The Grazing Mind

If you’re hanging in or around Boulder this week, before the LOHAS conference next week, swing by Bombay Bistro this Thursday night where we’ll be hanging out with friends from Gaiam, Elephant Journal and W1SDØM. Great libations, great conversations. Also, Door prizes and a chance to win a free one day pass to the LOHAS conference.

For more details, and to RVSP…

As millions of gallons of oil continue to drain into the Gulf Coast, a deeper sense of sadness and helplessness has set in for many of us.  As is often the case with a national or international disaster, you see these awful images on the news and wonder what you – a lone person in Smalltown, Middle America – can possibly do to help. To me, it’s the same idea as voting in a presidential election.  Does my vote really count?  There are a lot of people who will tell me not really.  Do I do it anyway?  Sure, and I’m proud of it.

It’s the same thing here.  You can either talk about how one person can’t possibly make a difference in the face of such a horrific catastrophe, or you can actually give it a try.  And while you’re probably not going to be personally responsible for the restoration of the Gulf Coast, you will at least be able to rest easy knowing that you did something.

So aside from the old stand-bys like taking stock of your oil usage and riding the bus instead of driving, or the dramatic, i.e. coating yourself in chocolate and standing in front of your local BP station in protest, what can you do to help?

We’ve outlined three great opportunities below.

Donate

• Alabama Coastal Foundation: www.joinacf.org. 100% of donations will go towards Gulf Coast clean-up efforts.
• Our Gulf Waterkeepers: saveourgulf.org. Donations help provide everything from clean-up supplies and protective gear, to emergency office space and food for volunteers.
• National Wildlife Federation’s Gulf Oil Spill Restoration Fund: Easily donate $10 to support the NWF’s oil spill cleanup efforts by texting “Wildlife” to 20222.  All money goes towards helping their on-the-ground volunteer and restoration efforts.

Volunteer

You can register as a possible volunteer for several organizations that are taking on the heavy task of tackling clean-up.

• National Audubon Society
• Louisiana Gulf Response
• Global Green

Lobby

A number of advocacy organizations have crafted letters you can send to elected officials.

For those inclined to send a political message about the need to restore the Gulf Coast, the National Wildlife Federation has created this form letter. Those in favor of halting all ocean drilling can use this one from the Sierra Club.  Or, you can choose from the Gulf Restoration Network‘s menu of missives to the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, secretary of the interior, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and President Obama himself. They all urge the government to accurately assess and address the damage from the spill.

Yesterday we shared some photos from our first annual all-employee volunteer event, Impact Day. To give you a little more perspective on what went down, here’s a quick Q&A with someone who was out and about – Adam Bratter from our Corporate Services team….

TGM: First off, what exactly did your group do on Impact Day?

AB: Our Team assisted the City of Lafayette Parks and Recreation department with a tree and shrub planting project to help invigorate a preserved wetlands habitat.  We worked together to prepare the land and to plant native varieties of trees and shrubs by digging holes, adding fresh top soil, building moats to retain the water around each tree/shrub, and adding a layer of mulch to help reserve the moisture.  Our team accomplished an amazing amount of work, planting approximately 120 trees and shrubs.

TGM: How often does the company do this kind of thing?

AB: WhiteWave Foods has sponsored VIA (VIA = Values In Action = our internal volunteer program at WhiteWave) events in the past where we’ve been encouraged to volunteer in the community during work hours, but these have been smaller departmental initiatives. Our company ardently supports community service and volunteerism, however, this was the first annual company-wide Impact Day, and with all the success stories and buzz around the headquarters building, I think people are inspired and pumped to make it an even bigger and better event in the years to come.

Adam's in the back row, fourth from the left...

TGM: Does WhiteWave donate money to these organizations as well, or offer other kinds of support?

Impact Day coincidentally occurred just as the annual Community Food Share Corporate Challenge is taking place. Last year, 100% of the organization individually contributed to the drive, and was backed up by 100% company dollar matching; this is in addition to an enormous amount of donated food and volunteer hours. So on top of time and labor, we as a company do financially contribute to many organizations. In my opinion it is befitting that as a food company, WhiteWave contributes dollars, product, and volunteer hours to so many Food Banks around the country.

TGM: What did the day mean to you?

AB: Impact Day was tremendously inspiring, educational, fun and fulfilling. I laud the fact that I have the opportunity to work for a company with rich values and culture, that actively supports its employees walking the walk.  Embodying our company’s Values in Action is something that permeates my daily life at work, at home, and in the community, including recycling and composting, buying green, gardening, and being active in our community, as an individual and with my family.  Impact Day was specifically enriching as it added the communal team engagement aspect to our Values and provided an opportunity to work together with various departments in the organization with whom I do not ordinarily work with, this completely removed any sense of hierarchy and seniority.  I also personally benefitted greatly from picking the brains of the Lafayette Parks and Recreation crew about the wetlands habitat and about the natives species of trees and shrubs chosen for the project, a few of which I’ll be adding to my family’s new backyard!

Ok, I think I’m at risk for becoming the “plastic bag blogger.” I don’t want to typecast myself. I want freedom to be the funny sidekick who blogs about crazy incidents with compost or the underestimated  girl next door who writes about ingenious emission reducing technology. Please don’t pigeonhole me as the mom who writes about sandwich bags.

That said, I’m once again writing about plastic sandwich bags. A little while ago I told you about my struggle to reduce the waste produced by packing my sons’ lunches every day. Today, I read about Ziploc teaming up with the geniuses over at Terracycle to repurpose any and all Ziploc products (bags, reusable plastic containers and their little blue lids) into coolers and trash bags. Collect them, send them in, and let the magic begin.

They will even send any K-12 school collecting the bags two cents per piece. Teach your kids about reducing waste, get them involved in recruiting their friends, help their school reap the rewards.

Terracycle also makes candy wrappers into tote bags, and drink pouches into backpacks and laptop cases. Soon you will be able to outfit your whole house with the “waste” from your kids’ lunch boxes.

See… you don’t have to totally change your lifestyle to make a difference? Sometimes plastic bags are a necessity. But now you can alleviate your own guilt and reduce the landfill burden by tossing them in the mailbox instead of the trash can.

I read an article a few months back about a student who’d developed a video for a film and climate change course. His piece noted that despite his own sustainable efforts (he recycled, carried his own water bottle, turned off the lights, etc.), the emissions created by a trip to D.C. for a political science class, negated everything he’d been doing. “While I would like to think these small, conscious efforts make a difference, the truth is I know they don’t.” He’s right… but I disagree:

Habits, no matter how small, formed over the course of an entire lifetime, can add up and make a real difference.

Take last week when I reported on our Zero Waste program. It’s a cool story about how our company is working to eliminate waste in one fairly large location. But in the grand scheme of things, compared to all the outputs caused by the production of all our products, does it really make a difference? It’s a legitimate question, but before I answer it, it’s important we consider our Mt. Crawford plant in Virginia.

As WhiteWave’s largest facility, how Mt. Crawford goes about manufacturing our products is incredibly important. Everything they do is at a fairly large and intense scale. With this in mind, the plant took a comprehensive waste, water and energy assessment last year. And based on the results of that assessment, it’s clear that some new practices are making some pretty significant impacts.

To help cut down on water usage, Mt. Crawford invested in high-tech tools like stack economizers and condensation controls, the goal being to save more than 30 million gallons annually. The plant is also in the process of installing energy efficient lighting throughout the facility, which, when completed later this summer, will not only use less energy, but also potentially save us $10-15k per year. On top of it all, the plant recycled nearly five million pounds of waste last year that would otherwise have been sent to landfills.

So, was it worth it? In this case, it seems, undoubtedly, yes. With our Zero Waste program in Broomfield, maybe not so much. A better question is would one program have been possible without the other? The fact is, both are very much connected, and together, paint a bigger picture. And what that bigger picture reveals—what numbers of individual projects fail to capture—is that these programs collectively shape our company’s culture, and how we do our jobs.

One program’s influence over one group of people at WhiteWave, say corporate headquarters, makes investing in more efficient and sustainable practices at our plant not only more possible, but more plausible. What we learn from employing new practices in Mt. Crawford gets applied to our Jacksonville plant, to our logistics audits, to our packaging design, and so on.

So, as easy it is to feel discouraged about the irrelevance of a single act, or program, or one person’s change in behavior, it’s important to remember that these actions aren’t mutually exclusive. In the grand scheme of things, they all add up. They all matter.

I was listening to an archived episode of This American Life last week. One of the segments featured a failed writer who had to take a telemarketing job as a way to make ends meet. This career option wasn’t part of the “plan”, which was the theme for the show, Plan B. The episode was great. The characters had, for a variety of reasons, no other choice, and it was that choice that ultimately changed their lives, often for the better. The same idea is discussed in this Good magazine blog entry on Lester Brown. Head of the Earth Policy Institute, Brown is both alarmist and optimist when it comes to the future of the planet. From climate change, to food, and our dependence on oil, he’s got a plan… and calls it “Plan B” (“Plan A” being our current, unsustainable path).

Molly’s post earlier this week touched on some of the Zero Waste stuff we do here, and it’s really one of the cooler things we have  going on at WhiteWave. If you take a walk around the four floors of our building you’ll see that each copy room is outfitted with recycling stations for paper and cardboard, and each break room and our cafe, with compost and recycling bins. The recycling stuff, while important, isn’t anything new; most offices do the same these days. But the compost stations, that’s different. And not just because it’s rare to see such a thing at a corporate office, but also because come spring time, employees here get to take all the compost we’ve generated over the year home.

Local companies Eco-Cycle and A1Organics help us manage and store the compost, and when the weather starts to warm up they drop a giant bin of the nutrient rich fertilizer in our parking lot. Then everyone here is free to take what they need for home gardens or yards. It’s a pretty cool perk, but I think more importantly it’s a pretty good educational tool. Every day we’re reminded of the importance of waste management. And since starting the program, we’ve kept more than 386,000 pounds of waste from the ending up in the landfill.

Check back next week, and we’ll tell you a little more about some other conservation efforts going on at our production plants, where there’s been a lot of excellent work in the realm of waste and water conservation.

In 2003, I was at a PR firm in Chicago working on several food company accounts. That work required that I travel to Colorado on a regular basis. I loved Colorado. Open skies, big mountains, lots of sunshine. I loved it so much that I began looking for a new job. Outside of location, though, I had one requirement: the company needed to be honest about food and honest about its story. Then I read a profile about Horizon Organic.

An opportunity presented itself and before I knew it, I landed a job with Horizon, tasked with the responsibility of helping tell the company’s story. I was thrilled, and quickly came to find out that people across the company shared a common desire to do better, and in Horizon’s case that was to change the world one organic acre at a time. I loved talking to the press, who at the time felt we could do no wrong – vocal advocate for organic agriculture, proponent for the humane treatment of animals, partner to family farmers, champion for healthy foods for kids.  Anyway you sliced it our story was positive and it felt good to tell.

During that time Horizon was owned by Dean Foods, a parent company that had a pretty hands off approach to its individual divisions – at least that’s what it felt like where I sat. About a year later, Dean decided to merge Horizon with some other national Dean brands (International Delight) and also with WhiteWave Inc. (makers of Silk Soymilk). At that point WhiteWave Foods was born. During that process the spotlight was on us and all of a sudden we were now “Big”.  I’d worked with “Big” food companies before, and seen first-hand the negative association. Admittedly, that made me a little nervous. But looking back, it’s interesting to see that since then our story hasn’t only evolved it’s gotten better. And a lot of it has to do with being “Big”, combined with what we learned when we were “Small”. Balancing the two has been one of the most interesting, challenging and energizing aspects of my career.

Back then, Silk purchased renewable energy certificates to offset the electricity used in the production of the product. And now our Horizon, International Delight brands and WhiteWave’s corporate headquarters have followed suit – all now purchase renewable energy certificates and carbon offsets to help balance the electricity usage and emissions created by doing business.

Back then, Silk and Horizon offered recycling programs in the buildings in which they were housed.  At WhiteWave we take that to another level by partnering with Eco-Cycle and A1Organics to institute a state-of-the-art Zero Waste Recycling and Composting Program at our Broomfield headquarters. (From recycling and composting alone, we’ve diverted more than 386,000 pounds of waste from landfills to date.)

Back then, recycling and the impact of our carbon footprint was not top of mind for our manufacturing facilities. Today, our plants reduce their impact on the environment. Take our Bridgeton, New Jersey, location – in 2008 that plant reduced its annual waste by 21 percent.  Another example took place last year when our plant in City of Industry, Calif., conducted a water audit. As a result of the findings, the team implemented several water saving measures that will save more than 11 million gallons of water annually.

These are just a few examples. It’s not all we’ve done, but it gives you an idea of what we’re about and how things started changing once WhiteWave was created. Can we do better? Absolutely.  I’m proud to work for a company that struggles with the issues we have – from where we procure our ingredients to how we transport our products to the packages in which we sell them. The discussions we have across this company continue to energize me. I love that we struggle to find the “and” as we like to say. How can we be a profitable business AND do what’s right for the planet? We don’t get it right all the time, but we’re constantly challenging ourselves. That’s a story I can get behind.

Yesterday, WhiteWave Foods was proud to sponsor the “2010 Green Business of the Year Award” at the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce’s Annual Business Awards luncheon. There were three very cool finalists, each offering products for a more sustainable future or working to make Colorado greener.

However,  I was secretly rooting for Waste Farmers an organization that was founded on the belief that in nature there is no waste. Everything begins and ends with soil. To put it simply, Waste Farmers works with restaurants, hotels, schools and other organizations to take food “waste” and turn the scraps into compost, which replenishes and feeds the soil, which grows the plants and in turn makes the food we eat. A closed cycle. A restorative economy.

I was impressed by Waste Farmers and the service they provide. But I also like the story behind the company. Who doesn’t root for the guy who starts his business with $9,000, a pickup truck, and a dream that its possible to make a profit while enriching the community? I believe more businesses should be built on the idea that idealism and capitalism don’t have to be mutually exclusive.  In fact, I’m pretty sure the future depends on it.

Happy Earth Day!

Food for Thought

• Americans throw away 43,000 tons of food each day
• 70% of world’s waste stream consists of organic material (food, paper, leaves) that could be composted

Earth Day began as a political demonstration, a protest, designed to bring more awareness to environmental issues. And over the years, that original concept has evolved and changed a lot. It isn’t just about protests or festivals anymore, it’s a mainstream event with main street attention.

The way people approach Earth Day has changed too. In fact at WhiteWave, we see it as a way to educate our kids not just on the importance of sustainability, but its role in modern business.

Obviously educating our kids about the importance of sustainability is an everyday kind of thing, but as it turns out, this year’s Earth Day is also national Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. So we’re blowing it out a little.

This isn’t going to be your average day at the office, it goes way beyond simply shadowing mom or dad. We’re actually going to have more than 150 kids, divided into 15 groups, attending 15 different “tour stops” throughout the day. All developed and led by WhiteWave employees… all dedicated to showcasing a wide variety of careers, and how sustainability fits into them. It would take way too long to explain what that looks like, so I think it’s best we just show you.

Tomorrow we’ll be tweeting highlights from the event itself, as well as other Earth Day activities via our WhiteWave twitter feed (@whitewavefoods) throughout the day. And don’t forget to also check out what our Silk brand is doing with The Huffington Post to celebrate Earth Day’s 40th anniversary…