While there are myriad perspectives on sustainability and corporate responsibility, each with its own unique value, I often find myself focusing on sustainability’s operational aspects: what can we do to increase the pace at which belief in sustainability translates into concrete actions that benefit the environment, society, and business? To me, a key question is how we get more done, how we “hard wire” sustainability into the way businesses operates.

The time is right to focus on the how of increasing sustainability because so much great work has already been done on the what over the years, and sustainability has come to be so well-known in business. For example, the concept of the triple bottom line (social, environmental, economic) is now decades old, and it has been remarkably successful at becoming part of the thinking of businesspeople. (There is, however, a long way to go in terms of becoming fully integrated into the day-to-day operation of businesses, as we will discuss later.)

While in years past sustainability and responsibility efforts had to fight being perceived as distractions, surveys now routinely find it is perceived as important—for example, one found that 93 percent of CEOs see sustainability as important to their company’s future success. In this context, it makes sense to me that our primary challenge is less about raising awareness of sustainability and responsibility and more about raising the level of action related to it.

Part of raising the level of action is addressing issues that frequently stand in the way of businesses doing more. While there are many barriers, I believe a core issue is the tendency to see sustainability as separate from the business, rather than as integral to how it creates value. This has two key components:

• Cultural: Sustainability being seen as not as rigorous or financially valuable as other areas of the business
• Conceptual: Sustainability being seen as tangential, or as outside of the core of how the business creates value

Separation from the business

The response to this perceived disconnect between sustainability and the business can be twofold: First, to demonstrate that sustainability is being run with the same culture of performance (e.g., rigor, focus on value) as the rest of the business; second, to illuminate the links between sustainability and the value-creation engine of the business.

One effective way to address the culture of performance aspect is to run sustainability programs with the same management rigor and focus on value, meeting the same business case requirements and using the same performance improvement processes as the rest of the business. Over the years, many studies—and my personal experience—have found that one of the top barriers to doing more around sustainability is the difficulty of demonstrating the business case.

As just one example, a report commissioned by the Institute of Chartered Management Accountants states that sustainability will only be embedded in an organization if it is supported by a robust business case linked to tangible benefits.

I’ve spent over a decade trying to address this specific issue, in particular working on how to better measure and grow the true value sustainability produces for an organization. In my experience, better valuation of sustainability’s benefits produces two key benefits: Proving and Improving. Proving the value sustainability brings is important: first, because a business that underestimates the value of sustainability may then underinvest in it, and, second, because the act of quantifying and valuing benefits can bring sustainability efforts in line with the rest of the business, where that kind of value-focused analysis is a core activity.

The reason that not proving the benefits of sustainability normally results in underinvestment is simple: people’s intuitive sense for how much value sustainability provides typically produces an estimate that is too low—much too low. In my experience, when we have finished finding all the “submerged value” that sustainability provides but the company hadn’t previously seen, the actual value produced by sustainability is often 1,000% as much as previously believed. As you might imagine, businesses are frequently investing much less than they would if they saw sustainability as ten times as valuable than they currently do.

Measurement may not only result in increased ability to prove sustainability’s value, but also to improve it. The old saying, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” is as important to sustainability as it is to other parts of the business—if the business believes that sustainability efforts can’t be measured well, and therefore managed well, sustainability may not have an equal seat at the table. For this reason, breaking down the measurement barrier also leads to breaking down part of the wall separating sustainability from the business.

In addition to helping convince the business that sustainability can be improved through the same processes as the rest of the business (e.g., Six Sigma and related methodologies, which rely heavily on measurement), there is evidence that measurement improves the outcomes of sustainability and responsibility efforts. For example, one report found that:

• Measurement, to an extent, is its own reward: it encourages improvement, management, and the explicit formulation of assumptions and expectations. It should be viewed as a process whose greatest value is achieved by organizations that learn from evidence amassed over time.

Similarly, another study found that responsibility practitioners running volunteer programs saw greater success when their programs used measurement and that both they and senior executives at their companies believed that measurement and evaluation was key to program success:

• Both CR/volunteer managers and senior executives agree that Measurement and Evaluationis key to the success of their volunteer programs….CR/volunteer managers from companies that measure and/or evaluate volunteer events/activities rate their programs more successful than the programs of their peers whose companies do not measure and/or evaluate.

Connecting to the value generation engine of the business

One reason people often intuitively believe that sustainability is not profitable is that they cannot see how it is connected to the way the business generates value. While saving money on the business’s energy bills, for example, is clearly good, it is not a core part of how most businesses compete. For the majority of firms, their competitive position is primarily about something else, such as product differentiation, brand strength, innovation, or overall low cost (primarily driven by controlling other types of costs besides energy, such as labor and materials). To the extent that sustainability’s benefits are seen as tangential to the core of the business, that perception affects efforts to embed it in the business.

One way to address this is to make clear how sustainability is, in fact, tied to the core ways the business creates value. For example:

Product differentiation: Many products and services are seen by buyers as commodities—that is, as not very differentiated from the competition’s (in spite of companies’ best efforts to differentiate them). Increasing numbers of buyers have begun including sustainability in their buying decisions—for example, the economic activity of organizations with supplier sustainability programs is well into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and many leading industries have groups of firms that are advancing sustainable purchasing, such as Practice Greenhealth in the health care space.

Innovation: Intuitively, it makes sense that including sustainability in a company’s thinking would help it to be more innovative—change the way you think and you change the way you create—and there is increasing evidence that this is the case. Research I led, for example, found that companies that were sustainability leaders were much more likely to be innovation leaders than those that weren’t—400% more likely, in fact.

Overall costs: Sustainability provides a lens that can help identify waste, whether tangible (e.g., material) or intangible (e.g., wasting existing goodwill or wasting the opportunity to develop more of it). Often by following the carbon emissions of a business, for example, companies find wasted material or effort, which leads to identifying opportunities for increased efficiency within the supply chain.

As just one example, suppliers may be sending products to stores over-packaged, costing the suppliers money in materials and the stores money in labor. Fixing this requires little if any investment and can yield millions of dollars in savings, generating a very strong ROI. This may be why research on sustainable supply chain projects finds they deliver such a high return on investment–such as ROI figures well in excess of 100%.

Brand: While there are multiple factors that go into brand strength, many companies see brand protection as one of the values provided by sustainability. For firms whose key advantage is brand strength, this means sustainability can be a way to reduce the risk of damage to that key asset.

Removing impediments to action

If we take the perspective that sustainability is not separate from the business, and that not only should it be “hard wired” into the business, but also that it already is, that can help change how businesses behave. In doing so, we can help businesses create more value, not only for themselves but also for the world.

A little while ago, Wired magazine’s Jeff Abramowitz took a look back at how Wi-Fi, the now-ubiquitous wireless internet system, came to be the way we all remotely connect. It’s a complex tale, as computers were still plugged into walls and cables, a lot of internet access depended on phone lines, businesses and consumers were working with different systems and so on. It was chaotic, to say the least.

The industry players — the large manufacturers of hardware, software, chipmakers, and so on — hadn’t yet agreed on which system was best. The great VHS vs Beta battle for the soul of videotape had a similar ring — but nowhere near the impact — of this epic struggle. And this all happened only twenty years ago this September!

Abramowitz compares this period to a digital ‘wild west’ wherein “one vendor could build ‘standards-compliant’ products that weren’t fully compatible with ‘standards-compliant’ products from another. These weaknesses in the international specification led companies to support rival technology consortia, each aiming to become a de facto standard.”

Right. Exactly, there was a hole in the system. We needed a standard. A universal standard makes it easier to focus on real impact; to allow everyone to get on with manufacturing their next generations of goods and services. To allow the whole industry to move forward.

By September 15, 1999, when the 17 major digital players finally got together in a room to back Wi-Fi, this was well understood and, as Abramowitz notes dryly, “there was no lack of enthusiasm in that room.”

It’s easy to see why, as we’re all still grappling with manufacturers using different types of screwheads. With Europe, Asia and the US wiring their electrical systems differently. With some countries driving on the left, some on the right. And with at least one major country continuing to resist universal adoption of the metric system. Mercy!

There is yet another major arena with an analogous situation: Plastic neutrality. Similarly, this is a new arena, one that is urgent for the world and that is struggling to find a meaningful standard in time for the big players to all get on board together.

Thus far, the standard has simply been pound-for-pound reclamation of any plastic in place of any type of manufactured product. But this is clearly flawed, just as Wi-Fi’s predecessors were.

What about plastics that are currently in a wetland channel, on their way to the sea…are they equivalent to a ton of the same material currently lying next to the highway in Montana? What about a ton of just-manufactured micro-plastic versus a ton of intact PET in the back room of a supermarket? There is more to the true impact than weight and volume.

Type, condition, toxicity, likely destination, economic impact and probable longevity in the environment — all these go along with the amount of plastic to create a real, meaningful, useful standard that all can adhere to.

For almost two years now, Valutus has been grappling with this and we’ve been developing a plastic standard that includes all of these impacts, a standard we call True Plastic Impact (TPI).

Let’s take the condition of the plastic involved. Currently a company can manufacture a ton of pristine plastic objects that happen to shred easily into shrapnel-like particles in the environment. Perhaps they’re designed for boats and generally end up in a waterway. And these fragments may complete their cycle in the digestive tracts of marine animals and, ultimately perhaps, in humans.

Yet currently, as long as the company finds and recycles a ton of plastic somewhere, whether similar to the one they used or not, they are considered ‘plastic neutral.’

To accelerate actual, meaningful action on plastic, companies need to understand and manage the true impact of their plastic use.

For us the True Plastic Impact calculation looks like this:

Those reading this article are likely doing so using Wi-Fi because all agreed that it was the best, most workable and universal option. The existence of a standard makes more action happen faster. It helps create the acceleration of action we saw when areas such as DVDs and green buildings adopted their own widely used standards. (About a year after Blu-ray defeated HD DVD, Blu-ray player sales nearly doubled.) For this reason, we believe it’s urgent that we all get quickly to a workable, meaningful plastic impact standard – and a more credible, comprehensive standard makes that happen faster.

Fundamentally, standards that consider all plastic to be the same (“mass-balance” approaches) create a credibility problem, since people know that isn’t the case. That holds back adoption and progress.

TPI doesn’t have this issue. As plastic waste expert Joao Sousa says:

Plastic waste is a big issue, and its impact needs to be measured accurately. Unfortunately, most plastic impact measures rely heavily or exclusively on weight and don’t include other factors that matter, such as location and toxicity.

The True Plastic Impact measure developed by Valutus is an exception and is the most comprehensive measure I have seen. 

— Joao Sousa Programme Lead, Plastic Waste
Leader, The Marine Plastic Footprint Report
IUCN

For more detail about True Plastic Impact, or to join the companies who are already using it, contact us or go to www.plasticstandard.com.

Yet how many sustainable initiatives die on the corporate vine because the earnest and hardworking CSO didn’t present this unsurfaced value to her skeptical CFO? We don’t know for certain but, based on the daily wailing and gnashing of teeth we encounter, a lot.

Submerged Value

Latent consequences are what we call Submerged Value, and it is high time this deep well got its due. It’s a critical part of impact science, our term for the full effect an organization has on the world.

There’s the company, for example, that built several LEED stores to help control energy costs. Energy savings was the ‘manifest,’ planned consequence. What they discovered afterwards was that the types of changes that go into LEED buildings led to more customers because, without knowing why, people felt better in those stores.

Then there was the manufacturing company that looked at the benefits of reducing industrial waste because they thought it would lower their purchasing and disposal costs. It turned out, however, that there were at least a dozen additional benefits that they had never considered, benefits that were unseen without thinking carefully about secondary and tertiary effects of the original action.

For example, there were lower warehousing costs due to managing less material, reductions in processing and insurance costs — all accompanied by an increase in working capital. These benefits were concrete, real, and significant, but had not been factored into their calculations or their investment request.

And consider the case of the large pharmaceutical company donating medicine to communities in Africa as a centerpiece of their CSR program. One would assume health outcomes would improve when pharmaceuticals are available — that is to be expected.

But there is another beneficial outcome, one the company did not foresee: improved gender equity. The U.N. tells us that when household members are sick, it’s usually a girl who stays home to care for them. Therefore, if there are fewer sick people, girls can attend school more frequently, which in turn – the U.N. again — contributes greatly to gender equity. These are, in Merton’s words, ‘latent’ or unexpected consequences.

Okay, some say, that’s good, but it just kind of happened that way, that’s why they’re unintended, right? Not in our book. Such things can be planned for, and values assigned to them, in advance. It’s a matter of asking the right questions, putting on the SCUBA gear in the planning stages, in order to raise this fountain of value to the surface.

In fact, it’s urgent we all use this approach. We’ve detailed in this space how difficult it is to break through the grass ceiling — to ourselves be properly valued — in the halls of power where thumbs up or down is all the difference. Submerged value can make that difference.

Valutus has been baking this metric into our valuations and tools for decades in order to present as realistic a snapshot of true outcomes as possible. In the process we often hear things like, “Whoa. I never thought of that before. But, now that I see it, it’s obvious.”

“Gender equity in Africa because girls have more freedom to attend school when there’s medicine?” Of course, right, it’s obvious now.
“Lower across-the-board costs and higher yields with reduced industrial waste?” Sure, naturally, had it in our back pocket the whole time.”
“Customers like being in our LEED buildings more?” Yeah, a slam dunk!

We’re not saying this is simple; even leading organizations miss this stuff. We checked the reporting of companies with large, longstanding, sophisticated medicine donation programs and found nary a one that even mentioned gender-equity impacts. This is why we call these benefits submerged, because they’re very difficult to see unless you know where and how to look.

There are questions and tools, however, that can dredge submerged value to the surface. But how much is all this trouble worth? Where’s the payoff?

We know from experience that if sustainability’s value can be increased just 25% through raising submerged value, a bunch of important projects that were borderline before may now get a thumbs up. And if 50% is submerged, and we can dredge it up? What if, as we’ve found, submerged value is often three times as much as visible value? How much sustainability would get done once the word got out that it frequently has four times the value originally thought?

We’re not saying this is child’s play. But neither is it impossible, as some have said. So far, in two decades of valuation, there has never been a case where we could not raise significant submerged value to the surface.

Additionally, in that span, the submerged value has never been lower than 25% of the total value of sustainability, and it is usually 50% or more. Pretty unexpected, right? We were shocked, too — at first.

We’ll talk more about this in our next issue, including why so much value is submerged and how to surface it, but first we’ll throw this question out there: what if a project’s submerged value were actually greater than its ‘manifest’ value…is that possible?

What’s that…you can’t wait? Okay, here’s a quick morsel: when a municipality adopted green building policies for its public facilities, research found that it led to a 90% increase – almost double – in the number of private sector green buildings that were built. Yes. It’s more than possible.

Want to dive into submerged value? We do that here. Bring your SCUBA gear!

Continued…

Previously, we discussed Submerged Value and made a point of noting how significant a chunk of the total value of sustainable actions it represented. We closed with the rather bold statement that often, submerged value actually rivals — or even exceeds — visible value.

Well, we’re here now to back that up. Over more than two decades of working on measurement and valuation, we keep confronting a shocking result: submerged value isn’t just a nice add-on that rounds up the project’s visible benefits. Often, it’s the majority of the project’s value.

Consider the story of a hospitality company with tens of thousands of employees. They’d been active in sustainability and CSR for years, and the executive in charge was highly experienced and respected.

The company knew sustainability and CSR activities were something employees liked, but they’d never been able to quantify their effects. As a result, when looking at the business benefits of their initiatives, they tended to focus on things like energy savings, for which they had good numbers. That meant that the ROI of sustainability and CSR wasn’t huge (though it was positive).

I asked the executive how much she believed the talent-related benefits of her sustainable activities were worth – that is, the value of these activities on things such as employee attraction and retention.

Now, I’ve asked this question of many, many companies over the years and had very few quantitative answers. The most common response, by far, is: “No idea. We’re not even sure how to answer that question.” Unfortunately, because “we don’t know” can’t be entered in a spreadsheet, the ROI value of something unknown is assigned the only value it can’t possibly have: Zero.[1]

But to her credit, this exec didn’t say, “I don’t know.” Instead, she estimated the value at about $3 million per year. She made it clear, however, that the company’s C-Suite would put the value at about $300K, ten percent of her estimate. This was very instructive.

First, it wasn’t good if C-Suite execs thought sustainability and CSR activity was worth so much less than she did.

Second, the number she believed they’d support was very small. Her estimate of $3 million isn’t much for a multi-billion-dollar company, but $300K? That’s tiny for an organization that large, so small that many executives wouldn’t bother with any activity that size, let alone budget much money for it.

Third, this allowed us to determine the percentage of sustainability’s talent-related value that was submerged. Once we determined the full value of the benefits, we could subtract her estimates, and the difference would show us how much value was submerged. 

We used conservative assumptions, which is our standard practice, since it shows we’re taking the analysis seriously, not just making up numbers that support our point of view. An added benefit: if we can make the case for sustainability or CSR using conservative numbers, any additional benefit is just a bonus.

As an example of our use of conservative numbers, published research has shown social responsibility leadership resulting in a reduction in employee attrition of 25%-30% or more. In our calculations, we went with 10%.

It is also our standard practice to do the calculations together with executives, rather than doing the calculations and then trying to convince them our numbers are right. Using our interactive Talent Benefit ValuationTool, we sit with executives and help them enter numbers that make sense to them, so they’ll feel more comfortable with the results.

Returning to the hospitality example, the result of calculating the true value of sustainability and CSR efforts for talent-related benefits alone was about $30 million per year, or ten times what the executive had estimated, and 100 times what she thought her C-Suite would assume. In this company’s case, the vast, vast majority of value was submerged.

When we get a result like that, the typical first response is, “Wow! That’s a lot more than we thought!” This is usually followed closely by, “we must have put an incorrect number in here somewhere!”Both responses are legitimate. It’s often the case, with a result so dramatically different from expectations, that the calculation is wrong. Therefore, our approach is not to argue — at all. We simply go through the calculation and offer to change any number in it.

Once we do that, the tool updates its calculation instantly and executives see that, while the total changes, it’s not enough to change the obvious conclusion: that sustainability is being greatly undervalued. For example, in a case like this one, the value might drop from $30M to $28M. That’s less, but it is still enormously more than previously believed.

At this point, we’re often asked to change a second number, and again the total changes somewhat, but the conclusion does not. Perhaps we’re asked to make a third change, meaning we’ve now reduced three numbers (numbers that were already conservative) – but, just as before, while the final value goes down it’s still many times what was previously thought.

In the example above, even if the value dropped to $25M, that’s still more than eight times as much as the executive previously thought, and 80 times her estimate of what the C-Suite believed.

So, stepping back from this specific corporation for a moment, what general lessons can we take from this?

First, it’s certainly clear that surfacing and quantifying submerged value matters. If executives believe sustainability’s value is much lower than it really is, what’s the likelihood they are investing the proper amount in sustainability and CSR programs? Second, it’s also clear that using interactive tools, and a we’re-doing-this-together approach, matters too.

Third, we need to welcome the chance to talk about value. Sustainability and CSR are much more valuable than people believe because most of that value is submerged. Surfacing and quantifying that value matters. A lot.

References:
[1] MIT Professor John Sterman

It’s a classic James Bond scenario. One brilliant, committed evildoer, with a small force of minions, is bent on global domination to get what he wants. He is pitted against one brilliant, committed do-gooder bent on stopping him at all costs. As usual, the clock is ticking.

In our case however, there are vast forces committed to actively opposing any increase in sustainable actions, with an army of minions, all arrayed against a small-but-committed cadre of leaders — business executives, NGOs, government officials, scientists, and members of the public bent on stopping them. And the clock certainly is ticking.

Many top executives who appear to align well with the Black Hats should —and could — be natural allies of sustainable actions. If they truly knew how sustainability could increase bottom-line profits, shareholder value, and value in the community, maybe they would leap into the fray with the White Hats, become leaders in this fight themselves. 

It is up to the rest of us to be effective sustainability leaders and to lead them, and the world, to become leaders too.

How? First, by making sustainability a valuable part of the business, and making sure all involved know it. If you’ve seen our articles on submerged value, breaking through to the C-Suite, etc., you’ll recognize our emphasis on this theme. Second, we need to be rigorous about what works – really works — and what doesn’t. 

Taking a cold, hard, and detailed look to see what works, and tossing the things that don’t, greatly increases our credibility. It also means fewer wasted resources. As we all know, sustainability programs don’t get enough resources to waste them on things that don’t work!

It has long been our approach to inject rigor into what we do and to focus on finding what works through hard evidence – then scaling it for larger impact. 

Before I started Valutus, I conducted research on whether a centralized sustainability / CSR organization had better results, or whether a decentralized one did, one where “sustainability is everyone’s job” and there is no CSO. There were champions of both approaches but, if one worked substantially better, then people using the other one weren’t maximizing their impact. We’re all about impact and we needed to know which was true. (It turns out it’s the centralized organization with a CSO. The intuition that explains the results is simple: Sustainability is like profitability – while it’s everyone’s job to help a company make money, companies still have CFOs.)

Similarly, I led a study about which sustainable supply chain practices actually work. Here again, the results pointed to a way to get more bang for both the buck and the managerial effort. What we found, after reviewing data from almost 1,000 organizations, was astounding. Under half of the 50 sustainable supply chain practices companies use can actually be shown to work. 

In other words, the majority of what companies do to promote sustainability in their value chain doesn’t seem to work at all and is a waste of precious resources. But why is this?

I begin a number of my talks by asking directly, “What if you could do more of what tends to work, and less of what may not?” But maybe the question that matters is, “Why don’t organizations know what actually works before they start?”

The answer seems to be that companies just don’t know how to find out what works. They may be brilliant at making better widgets or developing superior medicines, but when it comes to sustainability, they don’t know the right questions to ask (or simply don’t believe it’s possible to answer them). Even if they’re on the right track, they often don’t apply enough rigor to the answers.

Now, as anyone who follows us has heard (once or twice before!), we’ve spent the better part of two decades quantifying things we were told could not be measured. But if the unmeasurable is out there, we haven’t found it yet. (For one thing, it’s not always necessary to come up with the exact and perfect answer. As the great statistician John Tukey was fond of saying, “An approximate answer to the right question is worth a great deal more than a precise answer to the wrong question.”) 

When I was doing the research into making a supply chain more sustainable — helping suppliers improve their environmental and social performance — it took about 40% of the questions we ask just to clarify how well each practice worked. But we had to do it — no way do we want our clients putting their resources into low-value projects, and no way does the world have time for us to be inefficient. 

Today’s sustainability leaders need to be rigorous, to take nothing for granted, and to learn to measure and quantify what matters, even if that initially seems impossible. We need to know our project will work. 

We can’t afford not to: Not succeeding squanders resources, wastes time, and emboldens those opposing us. The forces trying to hold us back need to be shaken, not stirred.

_____________________________________

Each time we drove down the Henry Hudson Parkway, approaching my sister’s home in northern Manhattan, I’d gaze across the vast sheet of the Hudson, sigh and say, “You know, this must have been so pristine and beautiful when the first settlers got here… ”

Glancing at the passenger seat, I’d see my wife desperately trying to stifle her laughter. “You say it every. Single. Time!” she would gasp. “I’ve just been sitting here waiting.”

Okay, very funny. But the truth is, it was still magnificent. The cliffs on the Jersey shore, known as The Palisades. The Great Grey George Washington Bridge, under which – if you look carefully – you can see the Little Red Lighthouse, of children’s-book fame.

A few miles south are the Plains of Weehawken, to which Aaron Burr and Alex Hamilton were separately rowed for pistol practice, and from which Hamilton returned mortally wounded. (By the way, that was no mean feat: the river is well over a mile across at that point.) There have been some changes since then – since the early days, I mean.

When Henry Hudson, for example, sailed up the Hudson in 1609, there were huge creatures swimming alongside him: sperm whales, humpbacks and other species of cetaceans. One sperm whale famously became entangled and died at Cohoes, NY, in 1652, supplying the town with a vast supply of spermaceti for whale oil. 

But the those pesky ‘first settlers’ came, and the history of the river since then has not been a kind one: the European touch was not light, shall we say. Those who alleged, in the mid-20th, that ‘dillution is the solution to pollution’ were clearly not drinking from the Hudson. By the time I came along, the river was a sewer. 

I was born in Tarrytown, which is ranged along the east bank of the Hudson near its widest point, some three miles across. This is the home of Sleepy Hollow and the Tappan Zee bridge. We lived in Ossining then, also on Hudson, and later in Riverdale, close to the wonderfully named Spuyten Duyvel (spitting devil) creek separating Manhattan from the Bronx.

Perhaps that’s why the wreck of the river – and the constant thought of what it must once have been like – was so personal, and so painful. The pollution of our waterways was a concerted attack from all sides and it was only legislation such as the Clean Water Act that stemmed the tide. 

GE, for example, poured PCBs into its waters for 30 years, until their toxic effects were fully understood, and their use was banned. After 50 years of exposure, one species of fish, “evolved a two amino acid change in its AHR2 receptor gene.” Apparently this made it more likely to pass its PCB contaminants up the food chain through striped bass and beyond. Industry up and down the river added various chemicals, sewage and all the other trappings humanity seems to use but not dispose of safely.

There are major point-sources for waterway pollution and there are non-point-sources too. “…Sediments, nutrients, pesticides, fertilizers and animal wastes, account for more than half of the pollution in U.S. waters,” according to Wikipedia.

But hey, I didn’t come here to whine, not this time anyway. The story of the Hudson – and the Charles and the Great Lakes and many other American bodies of water – is a story of success. 

My last post was about air pollution and how the Clean Air Act of 1970, along with the creation of the EPA that same year, had done wonders for America’s lungs. While researching all that, I couldn’t help but think of the impact the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the EPA’s designation of the Hudson as a superfund site, had on that wonderful river.

Fortunately, many other waterways have also been rescued, among them the Charles River in Boston. That’s good, because two of my wife’s siblings and my nephew capsized their canoe just past the Anderson bridge in Cambridge during Boston’s 4th of July celebration en route to the fireworks. They had to be rescued by a yacht heading in the same direction. (I was just about to dive in to save them when that boat pulled up. No, really I was, honest.)

Thirty years ago this would have been horrifying and I would have aborted the trip and taken them to the hospital. By 2011, when this occured, the Charles – while still not absolutely pristine – was swimmable again.

 Some time in the summer of 1974 or ’75, I walked 20 miles along riverside trails beside Pete Seeger, on our way to Croton Point Park for his Hudson River Festival. We were raising money for the sloop Clearwater, Seeger’s co-op sailing vessel that plied the Hudson raising awareness about the plight of the river’s water, flora and fauna. I say ‘we’ but I was just a teenager helping raise a few bucks. Seeger, long-time champion of the Hudson, was walking behind the thousands of others, picking up trash they left behind, and I tagged along.

He was an old man, and I a young one, but he was spry and feisty and tall and had a wonderful resonant speaking voice, as I recall. Up close, he was as impressive as his reputation. The late great Harry Chapin was waiting at the park and entertained us all for a while.

A few years later I sailed on the Clearwater, taking my very young nephew – the same who took an unintentional dip in the Charles some years later – for his first sail. We both got an earful on the various states of the Hudson, dredging up crabs and shrimp along with the occasional piece of trash. He was born a few blocks from the George Washington Bridge, in an apartment my sister has occupied for almost 40 years. I guess the Hudson is pretty deep in my family’s bones.

But here’s the thing: the Hudson is back. The quality of water in the area is now higher than at any point in the last hundred years, according to the NYC Department of Environmental Protection. This in a river where fishing had to be banned in spots, along with eating anything that came out of it.

But there have been recent images of beaver in the Bronx and Hudson rivers, an animal that was hunted wiped out in New York before 1700 for its pelts.

Humpbacks have been spotted coasting upriver in the past few years. This is not a fluke – if you’ll pardon the pun – as some 272 were sighted in 2018. This was unthinkable just a short while ago and even as recently as 2011 only five were seen.

And that’s just the big boys. I, for one, was flabbergasted to learn there are seahorses in the lower river. Seahorses! 

The lined seahorse is flourishing, and that means there are tiny shrimp for them to eat, and sea nymphs, and on and on. There are now bald eagles along the central and upper Hudson, and many more sharks than we’re accustomed to are hunting in the estuary. Move over striped bass, the big boys are atop the food chain here now — meaning the Great Whites. That’s likely a good omen, as sharks only go places to hunt and that means fish, and lots of ‘em. There are well over 200 species in the estuary including glass eels, Atlantic sturgeon, several species of catfish, and many others.

The lower Hudson, of course, is not truly a river anymore. Below Troy, New York, it’s a tidal estuary, and the brackish mix of salt and fresh makes for variety of animals and plants that would not be found if the water was fresh alone.

Now, we’re not out of the woods on this, and last year another estuary, the Chesapeake, was damaged by runoff of chemicals – specifically nitrogen and phosphorus – from heavy rains, along with debris, receiving only a D grade from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF). 

The good news is, the Bay had been steadily improving for years. At the same time, it points up how easily all this work can be turned on its head. “The Bay’s sustained improvement was reversed in 2018, exposing just how fragile the recovery is,” Will Baker, the president of the CBF, told the Associated Press earlier this year, and the same is clearly true for the Hudson and others. This is not a ‘win’ where we can sit on our thumbs going forward. 

But for the moment, let’s enjoy the fact that we’ve made huge strides and more is being done. It may not be just the way the first settlers saw it. But for all practical purposes, the Hudson is back!

From Valutus Sustainability R.O.I. #18 Rigor: Part 1

Consider that the first Econ laureates, in 1969, were recognized for “applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes.” In 1970 it was for, “static and dynamic economic theory.”

A year later came, “empirically founded interpretation of economic growth,” followed closely by ‘economic equilibrium theory,’ ‘input-output’ method, the ‘theory of money’ and ‘theory of optimum allocation of resources.” See a pattern here?

This year, in contrast, the Nobel committee said their three Laureates — Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer — had “considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research.”

Boom! Theories are critical underpinnings, but sometimes decisions must be made now, perhaps with billions of dollars or people riding on them. If so, then real, concrete information is needed in advance to be as sure as possible that the intended good will result.

An ‘experiment-based approach’ such as these laureates used, leads to measurable, provable results. These economists made field work and experimentation a priority over accepted ideas on poverty reduction.

“Banerjee and his co-workers,” writes Prof Ujjwal K Chowdhury, Pro Vice Chancellor of Adamas University, Kolkata, “try to measure the effectiveness of actions… in improving people’s lives. For this, they use randomized controlled trials, similar to clinical trials in medical research. For example, although polio vaccination is freely available in India, many mothers were not bringing their children for the vaccination drives.” 

Duflo and Banerjee found that immunization rates for children in rural Rajasthan, India, jumped dramatically (from 5 percent to 39 percent) when their families were offered modest incentives for immunization, such as lentils. Lentils!

But it wasn’t immunizations alone. As MIT News notes, “Duflo and Banerjee have applied this new precision while studying a wide range of topics implicated in global poverty, including health care, education, agriculture, and gender issues, while developing new antipoverty programs based on their research.” Their work has “dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice” while demonstrating a “new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty.” 

Yes! No theory need apply. These guys are looking for hard evidence of what actually works. 

So, if a company had come to them and said, hey, we’d like to fund a million vaccinations in Burkina Faso and Kenya but the folks there don’t seem to be vaccinating their kids… any ideas? these three could say, with a high degree of confidence, Yes. We suggest you stock up on legumes.

My wife just returned from a visit to Xiamen, China. Calling me from a tour bus, she remarked on Xiamen’s clean, fresh waterfront air. This reminded me of my own recent trip to the States, and the enjoyable breezes I inhaled in such places as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Boston.

That was a far cry from my boyhood, when approaching any of those towns meant peering through a grimy brown smear. On an early foray to Los Angeles, I saw the thick, hazy rim hanging, stationary, above the great bowl between the mountains. And let’s not mention Gary, Indiana or Elizabeth, New Jersey, where rolling the car windows up was mandatory.

I remember when the air was so thick in New York that it was tough to see the Empire State Building from my place on 13^th street, twenty blocks away. The same nasty stuff hung over Chicago’s skyline. So it was notable that I never gave the air a thought during my trip there this past September.

The air in my current town is a lot more like what I saw during my boyhood. It so happens that just as I flew to the U.S., there was a sudden upswing in air pollution, both here in Hồ Chí Minh City, and in Hanoi.

Since my return, the view from our windows here in Hồ Chí Minh includes a grey, dirty haze, limiting visibility and causing us to buy an air purifier just last week. My oldest daughter — the only one of us to spend the majority of our time in the outside air — has had a persistent cough for most of the past year.

It’s hard to explain the schools here, but hers is three floors of open-air classrooms ranged along open-air corridors in a rectangle around a large open-air courtyard, with flagstones and full-sized trees. By ‘open’ I mean that if it rains — which it does every day during the monsoon season — then it’s also raining in the courtyard and corridors. Whatever the outside air contains is what she breathes all day.

So what should we do? Well, it occurs to me that a snapshot of success in this area looks a lot like the Clean Air Act and the establishment of the EPA, in 1970. We’re just shy of 50 years on from those acts and consider that over this period, GDP has risen nearly 300% while emissions have dropped about 80%. Now that is an accomplishment.

It’s also a little alarming that, for the first time since those incredibly powerful pieces of legislation were passed, air quality in the United States is going in the wrong direction since 2016. The New York Times wrote this week that particulate is up ≈5.5%, enough to be responsible for just under 10,000 extra deaths over the past two years. Yikes!

Now, in spite of this, the U.S. death rate is relatively low. As of 2015, it was coming in at 20.7 deaths per 100,000 people. For context, India, at the top end, had a rate of 223/100,000 with Vietnam in the middle at about 87/100K.

Except that U.S. rates are now rising. More particulate is being pumped into the atmosphere from industry, autos, agriculture and, yes, climate-change-driven wildfires in the West. Having just written about the ravages of indoor air pollution (IAP) in R.O.I. last issue, it seemed air pollution particulate was now an issue for the developing world. Perhaps it’s too soon to make that call.

Under these circumstances, it is comforting that, according to the Washington Post, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler recently disbanded the expert academic panel that reviewed and advised the agency on its standards for small-particle air pollution and replaced it with fossil-fuel-industry consultants. What?!! Double Yikes!

Yet at least up to this point, the EPA, Clean Water act and the various Clean Air acts, have been spectacularly successful.

Still, if I was hoping Vietnam would follow the U.S. model, the news that AirVisual, an app that monitors air quality in cities around the world, took down its Facebook page, was disconcerting. AirVisual was also unavailable on the various App Store sites after Hanoi recently found itself at the top of their list for bad air pollution. The cause, they said, was a ‘coordinated attack,’ though they did not say by whom. If one were indiscreet, one could make a pretty solid guess, given that Hanoi is the capital. (Incidentally, the site is back up and Hanoi is now fourth on the list behind Belgrade, Delhi and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.)

As an American expat, it is gut-wrenching to find that my government is now in the habit of similar attacks on climate information. It is not shocking here to find that politically unwelcome facts are suppressed but when the EPA’s Climate Change Page went dark for more than a year, it became hideously clear the same was happening back home.

Happily, for those who haven’t checked in a while, I just did and the page content has reappeared.
Yet now we find that enforcement at the EPA is down, leading in part, to the uptick in emissions and, sad to say, to more disease and death.

Living here, where just breathing is deadly, is a stern reminder that going back to the days of smog in America’s big cities should be off the table. I can’t cross my fingers — that’s an inappropriate gesture here in Vietnam. But all the toes on my left foot are crossed that soon, Vietnam can replicate what the U.S. did fifty years ago and make its air breathable again. I’ve crossed the toes on my right just as tightly hoping the U.S. does not do the same in reverse.

Speeding along the pre-dawn Mass Pike en route to Logan Airport, my brother-in-law stretched languorously in the passenger seat, laughed and said, “how about those losers who spent all day at the Apple store for the new iPhone launch. Who would use a vacation day just for that?”

I knew the answer and so did he: I would.

I’d just devoted portions of three vacation days to getting one of the 75-million iPhones apple had prepared for this launch, so friends back home in Vietnam could have the newest, hottest tech before anyone else. And I’d missed the Climate Strike to do it.

I’d come to the U.S. a month before for a wedding and to see friends and family but, when word came down from on high – my wife in Ho Chi Minh City – that I had to drive an hour to a certain mall to buy a phone, computer and watch, I rumbled off to New Hampshire.

It was a hot day and, at a food-court counter that made blended smoothies, I ordered something fruity and handed them the travel cup I’d brought with me for the purpose. As usual, I felt a little smug that I’d remembered it.

The youngster serving me was nonplussed and stuttered for a moment before turning to her supervisor and holding out my cup questioningly. “No,” the supe said, with a sympathetic tone, “company policy. We can’t use your cup.

“But,” I frothed inanely, “but…on the very day of the student climate strike?!” Okay, I’m not proud of it but, yes, I said that. Eager to soothe me the first clerk said helpfully, “I can’t use your cup, Sir, but I can use one of ours and pour it into yours…would that work?”

Needless to say, that did not work and, still thirsty, I headed through the mall to get my stuff. But something was clearly wrong as I approached the Apple store: there was a mob in the neighborhood. Was this part of the climate strike?

In fact, these weren’t kids milling around. Instead, in lines six-shops long on either side of the store entrance, were several hundred Gen-Xers and Boomers. They weren’t holding protest signs, but their own current, and perfectly viable, iPhones: texting, chatting, photographing, gaming, working, videoing, and posting, all while waiting breathlessly for their new iPhone 11, which, I learned, had just come out that day.

I, too, was one of those middle-aged posters, and after finding my place in line I posted this:

A pleasant lady in the group on the right said, “no, no, this line is only for people with an appointment between noon and twelve-thirty.” Appointment?

I checked and indeed, in order to pay well over a thousand dollars for one of their new products, an appointment to stand in line was needed. Yet making an appointment turned out to be superfluous anyway: the darned things were already sold out across the East Coast.

I finally got a slot to pick up an Apple Watch between two and two-thirty, which gave me plenty of time to ponder the greenomics of this absurd phenomenon.

As GetOrchard.com reports, “On one hand, Apple arguably created the (annual upgrade) cycle by releasing a new iPhone every year. Major design changes are saved for every second year, making devices look obsolete, even if they still work perfectly.” In other words, their goal is to get us to upgrade annually. Then our phone plan providers — nicely aligned with the manufacturers — also try to hustle an upgrade every other year when our contracts are up.

Apple’s own environmental report documents many steps they have taken to lighten their overall corporate impact, but they also list an iPhone’s carbon phone-print as averaging about 79 kilos of CO₂ over the device’s lifetime and about 80% of that — 63 kg CO₂ — is in the manufacture. In other words, even if the buyer never uses it before replacing it with a new phone, that 63 kg of carbon dioxide – and a host of other greenhouse gases — is already baked in.

Let’s see, 79 kilos per phone, times 75 million initial units, carry the one and…hmm. By my count that comes to just under 6 Billion kilograms of CO₂ in the first week of this launch alone. But wait! They’ve actually ordered around 180-million units for the sales year, which ups our calculations some to, uh, let’s see, 79 kilos times 180 million… I put it at 14.2 Billion kilograms or, more succinctly, 14.2 Million metric tonnes of carbon.

Consider that the total carbon emissions of greater Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2015 was 14.7 million tonnes and it’s clear that almost as much carbon will be released by launching the iPhone 11 this year as a major metropolitan area releases in the same period.[1]  This, of course, only refers to the iPhone and not to any of the millions of units of the other products sold in the same stores.  

What does it mean when millions are standing in solidarity for the climate on the same day millions more are standing in line to buy the newest phone launch?

And what does it mean when that launch represents billions of tons of carbon added to the atmosphere?

Now there’s no need just to pick on Apple. The other manufacturers are in the same boat, and so are we all. It took me, and millions of others, an hour to get to the mall in a personal automobile — not so carbon friendly. Besides, this is how we communicate, work, date, memorialize, innovate, play and view. I have at least ten weekly meetings on my laptop that I would not be able to attend effectively otherwise.

I recently founded an online community for a brick-and-mortar organization and our internet beachhead is growing far, far faster than the earthbound wing. The commute? From bedroom to living room. That’s a lot of gas saved.

It is possible — and I did not find any direct data on this — that all these phones, tablets and laptops, have reduced the number of home TV sets — I don’t feel a need for one, for example — boomboxes, radios, satellite dishes, movie cameras and projectors, trips to the theater, visits to the photo developer and many, many other things we all used to do. Could that be enough to offset this insane, carbon-mad consumer frenzy?

Meanwhile the line had been thinning and it was my turn. I was shuttled between blue-shirted staffers, and the third of these and I waited about fifteen minutes for my watch to emerge from the holy-of-holies, the mysterious Apple back room.

I took the opportunity to ask my young companion, “So…what’s so great about this new iPhone anyhow?” She looked upward for a moment, and said with a little shrug, “Not much, I guess.”
Oh.

I followed up doggedly though, with, “What about this watch, what does that do?”
“Well,” she said, “it works with the iPhone to count your steps, keep track of stuff, you can make calls with it…stuff like that.”
“So, you’re saying I need an iPhone in order to use the watch?”
“Uh huh,” she said blithely.

I ran out — still thirsty — and drove to the nearest climate strike to show my support. But it was too late: the kids had gone, I knew not where. I already knew where their parents were.

References:
[1] Vancouver is the 31^st largest city in North America, with a population of 2.5 million.

Thanks for reading and, of course, your comments are very welcome. – DK