community
The Converts
They saw the light. Now they're making sure everyone else does, too.
Suddenly, "organic fast food" is no longer an oxymoron
Someone call Eric Schlosser. Burgerville is out to redeem the greatly maligned fast-food industry, one environmentally friendly burger at time.
Founded in 1922 as a small creamery--it now has 39 locations in Oregon and Washington--the family-owned business always had a fresh-and-local identity. It traditionally sold shakes made from local blackberries and onion rings made from Walla Walla onions. Three years ago, Burgerville decided to take it further and shoot for near-complete sustainability. That meant starting with the beef for its burgers. Burgerville decided to buy all its beef, some 35,000 pounds per week, from the Country Natural Beef co-op, whose members raise humanely treated, grain-fed cows without using antibiotics or growth hormones.
Last year, Burgerville went even further, purchasing enough wind power from local utilities to power all of its facilities. That has eliminated 17.4 million pounds of carbon emissions annually--the equivalent of taking 1,700 cars off the road. Last fall, the company instituted a program to transform cooking oil, a restaurant's largest waste product, into clean-burning biodiesel. "Our hope is to challenge the industry," says Jeff Harvey, Burgerville's COO. "Quick service is just a delivery mechanism for food--everything else is up to the company."
Bill Hayward, your great-grandfather would be proud
When Homer T. Hayward founded Hayward Lumber (now Hayward Corp.) in Monterey, California, 87 years ago, "people thought that the forests would last forever," says his great-grandson and the company's current CEO, Bill Hayward. Of course, that turned out not to be the case. Hayward's mission is to make sure the construction industry doesn't forget.
Hayward has been steadily greening up the family-owned business for about a decade. It's now the only large building supplier marketing its own line of energy-saving products, which include sustainably harvested lumber, energy-saving windows, bamboo flooring, and insulation made from recycled denim. But the company--which runs seven lumberyards and three design show rooms--truly put its principles into action when it built a new on-site factory to construct trusses, the triangular wood frames that hold up roofs. Equipped with an array of water- and energy-saving features, the factory draws half of its power from solar panels. It's also proved to be a savvy marketing move, drawing contractors curious to see a solar-powered factory. At $2.5 million, the factory was more expensive to build than a traditional factory, but lower operating costs already are offsetting those costs, Hayward tells his customers. "We're showing builders that they can actually reduce costs through green building," he says.
GreenOrder is the shepherd. Big businesses (think GE and General Motors) are the sheep
You know you're on to something when some of the largest companies in the world start cold-calling. At GreenOrder, an environmental consulting firm, those calls come almost weekly--all of them from companies looking for someone to guide them into the new world of sustainable business practices. "I had a client say to me, 'Oh, I get it, you're kind of like the McKinsey of green business," says founder and CEO Andrew Shapiro.
GreenOrder guides clients--which include General Electric (NYSE:GE), Office Depot (NYSE:ODP), and General Motors (NYSE:GM) --through the thicket of environmental terminology, metrics, and certifications. Its marquee project: General Electric's companywide environmental overhaul. GE is shooting to improve its energy efficiency by 30 percent by 2012 and to double, to $20 billion, its annual revenue from products that offer environmental advantages. GreenOrder, based in New York City, devised guidelines to evaluate and promote the benefits of GE products ranging from fluorescent light bulbs to energy-efficient jet engines to offshore wind turbines.
When a company of this size changes, it matters: GE estimates--that is, GreenOrder helped it estimate--that if every household in America replaced one 100-watt bulb with a GE compact fluorescent, the savings would be enough to power more than one million homes for an entire year.
