Catching Up

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Time flies when you're having fun, which I guess explains how two and a half weeks have elapsed since we last posted here: Christmas, New Year's Day, college bowl games, a wild and unpredictable presidential primary season, and an exhausting schedule of personal activities seem to have conspired to keep us away from our keyboard for an unconscionable period.

Our apologies. One day we will share with you some of our adventures during the past few weeks, including sitting in on twelve focus groups in four different cities across the United States to learn about the social and political attitudes of the Millennial Generation (under-30 Americans). Biggest takeaway: For the Millennials, the culture wars are over. It doesn't matter whether they are atheists from California or Evangelical Christians from Alabama; their attitude toward people of other religions, philosophies, and sexual orientations is live-and-let-live. Personally, I found this heartening news.

And on the eco-business front, here's a quick roundup of news and ideas you may find interesting--we did.

Seeds as intellectual property. Check out Grist, a green-oriented website we somehow didn't know about until recently, which actually lives up to its promise of "Environmental News and Humor." (Yes, they are funny . . . when appropriate.) One of the more intriguing stories currently up on Grist is this account of how Monsanto's genetically-modified soybean seed business has put the company in the awkward position of suing farmers for unauthorized use of the intellectual property represented by those patentened gene sequences. And although the Supreme Court recently upheld one of Monsanto's legal victories, it doesn't strike us as a sustainable business strategy to be taking your own customers to court. In the long run, it won't work for the record companies, and it won't work for Monsanto either.

Creating a commons for eco-friendly thinking. By contrast with Monsanto, a consortium of companies, including IBM, Nokia, Pitney-Bowes, and Sony, is participating in a system for openly sharing intellectual property (specifically patents) with environmental benefits. As described here, this system, organized by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, encourages corporations to donate green-business patents for free use by other companies. For example, one of the patents being made available by IBM is for a less-polluting method of cleaning surfaces that the company designed for microchips but that might be useable for other products such as eyeglass lenses. (You can watch a video about it on YouTube.)

Obviously, there will be significant limitations to the kinds of patents companies will be willing to share. Patents related to a company's core business processes, those that provide a significant competitive advantage, and those with the potential to generate large licensing fees will probably not be donated to the Eco-Patent Commons any time soon. But it's very interesting to see some of the world's most innovative companies taking this fresh approach to managing the intellectual property they create. We'll be watching to see how significant an impact they have.

More on greenwashing. There's a new attempt to distinguish legitimate environmental claims by companies from illegitimate ones, following on the heels of the controversial "Six Sins of Greenwashing" report that we wrote about here. This new initiative is called The Greenwashing Index, and although I've spent quite a bit of time studying the site and trying to figure out how it works, I'm still rather confused. The idea seems to be that consumers can post ads on the site and rate them, on a scale of one to five, as to their honesty and accuracy. A score of one means a "good ad," and score of five "total greenwashing."

What puzzles me, though, is that the ratings seem to be very subjective. Although the organizers of the site have provided a set of five criteria that consumers are supposed to use, in the end anyone can post an ad on the site with whatever rating they want. It's not unlike the one-to-five-stars rating system for books on Amazon. Of course, the accumulation of many ratings from various individuals for a single ad should mitigate the subjectivity somewhat. But this system still seems to me an inadequate substitute for the hard word of actually examining and evaluating the environmental practices of a company--something that demands a degree of expertise that few ordinary consumers possess.

We'll keep an eye on the Greenwashing Index site. It'll be interesting to see how it develops over time. But somehow I don't think this will become the authoritative source for reliable evaluations of environmental claims that so many people seem to be looking for.