Corporate Progress or Greenwashing?

I received this press release in my email today. I know I have promoted the company which is probably the purpose behind me receiving it. What I do find interesting is the attention paid to blogs by corporations. It is amazing the lengths a company will go to promote a green image. I'm sure other blogs on other topics receive the same type of messages.

I have no idea whether anything they claim in the press release is true, how close they are to reaching their goals or if they're just greenwashing. I am not endorsing anything but I have finally realized the power of the internet as my soapbox.

For Immediate Release

July 31, 2007

PURPLE GOES GREEN: CADBURY SCHWEPPES LAUNCHES
'ABSOLUTE' COMMITMENT TO CLIMATE ACTION

Cadbury Schweppes has launched its new environmental strategy designed to transform the company's manufacturing processes and assets, to minimize the use of energy, packaging and water in response to the challenge of climate change. Central to the strategy is the adoption of absolute rather than relative* targets for carbon emission reductions.

Cadbury Schweppes has pledged a 50% reduction of net absolute carbon emissions by 2020 aiming to reduce not just the 'relative' energy intensity of its global operations but also its absolute* carbon emissions through a balanced program of "saving, switching and, as a last resort, off-setting"**. This reinforces the recent moves by a number of retail and service sector companies around the world and adds considerable momentum to the growing consensus for 'absolute' measures.

In order to focus its strategy, Cadbury Schweppes has set the following targets:

• 50% reduction of net absolute carbon emissions by 2020 - with a minimum of 30% from in-company actions

• 10% reduction in packaging used per tonne of product and 25% in the more highly packaged seasonal and gifting items

• Use more environmentally sustainable forms of packaging - aim for 60% biodegradable, with 100% of secondary packaging being recyclable

• All 'water scarce' sites to have water reduction programs in place

Having launched its environmental commitments, Cadbury Schweppes hopes to unite the industry, joining forces with peers and partners throughout the supply chain, to reduce the carbon footprint of the food manufacturing sector.

Todd Stitzer, CEO of Cadbury Schweppes, said: "We recognize that if we are serious about tackling climate change, we need to be 'absolutely' committed. This means re-thinking the way we do business, embedding sustainability into every decision we take. Not only will this have a strong social and environmental impact but also a positive economic impact too in the longer term.”

The Greening of Canada

In Canada, Cadbury Adams, the largest confectionery company in the country and a subsidiary of Cadbury Schweppes, is taking
Cadbury Schweppes’ global leadership to a local level, expanding its focus on the environment through increased use of renewable energy, youth education programs, employee volunteerism, strategic partnerships, and reductions in packaging and energy use.

“Our goal is to have a positive impact on our environment and in our communities,” said David Sculthorpe, President,
Cadbury Adams Canada. “As business leaders, we have a responsibility and an obligation to help drive change. In today’s environment, how you make a product is just as important as the product itself.”

“Cadbury Adams has demonstrated its ongoing leadership in environmental action among Canadian corporations,” said Tom Heintzman, President, Bullfrog Power. “Choosing clean, emissions-free power for its head office and national distribution centre has been a significant step forward in reducing its carbon footprint and creating a healthier environment for future generations.”

Cadbury Schweppes’ environmental program has been in place for 15 years with a more aggressive push globally and locally within the last few years. In Canada, Cadbury Adams launched its environmental program two years ago and has already taken the following action to reduce its environmental footprint in Canada:

Carbon Emissions

· Implemented head office policies including network-only printers, motion sensor lighting, automatic double sided printing, and transit subsidy program

· Cadbury Adams’ head office and national distribution centre are Bullfrog Powered, sourcing green electricity and reducing carbon emissions by 4000 tonnes annually

· Reduced energy consumption across manufacturing facilities by 6% from 2005 to 2006

Packaging

· Increased recycled materials in corrugated packaging from 50% to 73% or more than 1300 tonnes annually

· Reduced boxboard waste by over 29 tonnes (12.7%) and shrink wrap usage by 14 tonnes (11%) across Cadbury Easter Portfolio

· Reduced all product packaging by 3% per ton in 2006

Community Involvement – 2006 - 2007

· Planted more than 1650 trees at Parc Downsview Park to help build Canada’s largest, urban, national forest

· Planted more than 1500 native shrubs and grasses on Toronto Island

· Restored hiking trails in Calgary’s Fish Creek Provincial Park

· Shoreline clean up along Ile St-Quentin Regional Park in Trois-Rivieres and along 14 km of the Toronto Waterfront, winning a Toronto Clean, Beautiful City award

Cadbury Adams has also partnered with Learning for a Sustainable Future (LSF) to create EcoLeague, a program that will rally behind kids from grades 4 to 8 to inspire Canadians to save the planet. Through youth forums, EcoLeague will provide the tools, resources and volunteers to implement environmental action plans in their classrooms, schools, homes and communities.

Green Activism

"We realize we cannot minimize the environmental impact of the manufacturing industry alone,” concludes Mr. Stitzer. “We need to work with our people, our peers and partners in our supply chain to reduce the size of our collective carbon footprint - acting as a united force for good".

In addition to taking real action, Cadbury Schweppes is also encouraging 'green activism' within the company, with employees empowered to take action, press for change and create a culture of environmental consciousness.

About Cadbury Adams Canada Inc.

Cadbury Adams Canada is the country's largest confectionery company and manufactures, markets and sells some of the country's leading chocolate, candy, cough and gum brands such as Caramilk, Dairy Milk, Mr. Big**, Dentyne*, Trident*, Bubblicious*, Halls*, and
Maynards Wine Gums*. Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Cadbury Adams is a subsidiary of Cadbury Schweppes plc, a leading global confectionery and beverage company. Cadbury Schweppes is number one in sugar and functional confectionery, a strong number two in gum and the world's third largest soft drinks group.

- 30 -

For more information, or to arrange an interview with a Cadbury Schweppes spokesperson, please contact:

David Weinstein Stephanie Minna

Strategic Objectives Cadbury Adams

Tel: (416) 366-7735; Fax: (416) 366-2295 Tel: (416) 590-5904

Email: davidw@strategicobjectives.com Email: stephanie.minna@cs-americas.com

*Absolute' vs. 'Relative' carbon emissions: Many companies have commitments to reduce their 'relative' carbon emissions, i.e. emissions per tonne of finished product. This means that as production processes become more efficient their energy intensity is reduced and less carbon is emitted. However under relative commitments, if the business grows the total amount of carbon emitted may also grow. An 'absolute' cut commits a business to reduce not only the emissions per tonne but also the overall footprint despite any growth. This makes absolute targets more challenging, particularly for a sector such as manufacturing.

** Save, Switch, Offset: The strategy outlines a clear hierarchy of control, starting with:

1. Saving by minimizing the use of energy through process optimization and efficiency improvements, or the installation of CHP/co-generation to optimize total energy requirements

2. Switching to more environmentally-friendly energy forms such as low or zero carbon fuels; the purchase of electricity on renewable energy tariffs or the installation of "renewable energy" generation on-site (e.g. solar, wind, biofuel)

3. Offsetting by incentivizing saving and switching by others, as a last resort

100 Mile Diet

The 100-mile diet, or any variation, is not about weight loss. It is about eating local and minimizing the impact on the environment with your food choices. A three week story was recently in the Globe and Mail about how one family managed. It is an interesting take on how you can adjust. They did make an exception for coffee, and I agree with that one.

If the articles are locked use this Google news search. Usually they work from there. To see the extensive coverage on this topic if you search in Google News you will find a lot of articles. Maybe one for your area to help you along.

Week1, Week2, and Week 3

Happy eating.

The Price of Progress

Pollution from industrial practices can linger for generations. This is the price we pay for the comforts of modern life in North America. How much are we willing to pay? How much of the cost will be paid by our children? Nuclear plants, factories, refineries and others leave a legacy that is not always forgotten. There is an extensive article at IHT.com about a closed Ford plant in New Jersey that was deemed cleaned up under Superfund. In 1994 it was determined that no further risk would come from the plant, which was closed in 1980. Now, a new lawsuit has emerged for contaminated soil and water, health effects, etc. I can't say that I'm surprised but I'm not sure how many more people need to suffer? Small towns like Braidwood, IL and Upper Ringwood, NJ are being decimated by pollution of their industrial neighbors. Add the economic devastation when communities build an economic reliance on an industry and it disappears.

I feel it is pretty obvious that economic and environmental policy need to change in order for us to survive. I'm afraid of what it will take to make the change.

Photo from IHT.com and Sylwia Kapuscinski/NYT

Free Energy

Hopefully some scientific testing can resolve this issue. It is nice to dream though...

Saving the Planet is Easy

You can do so many easy things to help the environment. The "Flick Off" campaign has an interesting ad. Their latest ad has a young woman talking about what can be done. She admits that she won't eat vegetarian all the time or drive a biodiesel car. But she will turn out the lights and not idle her car!!! Another easy thing is to get the new GE credit card that buys carbon offsets for you.

It looks like the plan is to continue doing what got us here with a little more consideration for everything around us. Don't do to much to inconvenience yourself, though.

While I agree that little steps on a wide scale will make a difference we can't think that it will end there. If we don't sacrifice now our children will be forced to later.

Toyota Develops PHEV

Tesla has announced how that it has received over 500 orders for it's roadsters. I think Toyota may sell a few more. This morning they announced approval for PHEV tests for Japanese public roads with plans for Europe and the U.S. We'll see how this develops as they don't have anything formal in place for the U.S. roads. Read the full story here, at CNBC.com

Technology in the Garden

Gardening is a favorite hobby for many people. A friend of mine found this, The Garden Monitoring Project, for a monitoring system for your garden. It will monitor soil moisture, temperature and other must have information for proper garden management. I'm not an electronics expert so I'm not sure whether you can build it with some recycled electronic components. I also don't know the power usage of this unit but you may be able to add a small PV and battery to make it an off-grid appliance. With all the information it can gather I'm sure it could help you enhance your organic garden production in some way and you'll never forget to water again with the automatic sprinkler connection. These kinds of displays of creativity make me feel hopeful that we'll be able to harness our brain power to find solutions to our environmental problems. I guess that will happen when less people read Perez Hilton or follow Lindsay Lohan's escapades.

Automotive Greenwashing

Toyota has been hailed as the leader in automotive efficiency and technology. It is no secret that they have also been trying to rebrand themselves as an American automaker that is in touch with consumers and is not disrupting employment in the domestic auto sector.

Part of this is to promote new environmental initiatives that will support the perception that they are an environmental leader because of the Prius. They have announced changes at some manufacturing facilities including PV for electricity. As TreeHugger pointed out they are only making press releases about future plans and have not actually done anything yet.

On the other side, Subaru has a plant in Indiana that has made some pretty remarkable achievements. Read about it here.

Greenwashing is something that will spread to every possible industry until the spotlight and celebrity rock concerts move on to another worthy cause. If you plan on buying products from environmentally friendly companies look at results and not plans to do something.

The Greenbox. Let's hope it's real...

In the past perpetual motion and nuclear fusion have been harnessed. Unfortunately, many of those feats were subsequently discredited. Now a new technology that sounds just as fascinating has been identified in Wales. The details behind the technology have not been released by the inventors. I can't blame them. What they claim it can do is remarkable and I hope it is real.

The simple explanation of the technology is a box is connected to a vehicle emissions system and collects most of the gases and emits primarily water vapor. You change it at every fill up. Then

Through a chemical reaction, the captured gases from the box would be fed to algae, which would then be crushed to produce a bio-oil. This extract can be converted to produce a biodiesel almost identical to normal diesel.

This biodiesel can be fed back into a diesel engine, the emptied Greenbox can be affixed to the car and the cycle can begin again.

The process also yields methane gas and fertilizer, both of which can be captured separately. The algae required to capture all of Britain's auto emissions would take up around 1,000 acres.

That's quite a bit for something that connects to your car exhaust. If this thing is real and can do all it says it can this will change everything. That's an understatement but how else do you say it. I'm looking forward to more coming out on this about the science and feasibility behind it. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Outdoor Cooking with a Twist

So it's hot, hazy and humid. But you really want to make an oven roast, casserole or something like that. It's too hot to run the oven in the house at 400 so you fire up the BBQ instead.

How about having that roast without running your oven? The Sun Oven is the answer. I read a little about this thing and I find it so simple yet amazing. You know that slap your forehead kind of simple. It has so many practical applications and it will save you on energy costs too. I really love finding things that use simple ways to do things in an environmentally friendly way.

Live Earth

I know I'm way behind since the concerts happened almost two weeks ago. I originally wasn't going to comment at all because I don't think it is productive. Rex Murphy wrote an excellent piece that pretty much summarizes how I feel about the Live Earth spectacle. This was found on page A23 of the Globe and Mail on July 14, 2007

Live Earth? How about live irony?

The reviews are in concerning last weekend's eco-sanctimony staged by global warming's Nostradamus, Al Gore, and most of them aren't pretty. It was, according to the advance hype - and the hype for this event matched anything Hollywood roars up for Johnny Depp in a bandana, or a new Jessica Simpson big-screen onslaught - going to command an audience in excess of two billion. There is nothing original in rounding up a beaker full of rock stars and movie celebrities, faded songsters and a rapper or two to variously strum, gyrate and posture for a cause du jour . We have had We Are the World and Live Aid, Willie Nelson doing his minstrel bit for the American farmer, and last year's care-a-polooza, the Make Poverty History jamboree, which didn't.

NBC gave three hours of prime time to last Saturday's effort, which trawled a measly 2.7 million viewers, a number that would be embarrassing for a home-cooking show or a rerun of Three's Company . Not even such class-A world-dominating entertainers as Madonna and Shakira, assisted by those cleavage climatologists, the Pussycat Dolls, could lure the torpid and the unaware, in any numbers, to the home screen. Nor could Snoop Dogg (the bard of Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang ) appearing on stage in Hamburg (Hamburg? Who knew?) jolt the sing-a-long into a zone of even mild and credible buzz.

What happened?

I suppose the spectacle of the world's most wasteful people, rock-star plutocrats with their cribs and bling, caravans of trailer trucks and 100,000-watt amplifiers, taking a day out of their wealth-stuffed lives to preach to the less well off of the world on the moral importance of consuming less "to save the planet" set the hypocrisy bar so high that it put too great a strain on the digestion of ordinary people. "Private jets for climate change," the phrase of one rock star who declined to join the bandwagon, summed up this aspect most wickedly.

Unless outfitted with a cast-iron stomach - and I mean a real one - how could anybody endure Madonna of the Nine Mansions wrapping herself in the ascetics of the eco-movement? Hyper-indulgent, super-pampered, colossally wealthy, manically consumerist entertainment celebrities preaching restraint to others: Live Earth was a weird and monstrous journey to a whole new dimension of live irony.

Come back Uriah Heep: All is forgiven.

Not even the professional environmentalists could stay their gorge at Madonna's participation. They gave the world the news that the Material Girl owns shares in the most politically incorrect enterprises, such as Alcoa, the American aluminum giant, the Ford Motor Company and Weyerhaeuser, which . . . chops trees for money.

Then there was the sheer deep folly of it all. What has Shakira, or her hips, got to offer on the question of the world's weather over the next hundred years? But Shakira is Robert Oppenheimer on steroids compared with Geri Halliwell of the long-forgotten fluff band the Spice Girls - "Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want etc. etc. etc. etc."

Geri Halliwell, Snoop Dogg, Shakira, Madonna and the Pussycat arborists are an unlikely think tank (maybe a tank top) on global warming or anything else. They are career publicists of themselves, artists in the merchandising of fluff and ego.

But beyond the obvious hypocrisy, beyond the saccharine Mickey Rooney "let's put on a show" conceit of the Live Earth dud-spectacular, I think something rather deeper and, perhaps grimly encouraging, accounts for its failure.

The public has just gotten tired of "stars." These luminescent bodies are now in much the same leaky boat as most politicians, because, in so many ways, stars themselves, by trying to wed some aspects of politics to strengthen or underwrite their highly capitalist careers, are seen as manipulative in precisely the same cynical way politicians are. Entertainers are, primarily, politicians of their own careers.

They don't have the cred they used to have. They have been exposed as shills for themselves, before anything else. And so it's not the elephantine "carbon footprint" of Madonna or the big bands that turned people away from Live Earth.

It's the growing perception that the strutting icons up there on all those stages are playing a game just as the politicians play a game, and for very much the same self-serving, egotistic reasons.

It's an Animal Farm moment for our time. "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

Now it's: Which are the stars and which the politicians? Madonna and Gore - can you spot the difference?

I couldn't agree more Rex...

Recycling at a higher level

Consumers buy a lot of stuff. They throw out a lot of stuff they bought. I always think something that is garbage can be used. I would also like to buy stuff that creates less garbage if I could.

Great Green Goods is a website that showcases some products made from "garbage". Who knew so many things could be made from things that would be thrown out? Hopefully it inspires some of you to get creative. I've seen old tires converted to plant pots and a few other things but this site has some really creative products. I want to try and find something to convert from garbage around my house. Good luck to anyone who does and send it to me. If you plan on selling your creation, Great Green Goods might showcase it for you.

China and the Environment

Chinese products have been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons. Ralph Nader spoke about this on CNN recently.



Environmental practices in China have been facing increased scrutiny as well. The writers at Globalisation and the Environment have done extensive reporting on the intersection between Chinese economic and environmental practices. Recently reports surfaced that Chinese government officials convinced the authors of a World Bank report to remove damaging information on Chinese environmental practices. Now, the Chinese government are saying the World Bank report is "not very reliable".

China is a rapidly developing economy and new administrative institutions are being developed to keep up with the growth. I'm not suggesting they have an excuse to pollute recklessly and sell contaminated toothpaste but if we can't inspect everything for safety how could we expect them to do so? I also don't think "developed" economies have an exemplary environmental record to parade around with. If we weren't buying cheap Chinese products they probably wouldn't have as many environmental problems. Again I repeat that I am not making excuses for the Chinese. Just in case somebody wanted to call me a communist or something. I think we need to consider the pace of Chinese economic development relative to the institutions they have to manage the economy. We also need to consider whether our economic relationship with/dependence on China is worth the environmental degradation.

If it's polluting the water...

So I'm reading the Globe and Mail today and this headline jumps out at me

"Ontario warned of new chemicals in water"

There are new ones? That's right folks. New chemicals in the water. Guess where they're coming from?

"The chemicals, which are showing up in water around the world, come from farm activity, antibiotics or other discarded medication that is poured down the toilet or sink, medication found in human waste, and run-off from antibacterial soaps and shampoos."

A lot of it is coming from our bathrooms. If the products we use and rub on our faces, and other parts, can cause water pollution what are they doing to us? Something to think about.

I won't be making a lot of posts, if any, for the next few days. Things are getting a little hectic with the outdoor projects and activities with the weather being so nice I find it hard to sit at the computer. I'll take a few days off and come back soon.