Vicious vs. Virtuous
Catching up on old news from GreenBiz, I found the following quote in one of the GreenerBuildings articles which brought to mind again the idea of pressure points for change:
Whatever the motivation, the lesson learned is simple but elegant: get to the right person inside the retailer’s world and the right things begin to happen. The big question of course is how you find this virtuous insider? Sometimes it’s sheer luck. Sometimes, in the course of doing research on a potential tenant, you discover that they’ve done projects elsewhere that don’t fit the retailer’s typical prototype – and you look for the particular team members responsible for these atypical projects. And in a few cases, the retailer is actually on record as promoting eco-friendly practices. Whatever the case, once you find alignment between your team and that of the tenant’s, instead of a vicious cycle of ongoing resistance to green, you find a virtuous cycle of collaboration.
And since I’ve been looking at supermarkets, I was also interested to see the following:
Under the partnership, Safeway has agreed to purchase 78 million kilowatt hours in the form of wind energy. By doing so, the company not only becomes one of the nation’s largest buyers of green energy in the U.S. but also becomes California’s largest buyer of renewable energy. Safeway is now the only retailer to purchase enough renewable energy to power 100% of its U.S. fuel stations.
“Protecting the environment and conserving our nation’s valuable energy resources is something that Safeway and our customers care deeply about,” said executive vice president Larree Renda. “By powering our fuel stations, stores and corporate offices with wind energy, we are taking a leadership role in using cleaner sources of electricity.”
While I might be inclined to think that Safeway is defending itself in the marketplace against the likes of Whole Foods—Safeway can’t claim the same organic/healthy focus that Whole Foods controls, so it has to address the market in different terms—nonetheless, it is heartening to see this kind of change. Regardless of Safeway’s motivation, their purchasing wind power helps increase demand in general within the alternative energy market.
Again, at some point a discerning market will begin to separate the talkers from the walkers, so to speak. But until that point, any motion towards sustainable business practices will help push the overall market in that direction. And those companies which truly mean what they say will be rewarded, and those who are merely making the motions will be punished.