Sustainable Operations Summit Offers High-Level Tools for Green Strategies

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MONTEREY, Calif. -- Paul Hawken challenged business and civic leaders to raise the bar on their sustainability goals; Will Wynn explained how being the mayor of Austin, Texas, requires him to a key role in the climate fight; Ray Anderson listed seven examples of how new ways of thinking increased sales and reduced waste and pollution at InterfaceFLOR; and Robert Kennedy, Jr. laid out the reasons why good business needs good environmental policy.

Those four thought leaders served as keynote speakers at this year's Sustainable Operations Summit, an event hosted by CraigMichaels this week in Monterey, Calif. The summit, which launched last year, brings together business and civic leaders with industry experts to share success stories and cutting-edge ideas in reducing businesses' environmental impacts.

More than a hundred representatives of major corporations, municipalities and school districts gathered in Monterey to hear the keynotes, but also to sit on more intimate panels that covered in detail what companies have done to reduce costs, increase sales and green their operations, all at the same time.

Not surprisingly, GHG emissions and carbon offsets figured prominently on the Summit's agenda. Representatives from tech giants Yahoo and Sun Microsystems explained the ways their companies have measured their emissions and planned to reduce and offset them.

Christina Page, Yahoo's Director of Climate and Energy, explained that her company is using the voluntary carbon market for its offset program as a way of avoiding the controversy that still surrounds the additionality requirements of other offset programs. And Lori Duvall, Sun's Director of Eco-Responsibility, illustrated the complexity of supply chain footprint issues when she said that her company may end up calculating the carbon footprint on behalf of its many suppliers in order to accurately gauge its own footprint.

Complexity and controversy were the topic of the day in a later session on carbon offset strategies. Both James Hunt, the city of Boston's Chief of Energy Services, and News Corporation's Director of Energy Initiatives, Rachel Webber, took extensive questions on just what constitutes a "real" carbon offset during their presentations. Hunt explained how Boston is developing its own local carbon-offset market to help encourage city residents to join the government and area businesses in taking action. And Webber walked the group through the process News Corp. used to develop its strategy.

The company had a realization early on: "Carbon neutral is a target, not a goal," Webber said. "The goal is helping to solve the climate problem." In addition to redefining carbon neutrality as part of a larger process, the company has also incorporated a "shadow price" for carbon into its purchasing decisions. And last year, the company made its first foray into the carbon market, purchasing offsets enough to make several of its business units, as well as the Emmy Awards and a direct-to-DVD feature film, carbon neutral.

Among the other main topics at the Summit was the benefits of setting green building standards and goals: Lois Grobert Citi's Global Sustainability Program Manager, unveiled the company's steps for developing new green buildings in its corporate campuses as well as Citibank and Citi Financial stores. 

Mingled amongst the panels were the real draw for most attendees: the opportunity to have a one-on-one sit-down with experts in sustainability across a range of topics to explore how their company or organization can address any number of environmental impacts.

According to some of the company representatives at the Summit, attendees were approaching them with questions from the absolute beginning stages of sustainability planning to revisiting successful programs and how to apply those lessons to new elements of their operations.

But across the board, representatives said that the tone of the gathering further illustrated just how serious companies are getting about their sustainability platforms. At one point the green business movement was likened to a "bullet train," instead of a bandwagon, although the speed of adoption doesn't seem to be preventing newcomers from joining in quickly as well.

Ray Anderson, founder of InterfaceFLOR and a leading lion of the corporate sustainability movement, aptly summed up the message of the Summit when he said during his keynote speech, "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around."

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