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The following post is part of the course work for “Live Exchange” the foundational course on communication for The MBA Design Strategy Program at California College of the Arts. The rest of the posts are presented here.

by Alexander R. Scott

The high price of advertising has always driven me crazy. As a business owner and partner in a creative shop here in Oregon with a decade of experience in marketing and advertising in the creative industry, I admit to being a penny pincher (I like to think of it as financially conservative).  I'm always looking for new ways to drive costs down and have less of an environmental impact.

Take a television commercial- aside from the pricey airtime, you're looking at the costs for a director, production crew, actors, sets, special effect and editing. It is not surprising to see that the average cost to just produce a thirty second spot runs around a half a million dollars. And almost no one knows this more than Nike. With an annual advertising budget nearing $2.5 billion, they're no strangers to the high cost of producing dynamic, beautiful and complex content on a global scale.

But one of Nike's latest commercials has started to get noticed. Not for the exotic location or celebrity endorsement, but for bringing a little bit of recycling to their advertising.

Nike made a splash with the launch of their Better World campaign focusing around a mission to create a better world through sport. Aside from a list of some innovative earth-friendly products they feature a new commercial- built from 100% recycled ads pulled out of previous campaigns. Through some clever editing, the two-minute spot showcases the inspiration and history of the brand while bringing attention to the concept of reuse and reducing resources.

The idea to create a digital mash-up using their old content is a bold and clever move. Recently Dr. Pepper and McDonalds took us on a walk down memory lane with re-runs of old television ads in an attempt to capture a little nostalgia- but Nike put environmental consciousness front and center. It made me think, how can we take this idea a step further and build better sustainability into our advertising?

1. Reuse Content:
   Nike pulled from their vault, but companies like Thought Equity have made a business around reselling media at a fraction of the cost to produce it independently. Whether it be Creative Common’s licensed material, professional licenses or internal remixing- reusing material is easier than ever.


2. Stock Content
   Similar to Thought Equity, dozens of internet companies have emerged to sell cheap licenses for video clips, audio, photos and more. You’ll be relegated to sharing your iStockphoto of a sunset with hundreds others- but you’ll be saving time and the expense of a professional crew.


3. New Media Channels:
   Perhaps the biggest change is the ways advertisers are communicating their message. With dwindling returns on television commercials and print ads, advertisers are becoming savvy to joining the conversation on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. We’re also seeing companies create commercials just for the web- bringing distribution costs to nearly zero. Companies are even opening their doors to user-submitted video and content, letting their customers create the messaging.

We see the move away from traditional media as an evolutionary step in technology- but the potential to reduce costs and resources in the creation process is significant. Smaller footprint, lower costs and greater opportunity for consumers to influence a brand. Advertising must adapt to our economic and environmental challenges to stay ahead of the race, and it’s up to us to push them to the finish line.

Image credit: Domino/Unsplash

This post is part of a blogging series by economics students at the Presidio Graduate School's MBA program. You can follow along here.

By: Chad Reese

San Diego County has a temperate climate, a population of over three million people and, according to the last US Census, is home to 6,687 farms. The county leads the nation in avocado and nursery crop production. Still, despite its moderate climate, multiple growing seasons, high national agriculture rankings and a $1.5 billion agriculture industry, nearly two-thirds of what’s grown in the San Diego region can’t be eaten. Local farmers are producing products such as sod and landscaping shrubs.

Major challenges to San Diego food production include increasing water costs and loss of agriculture land due to population growth. The shelves of mainstream San Diego grocery stores are stocked with products that have been shipped an average of 1500 miles from factory farm to grocery, and the typical prepared meal in the US contains ingredients from at least five countries outside of America. These are the unfortunate economics of industrial agriculture.

The "Good Food" Movement

In contrast, a recent national trend reveals increasing consumer interest in locally grown food. The Good Food Movement, as the trend has been dubbed, encourages consumption of local and organic or sustainably grown food from small- and medium-sized family farms.
With its heavy emphasis on local family farms that grow organically, San Diego well fits the "good food" trend. In fact, San Diego County is home to more organic farms than in any other county in the nation. However, most of the organic produce grown in the county is sold to wholesalers who aggregate and distribute to national markets. Some of the San Diego-grown produce is sold directly to local restaurants and stores, at produce stands, certified farmers' markets and CSA programs, but small farm production precludes selling to local institutional buyers like schools and hospitals that have minimum volume purchasing requirements.

In an effort to bridge the local production and distribution gaps, a group of San Diego food producers is banding together to create a local food aggregation and distribution system – a "food hub" – called San Diego Growers.

What is a Food Hub?

In September 2009, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched the “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative to minimize barriers to local food systems development. A food hub, the initiative explains, provides small and medium farms access to capital including trucks, warehouse storage and processing facilities. Food hubs also offer marketing and business services to growers.

The formal USDA food hub definition:

"A centrally located facility with a business management structure facilitating the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution, and/or marketing of locally/regionally produced food products."

US food producers who are located within 25 miles of San Diego County are eligible to join San Diego Growers if they practice sustainable farming methods that promote biodiversity and human health; farmers also must pledge to avoid genetically modified organisms or genetically engineered seeds. The current version of the San Diego food hub comprises nearly 25 food producers and functions under the umbrella of Tierra Miguel Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public benefit farm and educational center. According to Jonathan Reinbold, Director of Tierra Miguel Foundation, San Diego Growers has recently decided to pursue an agricultural cooperative model and is making rapid moves to make the organizational change. The group's goal is 50 food producers contributing to the San Diego hub.

Growing it Forward

In the economics of traditional agriculture, the beginning of a growing season provides a premium to the first grower that harvests a crop, but soon other producers flood the market and drive prices downward for the rest of the season. In contrast, food hub participants have more bargaining power collectively than individually, and costs are allayed as risk and capital spending are spread among all participants. In the words of Ashley Colpaart, Farm to Institution Coordinator for the Tierra Miguel Farm and San Diego Growers, the regional food hub is "building a value chain instead of a supply chain."

Chad Reese is an MBA candidate in Sustainable Management at Presidio Graduate School. His professional focus is the nexus of energy, water and food production. Follow Chad on Twitter.

Image credit: Sean Mullowney/Unsplash

By Peter Vander Auwera, innovation lead at SWIFT

In any conversation about mobile banking services in the developing world, it is never long before someone mentions M-PESA in Kenya. It's now a familiar story: in March 2007 Safaricom, the leading mobile operator in Kenya, launched an SMS-based money transfer system that enables consumers to deposit, send and withdraw funds using their mobile phones.

Use of M-PESA skyrocketed, with the system quickly being adopted by more than 35 per cent of Kenya's adult population. And the moral of the story is clear: mobile technology is key to enabling financial inclusion for the 'unbanked'. And it’s the mobile network operators - the companies who already have extensive networks of customers in these markets – who are best-placed to provide the mobile banking services that will finally give people in the developing world the levels of convenience those of us in developed markets take for granted. Right? Well the numbers are certainly compelling.

Of the 6.9 billion people on our planet, just 30 per cent (2.1 billion) have bank accounts. But 75 per cent - 5.2 billion people - have mobile phones. In Africa, bank penetration runs at between 10 and 50 per cent - while mobile weighs in at 40-100 per cent. In Asia-Pacific, the figures are 20-60 per cent for bank penetration and 40-100 per cent for mobile. And in Latin America, it's between 30 and 60 per cent for bank and 60-80 per cent for mobile.

Logic suggests that take-up of mobile banking is inevitably going to be rapid in markets where people have no access to services other than via their mobile phones. And, as has been the case in Kenya, the winners (apart from the end consumers) will surely be the mobile network operators: given the relative penetration of bank access versus mobile access, how could it be otherwise?

The fact is that a sustained approach to enabling true financial inclusion requires more than a few disparate, opportunistic services - however successful. And to ensure all the pieces of the puzzle come together in the way they need to, the mobile network operators need input from other players - including the banks.

The right regulation needs to be in place if mobile banking and payments services are to be really safe for consumers. The banks have the expertise, the robustness and the willingness to cope with the rigours of regulation. When it comes to safety, security and reliability, the banks have by far the best pedigree.

The banks also have the fail-safe, scalable technology platforms to cope with the payments processing demand that the availability of wide-scale mobile banking services in the developing world would create. That is not to say that the banks can single-handedly enable financial inclusion in the developing world either. They need to tap into the strengths of the mobile network operators and the device providers - their agility, and, most significantly, their existing penetration among the customer bases being targeted.

In short, the banks, mobile operators and device manufacturers need to collaborate to realise the full potential of mobile to bring 21st century banking convenience to the unbanked. These players also need to work together to fully understand the needs of the unbanked.

Anyone with an interest in leveraging mobile for financial inclusion needs to put themselves in the shoes of the unbanked. They need to realise that the unbanked are not necessarily poor. And that even the poor need access to financial management tools.

To find out more about collaborative innovation in mobile – and for opportunities to put yourself in the shoes of the unbanked to understand their needs - check out the forthcoming conference - Innotribe - Mobile Payments: Connecting the Unbanked - taking place in Mumbai on 1-2 June, and designed explicitly to bring together global banks and mobile industry players to hammer out the way forward for using mobile technology to enable financial inclusion. 

Image credit: Vojtech Bruzek/Unsplash

I take little credit for the intelligence of this post. Indeed, I give all that might be due to Werther & Chandler’s 2011 text, Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Stakeholders in a Global Environment, as well as to my Green Mountain College MBA Triple-Bottom-Line Management Course, in progress. Through these studies, the five below drivers have been articulated as those most germane to the promotion of CSR, but I ask you, my favorite TriplePundit readers, are there others? Have motivating factors been missed? What else has brought us here, to this CSR "Tipping Point"?

The Five Driving Forces of CSR

1. Increased Affluence: CSR becomes more relevant as economies grow and stabilize. Therefore, the greatest attention to CSR is found in developed countries. Stable work and security provide the luxury of choice and socially responsible activism. No such luxury exists when basic needs are in question.
2. Ecological Sustainability: Perhaps the most obvious and most talked about of the drivers, concerns over pollution, waste, natural resource depletion, climate change and the like continue to fuel the CSR discussion and heighten expectations for proactive corporate action. After all, it is in the best interest of firms to protect for the sustainable future the long-term availability of the resources on which they depend.
3. Globalization: Globalization has had considerable impacts. First, the increased wealth and power of multinational corporations has led to questions on the decreased authority of the nation-state, especially in developing areas. Further, cultural differences have added to the complexity of CSR as expectations of acceptable behavior vary regionally. With increased power comes increased responsibility and globalization has fueled the need to filter all strategic decisions through a CSR lens to ensure optimal outcomes for diverse stakeholders.
4. Free Flow of Information: Yes, blame the bloggers, but through the Internet and other electronic mediums the flow of information has shifted back to the stakeholders, especially in the case of three important groups: consumers, NGOs and the general media. Easily accessible and affordable communication technologies have permanently changed the game and only truly authentic and transparent companies will profit in the long term.
5. The Power of the Brand: Brands are today the focal point of corporate success and much of the health of the brand depends on public perception of the corporation. In other words, reputation is key and honest CSR is a way to protect that reputation and therefore the brand.

As reported by the aforementioned text, Malcolm Gladwell referred to the tipping point as the point of critical mass after which an idea spreads widely and becomes generally accepted and broadly implemented. I argue that CSR has reached such a tipping point, pushed there by the five above factors. I further argue that CSR will become more mainstream and more part and parcel of everyday business strategy. These five forces have brought us here and will continue to promote and develop trends towards greater social responsibility on the part of firms. But, are there others? Factors that have not here been considered that have or will prompt this continued CSR evolution?    

Image credit: Morgan Sessions/Unsplash

This post is part of a blogging series by economics students at the Presidio Graduate School's MBA program. You can follow along here. 

By Jourdan Phillips    

Plastic bags were initially introduced to the US market in the 1950s for packaging items such as bread loaves.  In the 1970s, product utilization went mainstream as a shopping carrier bag to rival/replace paper bags.  Plastic bags were viewed as an environmental salve to the paper bag shortages and environmental logging concerns that filled the Mid-1970s to Early 1980s.  For thirty years, demand soared as plastic bags offered consumers a “one and done” product usability.  With plastic bags having a marginal cost to retailers and a perceived zero cost to the consumer the product proliferation without market restraint led to a Tragedy of the Commons.  As plastic bag use spread globally their negative externalities began to emerge; reports of littering, lack of biodegradability in landfills, ocean contamination and other environmental pollutants began to crop up.  An intended utilitarian good quickly turned into a non-disposable consumer good.

At first, there were attempts to create a market in property rights to control the impact of plastic bags on the environment; retailers created recycling programs to take back the bags and some even had a deposit refund associated with their return, but the reform didn’t take.  Consumers just don’t recycle their plastic bags.  Without the market of plastic bag recycling, plastic bags became a common good that was over-exploited by the consumer and the supplier without proper disposal. Plastic bags became a market failure.  The EPA states that today the United States alone currently uses around 380 billion plastic bags annually; less than 10% of these bags get recycled.  Vincent Cobb, President of reusablebags.com described the plight of plastic bags , “[They] are a brilliant product but they are a victim of their own success.  They’ve been perceived as free when they have a real cost to the environment and to consumers.”  

Until the start of the 21^st century, the social cost was hidden and economic cost was thought to be null, that is until the San Francisco Department of the Environment (SFDOE) put a price on the cost to “cleanup the commons."  In 2004, the SFDOE released a study of estimated costs for clean up and landfill processing of plastic bags at 17 cents for each bag. For San Francisco, this adds up to $8.5 million in costs to clean up the over 100,000 plastic bags found annually in the waste stream.  To correct the negative externalities caused by plastic bags, governments had two options: command and control regulation (bans) and direct price intervention (fees and taxes).  In 2002, Ireland, by way of environmental taxation, and Bangladesh, via a regulatory ban, were the first nations to introduce government policy on plastic bags. Today over 140 cities, states, and nations have implemented a form of plastic bag reduction policy.  

With a reduced demand for plastic bags, suppliers followed the trappings of “see a need, fill a need” product development.  Reusable bags were quickly championed as the new right way to transport our harvest.  The benefits over plastic bags were quickly apparent; they reduced litter, were cost-effective and, used continuously, - are environmentally effective.  The number of reusable bag imports to the U.S. rose from 100 million in 2000 to half a billion in 2010.  With over 3.3 billion bags imported to date and the U.S population at just over 311 million, we have already exceeded “a few per person” utilization. 

Plastic bags were a market failure because they couldn’t satisfy any of the three R’s: reduce, reuse, and recycle. Where plastic bags failed at recycling, reusable bags must triumph at their intended design.  There is a potential Catch-22 that may ensue around reusable bags if they aren’t able to transcend the same market failure mechanisms that plagued the plastic bag.  As consumers purchase numerous reusable bags and/or collect free ones from retailers, the bag inventory in-house starts to accumulate.   It remains to be seen if consumer behavior around bag reuse will adapt fast enough to impose market control on the scale of reusable bags.  Should the stockpile of reusable bags begin to seep out of kitchen cupboards and car trunks and into our landfills and roadsides, it is possible that a repeat offense of negative externalities will be seen in this new generation of carrier bags.

Image credit: Anna Shvets/Pexels

Though on the one hand the bicycle is perhaps the most basic form of transportation, on the other, it's possible to spend several thousands of dollars on a bike made from the lightest, most high performance composite aerospace materials available.

Manufacturers of high performance bikes have sought frame materials for lightness, strength, and comfort that also provide the necessary stiffness to maximize the power transfer from the rider to the road. In this quest, materials have evolved from steel alloys to aluminum, and then to more exotic materials such as titanium. Today, carbon fiber is the material of choice, meeting all the performance characteristics, while offering the benefit of being able to be formed into any shape the bicycle designer so chooses. However, while this aerospace material is great to build with, it has been problematic to recycle at end-of-life.

But Trek, in conjunction with Materials Innovation Technology (MIT), has implemented a solution to recycle carbon fiber scrap from its US facilities. This will make the material less of an environmental burden, diverting a projected 54,000 lbs of material from landfill to re-purposed use each year.

Gizmag reports that the material for recycling will come from manufacturing waste as well as non-compliant components, along with warranty returned frames. They also state the reclamation process will involve the process of pyrolysis, which entails heating the carbon fiber material in a virtually oxygen free environment, thereby removing the binding resins while leaving the fibers free for re-composition into new products.

The source material is chopped up first, which inherently shortens the carbon fibers, causing the recycled material to be less strong. In this regard, the recycling process is actually a down-cycling process. Bicycling.com quotes MIT's CEO Jim Stike as saying virgin carbon fiber may be used in aircraft, which gets reclaimed for car parts, which gets reclaimed for sporting goods which in turn may be reclaimed for computer cases. Down-cycling indeed, but nonetheless with many valuable iterations. In addition, Composites World suggests that recycled carbon fiber is 70% of the cost of virgin material, so it's cheaper if used in applications that don't not need maximal strength. As such, recycled carbon fiber should find a robust market.

However, all that said, Trek deserves for embarking on this program at all. According to Carbon Fiber Gear.com, Trek is incurring a cost to do this, but is proceeding as it deems it the right thing to to do. In terms of the business case, it's always better if a recycling process is economically justified. However, if Trek sees the future of the bicycle increasingly in carbon fiber terms, they can be applauded for making corporate social responsibility an important end to meet.

Image credit: Alejandro Lopez/Unsplash

This post is part of a blogging series by economics students at the Presidio Graduate School's MBA program. You can follow along here.

By Somsak Boonkam

The economy is a major force driving our lives, from the purchasing decisions we make to the public and private institutions we support. It determines how wealthy nations and their people are, and consequently becomes a determining factor for assessing quality of life. On the other hand, when the economy collapses, it brings us enormous devastation and takes wealth and prosperity back from the people.  When an economy ceases to grow, it’s not easy --or maybe even impossible -- to bring it back to the state where it used to be. Suppose that we are lucky enough to see economic growth and prosperity again, how can we know that a collapse is not going to happen in the future?  Maybe it’s time for us not to rely too heavily on conventional economic theories, but instead start to look for a more sustainable and effective economic strategy. The Sufficiency Economy might be a better solution for mankind to pursue and improve upon.

The Sufficiency Economy is a philosophy developed by King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand through his royal remarks over the past three decades. The Sufficiency Economy is a happiness development approach, which emphasizes the middle path as an overriding principle for appropriate conduct by people at all levels.  The middle path is a way of thinking in which no one lives tooextravagantly or too thriftily. It encourages people to live in a way where they consume only what they really need, choose products carefully, and consider their impact on others and the planet. The sufficiency economy enhances the nation’s ability to modernize without defying globalization – it provides a means to respond to negative outcomes caused by rapid economic transitions.  This philosophy is a guide to making decisions that will generate outcomes that are beneficial to the development of the country.

Thailand values this new economics philosophy as a practical tool to effectively manage capitalism in a way that aligns and engages it with social sustainable development. In doing so, Thailand hopes that this approach will foster  accountability and empower people and their communities. More importantly, the main goal of The Sufficiency Economy is to measure economic development not just using GDP, but also by taking the reduction of social inequality and poverty into account.  This philosophy is also expected to help prevent another economic collapse such as the one that occurred during the mid-90s, and to be a powerful tool for moving the nation overall economy upward.

In this globalized world, we too often expect economic decisions to happen quickly without realizing that these hasty choices could adversely affect our lives and the lives of generations that come after us. It could also be argued that many of the past economic recessions resulted from the greediness and shortsighted decision-making of a group of bankers and executives. I believe that integrating the concept of The Sufficiency Economy into our worldview will give us a different perspective that promotes gradual development based on self-reliance and the principle of having “enough.” We would all do well to keep the three main tenets of this philosophy (moderation, reasonableness, and self-immunity) in mind as we try to change peoples' attitudes, behaviors, and way of living at both the micro and macro level.

Image credit: Flickr/Marko Mikkonen

This post is part of a blogging series by economics students at the Presidio Graduate School's MBA program.

By Eric Cetnarski

As one would expect from a Great Recession, much of American political and economic discourse has been focused on job creation.  And despite signals of recovery, the unemployment rate still remains above 9 percent.  Many Americans are still struggling to maintain their households – and as a result topics like ‘green-recovery’ and climate mitigation are not primary concerns.   Americans want jobs – even if they come from traditionally ‘dirtier’ industries like fossil fuel extraction and production.

It is important that climate mitigation and green industry advocates bear this in mind when communicating their initiatives. Statistics like the employment multiplier can help these advocates tell a compelling story when courting working-class Americans and municipal governments.

What is An Employment Multiplier?
An employment multiplier is one of the measures used to determine the impact a particular industry will have upon a municipality when it arrives or departs. In its simplest terms, the employment multiplier measures the amount of direct, indirect and induced jobs created (or lost) in the area. Direct jobs are related to the specific industry, while indirect jobs are those that support the industry. Induced jobs are those that are a result of direct/indirect employee’s spending money in the community. Generally, industries with a higher multiplier are more desirable.

Fossil Fuel Extraction And Production Are Desirable Because They Create Jobs

According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Industry multiplier data, coal mining has an employment multiplier of 4.4 - meaning that for every mining job, 4.4 other jobs are created. Oil and gas extraction have a multiplier of 6.9.  As one can see, these industries can be viewed as a boon to communities.   It can prove politically difficult to thwart the advances of the fossil fuel industry -- unless compelling clean energy options can be presented.

Green Energy Alternatives Are Job Creation Options

Like other traditional energy industries, green industry initiatives have the potential to significantly bolster a region’s economy. Activities like maintaining a large solar array or maintaining a smart-grid can be as labor intensive as extracting and processing fossil fuels.   For example, the clean energy coalition Apollo Alliance reports that for every $1 million invested in smart grid installations, 5.2 direct and 7.9 indirect/induced jobs are created.   There are a host of other studies that indicate green industries like renewable energy production create both direct and indirect jobs in the municipalities they are located.

Green Jobs and the Multiplier:  Debunking Myths
Unfortunately many Americans still associate green industries with economic contraction and job loss. Traditional industries often confuse the public about green initiatives (e.g. California's 2010 Proposition 23). It is imperative that those in the green industries clearly communicate the economic benefits to communities - not just the environmental ones.   If they don't, then most American’s will overlook the burgeoning green economy in favor of what they see as a ‘safe bet’ in traditional industry.

This misconception is neither good for our economy nor our environment.

***

Eric Cetnarski is earning his MBA so that he can harness the power of business to provide more sustainable production and purchasing options to consumers and businesses. He believes profound social and environmental change can manifest from the consumer.

Image credit: Pixabay

This post is part of a blogging series by economics students at the Presidio Graduate School's MBA program. You can follow along here.

By Jonathan Gibson

Sustainability is all about fundamentals; it’s about fairness, equality, responsibility, and paying as we go.  Underlying these fundamentals is the supply and demand of resources.  With fixed world resources, we humans are forced to limit demand for these resources through population control.  Rising populations around the world imply our well-being per person is steadily declining. 

As controversial as it may be, all world-citizens need to consider population control as a means to sustaining each of our families, tribes, streams, rivers, oceans, food stock, and our livelihood.  Fewer people will result in more of us meeting our basic needs including health, jobs, and greater prosperity for everyone. We must take action to control the world population. 

Consider if you will the impact of more people on the earth, on health, and on the economy.  In all cases, the more people we have, the more constrained our resources are.  The more people we have, the more environmental resources required to sustain them, the more potential for spread of disease and the fewer resources we have to fight disease, and the less nourishment each person is able to receive.  From an economic perspective, the fewer people we have the more resources available to share (see China’s example here).  

Generally, healthier people are able to work more productively and may even be able to get better jobs given a healthy persons relatively greater ability to perform well at any given job. Controlling populations is typically accomplished by simple, low cost solutions such as education and contraceptive services. 

Education materials and curriculum, usually taught in primary schools, are straight-forward and are often provided for free by not-for-profit groups.  Additionally, contraceptive products and services, such as condoms and counseling, are low-cost and relatively much cheaper than raising a child.  The biggest hurdles to implementing these solutions are cultural and political opposition.  First of all, women’s rights are often limited in developing countries where population control is arguably the most important issue.  In some places government policies may restrict education and availability of contraceptives.

To spread this critical population control message responsible global-citizens ought to appeal to people’s own needs; health, jobs, and economic gain.  In order to broaden the coalition for population control, our sales pitch must emphasize the greater prosperity of fewer people.  The result is better nourishment, better health, and more wealth per person.  Showing people “this is better for you” will convince them to adopt population control practices. 

Government policies are of primary importance.  The following companies, which have made profitable businesses selling condoms throughout the world, may be used as examples to governments: Church and Dwight – Trojan (Stock, Website), Reckitt Benckiser – Durex (Stock, Website), Ansell – Lifestyles (Stock, Website).

While the contraception industry is a high-capital business, its operations produce high-volume and low-cost products.  Governments have the ability to increase their citizen’s wealth by adopting population control measures and reducing the contraception industry’s highest barriers such as quality certification, brand development and awareness, and access to distribution channels. All of us are responsible for the well-being of ourselves and future generations. 

We must start acting to limit population growth so as to maximize our own well-being.  To spread this message we must appeal to people’s selfishness, the human tendency to act based on prospective personal gain.  By appealing to governments, businesses, and citizens, we can create shared benefits and make the world a better place.  Let us all get back to basics and remember to pass-along this population control message wherever we go.

Jonathan Gibson is currently pursuing his MBA in Sustainable Management at Presidio Graduate School in SF, CA.  Please contact Jonathan regarding sustainable business opportunities, or to discuss this article, at jonathan.gibson@presidiomba.org.

Image credit: Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition/Unsplash 

You may have noticed something new in the toothpaste aisle, and it's not an even more elaborate toothbrush. Tom's of Maine recently changed the tube your toothpaste comes in from the much loved, and apparently, much maligned aluminum tube to a more mainstream plastic laminate. The aluminum toothpaste tube was the original environmental packaging and I was eager to get to the bottom of the switch.

Tom's of Maine had long maintained that aluminum was the material of choice for toothpaste tubes because of its recyclability. I feared that the switch was related to Tom's relationship with it's parent company Colgate-Palmolive. I'm pleased to report that Colgate-Palmolive had nothing to do with the change in materials. Rather, the decision came after a careful review of a decade of consumer comments and a reevaluation of the assumption that aluminium was the most environmentally friendly material available.

Why the switch?
When viewed in aggregate, 25% of packaging complaints about Tom's products were related to the aluminium tube. Customers complained of cracks and splits that caused the product to leak. Parents complained that the tube was too hard for young toothbrushers to use; older customers had the same difficulties.

Says plant manager Bill Hetzel, "we had taken it as an indisputable fact that aluminium was the best material available, because of its recyclability, but the customer complaints challenged us to reconsider. We looked into the life cycle of our toothpaste tubes and realized that they weren't actually being recycled as often as we'd like, and even if the tubes made their way to recycling facilities many would not accept them because of the plastic caps attached."

The decision to move to more conventional packaging was not taken lightly. The customer comment review process took several years, and once the company determined that aluminium was out, the selection of plastic laminate and the factory switchover took about a year. Says Ellen Saksen, Toothpaste Brand Manager, "as a Tom’s of Maine employee, one of the first things you learn is to seek council. Over the course of the decision making process, we had hundreds of meetings. We needed to make sure the change was was right for the consumer and right for the company. Our stewardship model is very detailed. Consumers are hard on us, we welcome that, and we’re hard on ourselves."

Why plastic laminate?
Once aluminum was off the table, the field was wide open. The company considered biodegradable plastics, paperboard, and many other materials.

Because some of Tom's of Maine's toothpastes contain fluoride, the company is under strict FDA regulations about tube materials- they have to be very durable and pass rigorous testing. After much consideration, plastic laminate was chosen because it meets the FDA standards and because it is a lot lighter than aluminium. The weight of the product is key because it means the transport of the product has a much lower carbon footprint than the old aluminium tubes.

The tubes are also a lot more flexible and easier for little hands to squeeze.

Where is it sourced?
Tom's selected a tube manufacturer a truck drive away from its factory in Maine. The manufacturer was carefully selected for its focus on sustainability- a value shared by Tom's of Maine. The manufacturer recycles scraps from the manufacturing process and accepts Tom's of Maine's tube waste. Damaged tubes and the tubes returned by customers are returned to the manufacturer so that they can be incorporated into the downcycling stream. The recycled material is used mostly in industrial applications like bumpers for pallets, but the company is continuously sourcing new ways to reincorporate waste into the product stream.

How have customers responded?
The response has been 10:1 positive on the switch. That one customer who expresses dissatisfaction is not a surprise for Ellen Saksen, "change is hard, especially when it comes to a product you use every single day."

What's up next?
The toothpaste team is looking for better ways to recycle the new packaging. They're also working with distributors to get rid of the cardboard cartons that surround the tubes. Kids toothpaste is already sold without a carton and the adult versions are next in line for dematerialization.

The company has also funded research into bio-plastics. The most promising project on tap is one that incorporates local Maine potatoes into the packaging.

Image credit: Tom's of Maine via Facebook