'Green' coordinators a growing trend at U.S. companies

By Joyzelle Davis, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Monday, April 21, 2008

George Kochaniec Jr. / The Rocky

Adam Bratter, the mail room coordinator at White Wave Foods in Broomfield, shovels compost last week. The company composts all its cafeteria waste, which is then available to employees.

After each meal at White Wave Foods' Broomfield headquarters, employees diligently sort their food scraps, balled-up biodegradable napkins and soda cans into containers for composting, recycling or trash.

Once a year, White Wave's nearly 400 employees hit pay dirt - literally - in return when a dump truck delivers the now nutrient-rich composting soil to the parking lot for workers to bring home for their own gardens.

"It's a great symbolic gesture that composting comes full circle," said Ellen Feeney, White Wave's vice president of responsible livelihood.

White Wave's composting program is one of several eco-friendly programs the maker of Silk soy milk and Horizon organic dairy put into place after creating the "responsible livelihood" position some three years ago. That job title and its various permutations - ranging from sustainability manager to green mission coordinator - are popping up everywhere from Fortune 500 companies like Wal-Mart to local institutions like Children's Hospital.

Paul Jerde, executive director of the center for entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business, said that interest among employers and students alike in environmental issues prompted the school to require this year's entering MBA class to take a sustainability course as a core class.

"We liken what's going on with sustainability to what happened in terms of the world of quality assurance," Jerde said. "Fifteen years ago, quality assurance was its own box in business. Now it's inculcated into every stage, from design on up."

Children's Hospital added the position of sustainability manager late last year, after the hospital relocated to Aurora. Employees had long asked the hospital's management if the new campus could implement a recycling program and other eco-friendly measures, said John Hudgens, who started as sustainability manager in November.

"We want to be an employer of choice, so upper management dedicated the resources to create this position," he said.

First on Hudgen's list is creating the requested recycling program, but he's exploring everything from wind power to organizing employee van pools.

Boulder Community Hospital was one of the first hospitals nationwide to have a sustainability coordinator when it created the post in the mid-1990s. The nonprofit hospital's waste reduction efforts have helped to bolster its finances, trimming some $300,000 a year in waste management and $100,000 from reprocessing single-use sleeves on medical devices.

"We've really made people aware that sustainability benefits not only the community at large but, bottom line, it saves us money," said Kai Abelkis, the hospital's sustainability coordinator.

Whole Foods earlier this year hired Robin Burton as its first green mission coordinator for the Rocky Mountain region. Burton's job includes trying to reduce waste at some 30 supermarkets through everything from recycling used cooking oil to be used as biodiesel fuel, composting trimmings from the meat counter and donating day-old bread to local food banks.

"We look at everything that comes in the front door and goes out the back door," Burton said.

At White Wave, the company's sustainability program gives prizes to employees who log energy-saving measures like hitting the stairs instead of the elevator or riding their bikes to work.

"Our point of view is this is everyone's job," Feeney said. "I may be planting the seeds, but it's everyone's job to water them."

davisj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2514

• April 22, 2008

  6:02 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  greenleaf writes:

  Happy Earth Day everybody! I celebrated my first Earth Day as young botany student on the lawn in front of Norlin library on the University of Colorado campus. It was a beautiful spring day much like this one.

  So... stir the compost, plant a tree, buy a CFL bulb, walk or bike to work and think about how fortunate we are to live in this beautiful world. Do something to keep it that way for all of us.

  Again: Happy Earth Day!

• April 22, 2008

  7:48 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  Ottis writes:

  Just don't throw out that CFL bulb; many contain mercury. Treat it as hazardous waste.

• April 22, 2008

  7:56 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  greenleaf writes:

  Otis,

  You are right, CFLs do contain small amounts of mercury. They also last as long as 10 years, in fact, I have 2 that are now 18 years old. By the time they need replacement, convenient ways to do so will be available. People have thrown out long tube shop and office lights that contain even more mercury for years and without any thought! The CFL revolution will make it easier to recycle them as well.

• April 22, 2008

  9:30 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  SASQUATCH writes:

  EARTH DAY == BOULDER 420 DOPE-IN

  Same crowd...totally stoned...also inflicted with acute enviro-phobia and eco-hysteria...and all very green--literally!

• April 22, 2008

  9:34 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  greenleaf writes:

  Squatch,

  keep working on the humour angle, one of these days you might say something clever and worth laughing at. The funniest thing I've heard from you is your "window test" - what a hoot!

• April 22, 2008

  11:01 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  SASQUATCH writes:

  BLAME AL:

  This Earth Day finds the world threatened not by rising sea levels, but by rising food prices. Many on the planet are more likely to starve than drown, and we have only Gore's disciples to blame. "I have to say the situation has not improved since I made the movie in 2006." The polar bears, he says, are still going to drown, and boats will soon be moored to the top of the Washington Monument.

  To be sure, we're setting weather records, but they're not what Gore has in mind. Record cold temperatures have occurred over the globe this winter, and the only concern about flooding is from record snowfalls across the planet.

  U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently warned of a more imminent threat, one ironically created by the rush to save the planet. Speaking in Accra, Ghana, the U.N. chief said the world must drastically increase food production to ease skyrocketing prices that have caused food riots in countries like Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Haiti.

  The production of food grains has increased. But it is being diverted to empty gas tanks, not empty stomachs. Gore and others have warned that climate change is an imminent threat to the world. We would argue that climate-friendly policies are more of a threat.

  The Gore-induced rush to biofuels has diverted crops such as corn, soybeans and palm oil from food to fuel. Vast swaths of rain forest in places like Malaysia and Indonesia have been cleared to provide farmland not to feed the hungry but to fuel our cars. Our own grain belt has been increasingly diverted to ethanol over corn flakes.

  This has pressured food prices while damaging the environment. In the U.S., more cultivation has increased runoff from pesticides and fertilizer, creating dead zones for aquatic life from Chesapeake Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.

  As Indur M. Goklany of the Cato Institute reports, agricultural expansion leads to higher releases of carbon from biomass and soil above and below ground. Fertilizers that increase yields also increase nitrogen discharge into waters and emissions of nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas that heats the atmosphere 300 times more effectively than carbon dioxide.

  According to World Bank data, as of March, world grain prices had tripled and fertilizer prices had quadrupled since 2000. Food prices have risen an astounding 65% just since the beginning of this year.

  "Climate-change remedies can lead to greater poverty, starvation and disease, as well as widespread ecological destruction — some of the very misfortunes that they're supposed to prevent," Goklany wrote in the New York Post. "In our haste to address global warming, we have yet to think seriously about our policies' unintended effects."

  In his 1968 book "The Population Bomb," Paul Ehrlich warned of famine and mass starvation from overpopulation. Ironically, that might yet occur, not from overpopulation, but from overzealousness in trying to save Earth from a nonexistent threat.

• April 22, 2008

  11:14 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  ftssoad writes:

  Adam! Congratts on making the paper!

• April 22, 2008

  5:37 p.m.

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  greenleaf writes:

  Squatch,

  I agree totally with your statements regarding the food-based ethanols and biodiesels made from corn, soybeans and palm oil( I have to say though that palm oil is very high in saturated fats and not good for old apes such as yourself).

  Where you are totally wrong is in blaming environmentalist for the problem. In this country, we have a very powerful agricultural lobby backed by Con Agra and ADM. It was they and corn-belt politicians who hatched the ideas of corn ethanol and soy diesel. It was a windfall that our all business all the time president was glad to approve of. For the environmental community, these were never intended to be more than test bed and demonstration products. It took Con Agra, politicians and commodity traders to put us in the mess we are now with these products.

  Environmentalists want ethanol and biodiesel to be made from switch grass, landscape waste, algae, forest thinnings and other cellulosic waste products not human and animal food.

• April 23, 2008

  12:22 a.m.

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  Civility writes:

  Happy Earth Day to you, Greenleaf. I took the bus and the Light Rail into work and did not use my car at all. I figure that not only will it help the environment, it will lessen the demand for foreign oil and it will lessen traffic. It will also drive gas prices down which in turn will drive the prices down for everything else including food.

  One of the other things that I'm pushing for those who are able to, is to use the technology that we have, to be able to work from home most of the time. I have have replaced all of the bulbs in my home with CFL bulbs. 60 minutes had a special on Global Warming and it was pretty frightening.

  I appreciate YOUR comments and keep up good work. We need young people like you to save our planet.

• April 23, 2008

  6:28 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  greenleaf writes:

  Civility,

  Thanks for your kind comments. Although I should let you in on the fact that I am 57 years young!