Green Light

Greenthoughts 17

Mentally Spent

I’m as distracted as anyone from green issues right now. With lower gas prices (anything less than $2.50 a gallon is pretty sweet), the bailout, its aftermath and just an awful economy right now, who can blame you and I?

That’s why it’s good to have developed some green habits this year. I’m still carpooling with Tom Russell, an editor here, still trying to get away from the grocery store without any plastic bags and recycling any and everything I can.

I’m still loyally using my Sigg drinking container instead of carrying around bottled water and I’ve still got a half-gallon milk jug filled with water tucked into the back of my toilet so I use less water with each flush.

And I’m still turning off the faucet when I brush my teeth. I don’t always do as well with the one-minute showers.

Still, I’m feeling a little complacent on the green front.

My hope is that when the economy recovers, the legacy for 2008 will be a broader market for green goods and awareness of certifications.

This has been a pretty historic year, with the election, high gas prices, the Olympics, the financial crisis and green awareness.

As an industry, we’ve got our four markets behind us. Financially this was not a great year for the furniture industry, but I believe on other fronts like green issues, the industry has shown more solidarity. Looking through a special Sunday New York Times home supplement, I was struck by how many large furnishings chains were touting themselves with green messages in full page ads.

This year wasn’t a wash.

GIFFT Off

The Green Initiative for Furniture and Textiles, the program initiated by SWIFT, the Sample Waste Initiative for Furniture and Textiles has begun distributing blankets made with furniture industry discards.

The program was created this year by SWIFT and by Houston-based recycling company Avangard Innovative and Yardley, Pa.-based charity Quilts for Kids. The group distributes blankets to children in hospitals who can’t bring stuffed animals with them.
Their biggest furniture industry partner right now is Rooms to Go. Case goods source Gat Creek is donating 5% of sales from its blanket chest sales to Quilts for Kids.

The group has quilting chapters set up across the country. It mostly needs lightweight cotton fabrics in bright colors, that are about the weight of a chintz, or a calico cloth. Heavier weight fabrics are used to make saddle bags that hang over wheelchairs, tote bags and beds for animal shelters.

This is a program that’s made a lot of progress this year and now has an arm in the furniture industry. While there are many who find a use for discarded fabrics, there’s still so much that won’t get used and will end up in landfills. This is a good partnership for our industry.

Are you going?

I am going to attend the American Home Furnishings Alliance’s Sustainability Summit. The attendance to the furniture industry trade association’s event was very good last year.

I’m looking forward to seeing Dennis Quaintance, CEO and chief design officer for Quaintance-Weaver Restaurants and Hotels, which owns the Proximity Hotel, where the two-day event is being held. The Proximity Hotel attained the USGBC’s highest rating, LEED Platinum.

On Thursday the AHFA and Cargill’s BiOH Polyols will give the first Sage Award  recognizing environmental accomplishment.  From 15 entries, case goods producer Cisco Bros., upholstery and case goods producer Hickory Chair and textile maker Valley Forge were selected as finalists.

GREENTHOUGHTS #16

“A man watches his pear-tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap!”

Abraham Lincoln

FIXING A HOLE

The quote above might well describe how we got into this whole financial mess we’re watching unfold.

We’re watching a world governed by crisis. It is supposed to be the other way around. The role of government is to mitigate risks and help society avoid crisis.

This often is lost in its present structure. It’s hard to imagine (as some would have us believe) that in a decade no one saw the risks building. Many did.

Among them America’s most famous investor, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett. Go figure why no one listened.  To bad Britney Spears or Paris Hilton weren’t economists and saw this coming. We certainly would have known about it.

As this credit crisis spread with greater ferocity, it turned limited-government zealots into converts fast. The principle that government inclusion in our markets is unnecessary changed quickly.

Bulldozing massive amounts of taxpayer money to fill a liquidity hole and quickly increasing our debt was en vogue like never before this October.

The House and Senate were forced to vote on sensitive legislation just a few weeks before elections. Many surely would have preferred to wait until after elections to make the decision rather than to risk their incumbency.

That’s too bad. You either have two years or six years to figure it out if you don’t want to be pressured into those kinds of decisions late in a cycle.

They were faced with questions of conscience, and at least for the first bill, you didn’t see everyone voting along party lines. I will likely vote against at least one incumbent in my district because of what I’ve seen in the last month.

Our government is a public trust and I think they forget that sometimes.

What does all this have to do with green thoughts? I notice a similarity to voices ringing the alarm on environmental issues.

Tom Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, recently said he’d thought our political system was one designed by geniuses so that it could be run by idiots.

We should not forget that we may be proceeding through a critical time for our planet.

Will we decry poor leadership during our next crisis if we enabled it?

Probably.

That we watched western civilization change on a dime in a matter of weeks - not years, is proof that our government, our society and our principles do not have to change at a snail’s pace to progress.

WATCH WHERE YOU SIT

If you’ve been following the newsletter you know that we wrote several months ago about the adoption by our government in the Farm Bill of amendments to the Lacey Act.
The legislation created a requirement for importers to declare the species and country of origin on any plant or plant product, including wood, in their products.

This week’s Lacey Act story is mainly about enforcement being pushed to next year.

The amendments were intended to protect forests worldwide from deforestation and illegal wood products from entering the United States. Illegally harvested wood is sold below market price or is wood cut in violation of treaties, laws and regulations.

If this legislation were to be structured as strictly as the new California Air Resources Board formaldehyde emissions standard, it could be very challenging for our industry.
On another level these amendments make industries more accountable for the immense use of resources required to fuel the last decade’s import boom.

I’d file it under items to keep an eye on. Import declarations for wood furniture are supposed to take effect next year.

If you would like to read a story about some of the people behind this law, this is a fantastic recent piece from the New Yorker, and it even names some factories in our industry.

Interestingly, one of the big uses for illegally harvested wood is toilet seats.

GOOD NEWS

Here’s some good news for our industry. I’m just happy that this is even out there and you can read about it in the newsletter. The International Furnishings and Design Association is offering a $1,000 scholarship for a green focused student for the first time next year.

Here’s a quote from the story:

“It was evident from our numerous applications for current EF (Educational Foundation) scholarships that today’s students are concerned about the environment and interested in applying green/sustainable aspects in their design projects, now and in their future careers,” Linda Mariani, chairwoman of the Education Foundation.

She added:

“We felt it was time to add this scholarship to our family of grants and scholarships.”

The scholarship will be offered for the first time in 2009 and will be awarded to a full- or part-time student focusing on the field of sustainability.

Congratulations to the IFDA. This is a great way to encourage sustainable design in our industry. Maybe we can get more corporations, foundations and universities already involved with our industry to do something similar.

Best,
Heath

Greenthoughts - Num. 15

Trees-4-Trees

The Trees-4-Trees program at the top of this newsletter is a pretty ambitious program. The program aims to plant 400,000 trees in Indonesia next year, through funds raised by a levy paid on each container.

Indonesia is one of those areas that has gained a reputation for rampant illegal logging. Several economic and social factors play a role. If you want to read a little about illegal logging there, try this New York Times article from December 6, 2007:

Or this one from 2006 in the Washington Post:

The problem remains that the government cannot be everywhere. My main source for this story is Mark Schmidt of Domus Designs, a casual furniture company. His e-mail is: dms@domusdesigns.com

Speaking of green

Quite often I find myself locked in a great conversation on green issues. This is much more enjoyable than politics, whose conversations frequently give way to high blood pressure as I try to listen patiently.

Several of those conversations popped up over the last three weeks or so. At the Tupelo show I found myself locked in conversation with an executive from a pretty well known furniture company. They are a large importer and the person I spoke with has a sharp eye for product standards.

He knows them by heart and pointed to several violations he saw. The topic of conversation was how difficult this concept of a green industry is - especially when you consider the global nature of our industry.

My response has become: If you were making a green product, what could you control?

You could control finishes, raw materials, nails, fabrics, cushions, buttons, any of a number of components. The folks who make those components have control over what they make.

We control our buying decisions. I think oftentimes we feel as we’ve been enslaved by who we buy from, when in actuality, we have free will to buy from whomever we chose. All of our dollars speak for us. We get what we pay for.

The forests are at the whim of the mills, who are at the whim of the factories, who are at the whim of the suppliers, who are at the whim of the retailers.

I said to the executive you could tell the factory that you want to know its emissions. He said that this will be impossible in the source country he was using. It would be daunting, especially with the secrecy that shrouds government here, he said. This is an easier task in the United States.

In asking a factory owner here in the United States just what he has to report to our government, I learned that it is a lot. I received this reply (I’ve blotted out the specific numbers):

“We monitor & report our air emissions (annual VOC emissions —- plus other stuff like particulates ….).  We report all of our hazardous liquid disposal (less than — tons, making us a minor source).  I can even tell you how much we take to landfill every year (about – tons and it has dropped for three straight years).”

These are things you can hang your hat on if you were trying to prove your product was green.

But what would you do next?

Thoughts from the Baby-cue

Last weekend I attended a barbecue at my girlfriend’s friends’ home. They are getting ready to have a baby. We’ll get to compostable diapers in a second.

The husband, he works for a university. He said that one of the things he’s done in ordering paper for the school is asked suppliers to have the Forest Stewardship Council logo on paper from the printer.

He said: “We order the paper, so we can tell them what our preference is for, and if they want our business – which they do – then they will adapt.” That’s capitalism.

I liked that, because it goes back to what we were just discussing about product. If you tell a supplier what you want, they either have to do it that way or they lose your business. It’s probably best to have a back-up plan in place.

From there we talked about the furniture industry. We were sitting at this lovely table. They had just remodeled the kitchen and the kitchen island was from Ikea. Lovely kitchen island too. In the furniture industry, I think our challenge is telling consumers why a table is just so much more than a table.

When I was up in the managed forests at Coopers Rock in West Virginia this summer, I couldn’t help but think about how great it would be if consumers  knew how much work went into cutting a tree and getting into the forest to cut it down. They might also want to know that younger trees capture more carbon than older trees.

What if we could talk about what a table meant to emissions? What if we could say the industry as a whole lowered its carbon footprint? My goal, and I have talked about it for months, is to come up with a reasonable carbon footprint for an individual table or chair. This is not an easy task.

For this you must add gas to get a tree from which the table is made from point a to point b. You must know how much gas it took for a container ship to cross the Atlantic, then boil that down into how many tables were on a container and how much of the emissions of that ship you would contribute to the table. And you’ve got fabric, you’ve got nails and screws. You have glues.

How much time and gas did it take for the worker to get to the factory. It would have to be a very conservative number, but when you add all that up, it’s more than a table. You’d very quickly get a picture of our industry.

The grass is greener under the compost pile

Back at the barbecue, they’re getting ready to have a baby. I’m 28, so naturally, I’m starting to notice a larger proportion of babies just showing up at friendly events. The couple said they don’t have a lot of stuff they need and they didn’t really see the point of registering for a bunch of stuff at Target that might not be exactly what they want.

So they were considering creating a page to come up with an online directory of gifts they would like. Because of this, they can direct the purchase. Then they can get exactly what they want, and if they’ve done their research, all they need to give you is a link. They could get all green items, thus the eco-registry term and could really get down to controlling the gifts purchased for them.

Then we got to talking about compostable diapers. I just couldn’t help comically picturing taking off a baby’s diaper and throwing it out in the garden and then picking tomatoes from those plants.

Yeah, weird.

From what I was told, compostable baby diapers cost more. I don’t know, I haven’t bought diapers, but that does look to be the case from some price comparison I’ve done. Now someone here in the Furniture/Today office uses the Seventh Generation diapers and I looked at the site.

On the website, and this is unbelievable - to show you how different our industries are - you can pull up the Material Data Safety Sheets and all ingredients in the diapers.

At the bottom of their webpage, they list that they’ve saved 272,908 trees and 518,588 gallons of petroleum. That’s pretty cool. When I think about all the diapers being used on babies, I can’t help but think we must be sending a ton of waste to landfills with disposable diapers.

This is their site.

Sounds like a job for Juan Valdez

So all this talk of waste and composting gets me thinking about where I see it adding up. My girlfriend’s mother lives in Chapel Hill and has a beautiful garden. When we travel there, we always save the egg shells and coffee grounds because she uses them for fertilizer.

You can find some details about coffee composting here.

So then I got to thinking about how much coffee we drink in here at the Furniture/Today office. Let’s say we drink about a dozen pots of coffee a day. That’s two packs of coffee a pop. And I would say in our office, it’s probably closer to 15 or even 20 pots of coffee a day.

So of a dozen pots, two one ounce packets per pot, we’d probably have some 24 ounces of leftover coffee grounds that could be used as fertilizer. Let’s say each of the six floors on our building does the same.

That would be nine pounds of nitrous oxide rich fertilizer we are probably more often tossing than not, a day. Let’s say there are ten buildings that drink coffee the way our building does. That’s 90 pounds of fertilizer a day. In a five day week that is 450 pounds of fertilizer. I don’t know how to create economies of scale around waste, but it got me thinking.

With that, I’ll wrap. I have one more conversation I shared with an electrical engineer here recently on green energy, but I’ll wait as this entry looks long enough.

Best,

Heath