3
The Plan—
Implementing Your Sustainability Vision

You have your vision, it’s authentic, and it resonates with your actions. You have buy-in from the employees and a mechanism to motivate them to work toward continuous environmental improvement. You have performed a baseline audit and are informed of all the key events that influence your company’s environmental footprint. Now you need a plan to translate that vision into action. Once you have a plan, you can do what the plan requires of you, measure the results of your action, and then review the results to determine if you are on target or need to tweak the plan in order to keep making continuous progress toward sustainability.

This chapter is about converting your sustainability vision into a plan and ensuring its success by planning, doing, measuring, and reviewing. You’ll learn how to determine which of the various environmental management systems, protocols, and standards can best help you achieve your vision. Whatever options you select and whatever direction you take, don’t seek perfection because it is perennially elusive. Seek excellence and push yourself and your organization, but aim for continuous improvement, not perfection.

In order to convert their mission to action, the leaders of Stonyfield Farm created teams of employees. “At Stonyfield the employees take their mission so seriously now,” Gary Hirshberg said. “We have created a Mission Action Program (MAP), which is how we make sure our mission comes to life. The MAP teams are made up of diverse members from every sector of the company. We have ten teams with each focusing on different aspects of sustainability. We have a water team that is concentrating on reducing our water use. The water team has engineers on it but also marketing people. A packaging team is working to reduce the weight of packaging material.

“The ten teams report to the executive team monthly. In addition, there are twice-annual summits where all the teams report their achievements and challenges. These probably influence internal culture as much as anything else we do. Nancy and I can talk all we want, but the people in operations have more impact on our environmental footprint, and they’re the ones on the MAP teams. They are hacking away at reducing all of our metrics: energy use, carbon footprint, water use, packaging material use, on-farm impact, etc. We also have Problem Solving Groups (PSGs). Pretty much everybody in the company has environmental criteria as part of their job responsibilities.”¹

Gary is a big believer in “if you can measure it, you can manage it,” and each one of these MAP teams makes a plan, executes the plan, measures the results, and then reviews the success of its actions.

“Plan, Do, Measure, and Review” was not born at Stonyfield. It actually comes from a movement toward quality management invented by American women working in wartime factories during World War II.

Total Quality Management

Prior to WWII, the quality of America’s military equipment and munitions production was poor. Duds were common.

After Pearl Harbor, when men left the factories to go fight, women arrived to run the factories. The women had a big stake in the quality of work. If they made a mistake, their brothers, fathers, husbands, and friends would suffer on the battlefield.

To improve quality, the women closely inspected each item, not just at the end of the assembly line but at the beginning as well. Instead of competing, they had the manufacturing lines cooperate with one another. At the end of the workday, on their own time, they sat in circles to discuss quality. From their hearts and out of necessity, they created the Quality Circle.

In this new management environment, productivity improved dramatically. Improvement was so significant that statisticians were sent into the factories to investigate. A statistician named W. Edwards Deming “discovered” the Quality Circle system that the women had created. In his report, he recommended that the women and their system remain after the men came home from the war.

After the war, business boomed. Like many members of society with unorthodox ideas challenging conventional wisdom, Deming was strongly urged to “get out of town.” He left the United States and landed in Japan. After a period of investigation and review, he integrated the Zen Buddhist sensibilities of the Japanese culture with what he had learned from the American women and adjusted his philosophy. The Buddhist idea of community—Sarigha²—was introduced into the workplace along with Deming’s Buddhist-inspired dictum “Eliminate fear from the workplace.”

In Japan, the Quality Circle methodology evolved. The Japanese had a word for this body of work: Kaizen—”continuous improvement.” This nation that made products that were laughed at evolved a management methodology that put the American automotive business into receivership years later. This method, generically called Total Quality Management (TQM), was then exported to the United States and elsewhere.

The precepts of TQM were codified into a global standard for the International Standards Organization (ISO) called ISO 9000. If they elect to, companies can prepare their organizations to meet the criteria of ISO 9000. Then they are audited against the standard’s criteria. If they meet all the criteria, they become ISO 9000 certified for a period of time by a certifying organization. The basic concept behind ISO 9000 is that business owners and employees need to act as if the customer is king or queen. In order to satisfy the customer, a business has to make continuous improvements. The pathway to making continuous improvements is to Plan, Do, Measure, and Review while involving the entire stakeholder community. Chief among this stakeholder community are the employees. They are viewed not as cogs in the machine or expendable soldiers on the battlefield but as human beings who are the key to a company realizing its vision.

In the 1970s when the Japanese auto industry began to dominate U.S. automakers, Ford was the first company to commit to making an ISO 9000 Total Quality Management automobile, adopting the motto “Quality Is Job One” and designing the Taurus, which won all kinds of design awards and lots of business for Ford. Not to be outdone, both GM and Chrysler created ISO 9000 cars.

Focused on quality, ISO 9000 nonetheless allowed these companies to cost-effectively introduce a myriad of environmental quality innovations, such as greater fuel efficiency, volatile organic compound (VOC) free paints, and reduction or even elimination of the use of hazardous chemicals. All of these innovations were made possible by rigorous adherence to the ISO 9000 principles of Plan, Do, Measure, and Review. ISO 9000 works for big companies, but it also works for small and medium-sized companies. It has tremendous value to companies even if they do not get certified but merely use the standard as a guide. One aspect of TQM is total environmental quality management or sustainability management.

ISO 14000

In the 1990s ISO 9000 gave birth to a total environmental quality management standard, ISO 14000. David is an ISO 9000 lead auditor who was one of a handful of Americans who represented the United States and ANSI at the UN at the outset in the creation of ISO 14000. Today it is the most widely implemented set of standards for environmental management systems (EMSs). An increasing number of companies, including small and medium-sized companies, are embracing ISO 14000 worldwide. ISO 14000, like ISO 9000, is actually a suite of standards. Whether you elect to get certified or not, giving management attention to the component parts of ISO 14000 will greatly advance you toward sustainability.

One straightforward way to convert your vision into a sustainability plan is to follow the steps to compliance with ISO 14000. This does not necessarily mean getting certified, but it does mean investing management and employee time in addressing the requirements. What ISO 14000 asks of you is to first create an environmental policy (from your vision). This can be as simple as “We commit ourselves to reducing the amount of water we use and greenhouse gases we produce.” The next step is to determine the environmental aspects and impacts of all of your products, activities, and services (more on how to do this in chapter 4). Then you plan environmental objectives and measurable targets. This is where you commit, for example, to reducing water use by 30 percent per year (250,000 gallons per day) while still being able to grow output by 10 percent per year. The next step is to implement and operate programs to meet the objectives and targets; then you check compliance, take corrective action, and conduct management review. Resource C covers the seventeen specific elements that make up ISO 14001. If you want even more detail you can buy and download a copy of the standard from ISO.³

Do-it-yourself ISO 14000 software is available for $700 to $2,700.⁴ The costs of ISO 14000 implementation and certification can vary greatly depending on the size of a facility and the nature of its operation. For small to medium-sized manufacturing facilities (i.e., 100–300 employees) the cost of developing and auditing an EMS will generally range from $20,000 to $50,000.⁵ ISO 14000 is really transforming the landscape and pushing more and more companies and organizations globally to pursue sustainability profitably.⁶ But even if you just create a formal procedure in your organization for addressing each of the above steps, you will have advanced your company far in pursuing sustainability. This is because ISO 14000 makes you do the hard work of figuring out the environmental aspects and impacts of your products, activities, and services.

If, however, your company does not manufacture products with a potentially severe environmental impact and you are looking for perhaps an easier course than ISO 14000, consider the CERES Principles.

CERES Principles

The CERES Principles had their origin in the Valdez Principles, which were created in the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster in Prince William Sound off Valdez, Alaska. The Valdez Principles were designed to provide a framework of corporate environmental management to ensure that environmental disasters are prevented and that companies are proactive instead of reactive in regard to the environment. The Valdez Principles— cocreated by Denis Hayes of Earth Day fame and the late Joan Bavaria, founder of Trillium Asset Management and an innovator in socially responsible investing—became the CERES Principles.⁷ CERES’s current chair is Norman Dean, previously executive director of Green Seal and Friends of the Earth, and its executive director is Mindy Lubber.⁸ If you like these principles, make them yours. You can even join CERES and formalize your relationship with these principles. (CERES has a sliding membership cost starting at $2,000.)

The CERES Principles cover protection of the biosphere, sustainable use of natural resources, reduction and disposal of wastes, energy conservation, risk reduction, safe products and services, environmental restoration, and informing the public. CERES requires the same level of leadership commitment as is recommended in chapter 1 and, as is recommended in chapter 2, requires audits and reports. CERES, however, mandates that these reports be made available to the public.

CERES has just published its 21st Century Corporation: The CERES Roadmap for Sustainability “as a vision and practical roadmap for integrating sustainability into the DNA of business—from the boardroom to the copy room.”⁹ The twenty key expectations for companies cover governance for sustainability, stakeholder engagement, disclosure, and performance.

“Mine was the first company to sign onto CERES,” recalls Horst Rechelbacher of Aveda. “I came to the first meeting of the Valdez Principles and I was sitting with my friends Paul Hawken and Terry Gips and a bunch of investment bankers, corporate lawyers, investment groups, and other business owners, and the consensus was that we need to govern ourselves by the Valdez Principles. The principles were all written out and I raised my hand and said, ‘I will sign up.’ Denis Hayes said, ‘Don’t you want to check it with your lawyers first?’ and I said, ‘No, it is my mission statement. Everything you are saying is what my practice is.’“¹⁰

To facilitate action, Aveda held all-company morning meetings in which employees were inspired to volunteer and take on environmental responsibilities. “When I asked people to do things that were beyond their routine, such as work on sustainability,” Horst said, “I found too often that they just did not do what they said they would do. So I implemented a Project Commitment Form: when a person volunteered to take on a task, the commitment was written down along with the due dates and the form was signed by four other team members with copies distributed throughout the team.”¹¹

Stonyfield, too, is a founding CERES signatory. While the organization served Stonyfield well for many years, Gary Hirshberg now says that “CERES is no longer part of Stonyfield’s daily protocol ever since [CERES] began focusing more on converting large corporations.”¹²

The Natural Step Framework

Another, perhaps simpler yet science-based, sustainability management system (and design tool) that has the advantage of not having any specific “must do” requirements is the Natural Step Framework. It was founded in 1989 by Swedish oncologist and karate champion Dr. Karl-Henrik Robert in Sweden and popularized by Ray Anderson of Interface Inc. in his book Mid-Course Correction and recently by Gil Friend, author of the wonderful book The Truth About Green Business. The Natural Step Framework is a sustainability management system with a series of four steps that companies can take to become sustainable.¹³ It is so simple yet so effective that hundreds of companies, cities, and communities around the world have implemented it, including most companies in Sweden (like Ikea and Electrolux). In the United States, Nike, Interface Inc., Starbucks, and CH2M Hill employ it as do many other smaller companies and SVN companies such as Mission Research, Portfolio 21, and Benchmark Asset Management. Communities from Santa Monica and Seattle to Madison and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, also employ it. Terry Gips of Sustainability Associates and Paul Hawken—founder of Smith and Hawken and author of The Ecology of Commerce—were two of its initial proponents.

Here are the four Natural Step principles:

To become a sustainable society we must eliminate our contribution to:

1. the progressive buildup of substances extracted from the earth’s crust (for example, heavy metals and fossil fuels)

2. the progressive buildup of chemicals and compounds produced by society (for example, dioxins, PCBs, and DDT)

3. the progressive physical degradation and destruction of nature and natural processes (for example, unsustainable over-harvesting of forests and paving over critical wildlife habitat); and

4. conditions that undermine people’s capacity to meet their basic human needs (for example, unsafe working conditions and not enough pay to live on).¹⁴

Unlike the CERES Principles, which require a high degree of organizational rigor to implement, the Natural Step process can be effectively implemented with any level of organizational time and resource investment. To do a company-wide Natural Step Framework seminar and action planning session takes a day and a half and costs about $9,000. Following that, a sustainability team could work out the details of the plan in just a few hours more. To be really effective, the sustainability team should meet monthly for one to two hours. In addition, one person investing two hours per week dealing with e-mails and reports is sufficient.

Whatever approach you use, you can elect to report your sustainability practices and results using the Global Reporting Initiative,¹⁵ which “develops and disseminates globally applicable ‘Sustainability Reporting Guidelines’ for voluntary use by organizations reporting their economic and sustainability attributes.”¹⁶ GRI’s latest G3 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines are also available as a free download.

Standards

Standards differ from management systems and frameworks in that they deal with a narrow set of criteria. You may find one or more standards that will advance your mission if you comply with them. To be effective, the criteria in standards need to be SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Attainability is key. If everyone can and does meet a standard, the standard is not doing anything to drive continuous improvement to achieve sustainability. On the other hand, one country’s standards body came out with a silly standard for refrigerators that was so rigorous in terms of insulation, seals, and energy efficiency that no product on the market or planned in the future could meet it.

Among the sustainability standards are SVN’s Standards of Corporate Social Responsibility.¹⁷ These standards, which are available as a free download, were conceptualized and managed by David, and Joe contributed financing and content for their creation and publication.

Green Seal¹⁸ promulgates environmentally superior consensusbased product standards. It was founded by visionary Rena Shulsky, who cofounded Green Audit with David, and chaired by Denis Hayes. While he was director of standards at Green Seal, David oversaw the development of the first U.S. voluntary standards for energy-efficient lighting, waterefficient fixtures, rerefined engine oil, recycled business paper and sanitary papers, household cleaners, paint, windows and doors, and appliances.

Green Seal’s standards are created using an open, transparent process that involves the entire stakeholder community of companies/organizations, trade associations, suppliers, customers/members, public interest groups, regulators, and academicians. Usually a technical committee comprising representatives of these stakeholder groups researches the issues and prepares a draft standard. The standard consists of an introductory statement describing what it covers and what the boundary conditions are, the criteria, labeling instructions, and a glossary with references to other existing standards.

Once initial research is completed, the draft standard is issued with a rationale for each criterion along with measurement parameters. Once the draft standard is published, it undergoes a “purification by fire” process as it is sent to all the identified stakeholder groups and to anyone else who wants it. These stakeholders are invited to send in formal comments. In the revision of the draft standard to create a final version, every comment must be addressed. Often standards undergo multiple revisions until a consensus among the stakeholder groups is reached. The draft U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Standard for Organic Certification, for example, received over 275,000 comments before it was revised and finalized.

Standards are key to all businesses and organizations making continuous improvement. There are thousands of published standards. If sustainability standards don’t exist for your area of concentration, consider creating standards that are specific to your operations. Paulette Mae Cole of ABC Home did just that (see chapter 9) in creating the company’s “goodwood” standard for sustainably harvested wood used in making furniture.

If you make a standard, your standard can then be nominated to become an ANSI standard and then move on to become an ISO standard.

Summary

To become sustainable, take the steps to convert your vision into action. Many organizations do this directly, such as Stonyfield, which has developed Mission Action Program teams and Problem Solving Groups.

Most organizations follow existing holistic management systems, protocols, and frameworks that comprehensively address all aspects of an organization’s impact on the environment. These include ISO 14000, the global standards for environmental management systems; the CERES Principles; and the Natural Step Framework. Other organizations use existing standards to help them piece together the elements necessary to realize their vision. These include SVN’s Standards of Corporate Social Responsibility, the USDA organic standard, and Green Seal’s product standards.

Organizations that are unable to find existing standards that address their unique products/services, like ABC Home, make their own standards and then “open source” them or promulgate them to become published standards.

Following is a summary of the plan for implementing your sustainability vision:

• Draft and then articulate your sustainability plan, which consists of the steps to realizing your vision.

• Develop or adopt a sustainability management system that seeks excellence, not perfection, and strive for continuous improvement by planning, doing, measuring, and reviewing.

• Develop or adopt sustainability standards and measures of performance that are relevant to your business.

The next chapter provides instructions for three powerful metrics to assess your sustainability and to determine its cost-effectiveness.