garment-to-garment recycling process for the underwear, and Patagonia found out that using Capilene underwear as a raw material instead of petroleum uses 76 percent less energy and emits 42 percent less carbon dioxide.

The Common Threads program grew in spring 2007 when other Capilene apparel was included, along with 100 percent cotton T-shirts, Patagonia fleece and Polartec fleece jackets from any clothing brand. A year later Patagonia started labeling clothes that were accepted through Common Threads with instructions on what to do with them at the end of their lives. The collection program also expanded to include some board shorts, polyester jackets and nylon items, and later that year Patagonia unveiled the first recyclable nylon waterproof and breathable shell. Around that time Patagonia also started working with another company, Toray, which developed a recycling program for items made of nylon 6.

Results, Tempered by Challenges

Since the start of Common Threads, Patagonia has recycled more than 13,200 pounds of garments, and collected much more. But that is still nowhere close to the amount of items Patagonia sells or that get tossed in the trash.

The amount of recyclable items in Patagonia’s spring collection has gone from 28 percent last year to 38 percent this year. And for it’s fall collection, the amount is expected to increase from 45 percent last year to 65 percent this fall. Patagonia is not confident, though, that it will increase both of those to 100 percent by fall 2010. But it has a much better chance to make all of its apparel recyclable, since 80 percent of the clothing in its fall 2009 collection will be recyclable.

Along the way, Patagonia faced a host of challenges. Some of the recyclers it works with use chemical recycling, which dissolves products into chemicals. Another uses mechanical recycling, which physically, not chemically, rips apart fabric and spins it into yarn.

While chemical recycling systems can be easily tainted if too many different materials are combined, mechanical recycling can take a greater variety of inputs, but that also limits the variety of products Patagonia can make with the resulting fiber. Patagonia’s products are expected to meet certain performance levels, and any alternation to the amount of certain fabrics in them can affect that.

Patagonia is also reaching the limit of how much material it can handle. The amount of items they collect now is about what they are able to recycle. Increasing the amount of recycled materials would force its recycling systems to expand, which would require capital investment, more employees and more expenses for shipping garments overseas.

And some of the garments it receives are so old or worn out, with missing tags or faded labels, that it takes some serious investigating to find out what material they’re made of. But that only means that a piece of clothing has lived a long, useful life. Patagonia sees Common Threads as a last resort for clothing, and will even donate to non-profits usable clothing that customers return through Common Threads.

“If, after a lifetime of use, a garment can be reused or handed-down no more, we provide Common Threads as a final destination, so that worn, used, and abused products can be recycled and made into new garments,” Patagonia says in the report on Common Threads.

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Source:  Greenbiz.com

Icebreaker

With most of the things you buy, you’re told little or nothing about how they’re made. Icebreaker is different. Each product sold comew with an unique Baacode will let you see the living conditions of the high country sheep that produced the merino fibre in each Icebreaker garment, meet the farmers who are custodians of this astonishing landscape, and follow every step of the supply chain.

Out of the 120 sheep stations that provide wool for their clothing. Their site has a demo to show you how the system works, showing you how you can track each garment back to the source.

There are profiles of the different farms, including video, so you are able to connect in a meaningful way with the company.

Icebreaker also provides customers with detailed information on their environmental ethics policy, manufacturing ethics, and animal welfare.

As a whole, I’m impressed. The Baacode concept is great and the company has a unified and meaningful message that any sustainable business can learn from.