The Age of Corporate Environmentalism

Surprise--big business has learned that it's pretty easy being green.

Katherine Mangu-Ward from the February 2006 issue

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In 2005 Home Depot sold more than $400 million in wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. It does not buy old-growth timber or wood from recently cleared rainforests. Its Web site boasts that "typical Team Depot activities include conservation projects, beautification efforts, and cleanups." Every Home Depot employee is required to keep an animal from an endangered species as a pet. (Just kidding about that last one.)

Four-hundred million dollars seems like a lot of wood, and Home Depot is the largest lumber buyer in the world. But its purchases account for only about 1 percent of the trees cut down worldwide. Still, says Jarvis, who has the authority to sever logging contracts with any supplier whose practices harm endangered forests or otherwise injure the environment, "Does that mean that we turn our back and walk away and say that we do not have a social responsibility, that the impact's not great enough? No."

Actually, as Jarvis recently reminded an audience at the Companies for Corporate Responsibility investor conference, Home Depot has been buying certified wood since 1994. The problem, it discovered, was that the supply of certified wood wasn't adequate; people still bought the cheaper, uncertified stuff if given the choice. After RAN's campaign grew more intense, Home Depot decided to use its market power to reduce the price of certified wood by selling it exclusively. The will, Jarvis says, was there all along. The company just needed a little reassurance that customers who wouldn't pay extra from conscience alone would still buy at Home Depot when asked to fork over a few more cents per two-by-four.

After creating a cruelty-to-endangered-species-and-old-tree-free lumber department, Jarvis and his team expanded their efforts to include the wood involved in manufactured products in other departments. They started in 10 major markets in the U.S. They "walked into a store, went to the far right-hand side, started with the first aisle," and worked their way across the entire store in four-foot segments, looking for merchandise containing wood, Jarvis recalls.

They weren't above a little creative destruction. "When you're standing in the ceiling fan aisle," and you think "there's no wood in there," don't be too hasty, warns Jarvis. "You grab something that looks like a plastic fan blade and you break it and splinters go everywhere...you say, OK, back to the drawing board."

They repeated such experiments throughout the store, then went to the supplier for every product that incorporated wood and said: "OK, we know who you are, we know what your product is, we know now how much we buy and sell of this product, we need to know from you exactly where this product is coming from." This applied "to levels, to hammers, to wood gates--everything."

After a year and a half of this, Jarvis was promoted to his current position: Officially he is the "merchandising vice president of wood products and building materials." Once again, the peanut gallery started to chatter. This time, Jarvis says, it was a "shock wave that went through the business community that Home Depot has just [taken] an environmentalist and put [him] over [on] their business side."

To call Jarvis an environmentalist is just as inaccurate as calling him a "lumber guy." He doesn't fit the stereotype of either. The problem, he says, is that environmentalists and their corporate counterparts "couldn't speak the same language for years."

The Poster Clown for Corporate Waste

Which brings us back to Bob Langert, the man who won an EPA award for McDonald's. He talks like a Midwestern businessman, which, of course, he is. He discusses the problems of "monitoring the supply chain," declaims on McDonald's "holistic approach," and often refers to his area of expertise as "waste management." It's easy to imagine how this kind of talk would make "speaking the same language" a near-literal as well as figurative problem in pow-wows with greens. "At McDonald's," Langert says, "we like to roll up our sleeves and get things done." Naked tree sitters have no sleeves.

Langert lacks the traditional trappings of a global environmental mover-and-shaker. He does not appear to own any clothing made of hemp. He has never chained himself to anything or picketed outside the gates of an industrial polluter--or at least didn't admit to doing such things in a phone interview.

But the first thing that Langert wants to make clear is that he was present when corporate environmentalism was conceived. "I was working on packaging issues back in the late '80s," he remembers. Back then, a garbage barge was making headlines looking for a place to dump trash that no longer fit into existing landfills, recycling was taking off, and Ronald McDonald was the poster clown for corporate waste. As a defensive measure, says Langert, McDonald's became "one of the first companies to partner with an NGO" (nongovernmental organization). At the time, the group was known as the Environmental Defense Fund. (Following the examples of BP and KFC, it recently dropped the last word, perhaps averse to a moniker that suggested too much of an interest in lucre.)

BP's extravagant rebranding, and Jarvis' bold optimism about the impact that Home Depot can make on its market (corporate policy, he says, goes "much further than the 1 percent that you actually buy"), contrast with Langert's more staid approach at McDonald's. "At the end of the day we're a restaurant company, we're a retailer," says Langert. "We influence our suppliers, but we're not in agriculture....We only have so much influence."

The Greenpeace-Big Mac Ceasefire

But Langert's provincial r�sum� contains some very ambitious, cosmopolitan projects. Employing another pat boardroom phrase, Langert notes that he "led the charge" to create the first HFC-free McDonald's restaurant, the one that eventually won recognition from the EPA, which opened in Denmark in 2003. HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons), which are produced by conventional refrigerants, have been fingered as a major cause for concern on climate change--Greenpeace calls them "one of the most potent global warming gasses ever invented."