Musings on an Assortment of Subjects

Have you ever wondered if sustainable practices can really be good for business? This evening I attended a lecture in which Paul Murray, environmental affairs manager for Herman Miller, Inc., made a powerful case that it can.

Herman Miller is a Michigan-based manufacturer of chairs and other furnishings with an impressive history of paying attention to their triple bottom line (considering the environmental and social costs of business decisions as well as the direct financial ones). For instance, they helped support the U.S. Green Building Council (creator of the LEED green building standards) in its infancy and have been a pioneer in applying cradle-to-cradle design philosophy to their products.

Their current “Perfect Vision” initiative is a particularly impressive benchmark for where the company hopes to be in 2020:

• zero solid waste
• zero hazardous waste
• zero air and water emissions from manufacturing
• 100% renewable energy
• company buildings constructed to a minimum LEED Silver certification

According to Murray, the company is 61% of the way towards this goal now, and will reach 80% by 2010.

I was particularly impressed by the company’s efforts in organization to allow for innovation in the area of sustainability. There is a committee, overseen by Murray, which interacts with multiple subcommittees attending to various areas of concern. All told, 400 of the company’s 6000 employees are involved in these committees–management has realizaed that the workers on the floor are often the most aware of where improvements can be made.

A striking example of how this company works is the story of what happened when the 37 acres of wildflowers at one of their locations began to attract troublesome wasps. The groundskeeper was instructed to remove them using whatever means necessary–insecticide or mowing. Instead, he contacted a biologist at the university who raised the possibility of bringing in honeybees to compete with the wasps. A local beekeeper was invited to bring his bees, and it turns out that wildflower honey sells for more than other types–thus a deal was reached by which the beekeeper paid for access to the flowers with honey that was passed on to Herman Miller’s customers. Today the company owns its own bees and continues this tradition.

I asked Murray how to work for change in an organization that doesn’t have the management support for efforts in sustainability that Herman Miller does. His recommendation was to treat all suggestions as business proposals, pointing out how the change can save the organization money. (He noted that the combined rate of return for all of Herman Miller’s projects to date is around 50 percent!) He also highlighted that as consumers, we can have a significant influence on the companies we purchase from simply by asking questions about their environmental decisions.

I hope that in the years to come I will be fortunate enough to work for an organization with as good an environmental and social record as Herman Miller’s–or, failing that, that I will find the patience and creativity to seek out improved practices that are beneficial for people, for the environment, AND for the organization’s bottom line.