Top 3 Sustainability Trends for 2009

Terry Tamminen, former chief policy advisor for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, sees three big sustainability trends coming down the pipe for 2009. The author of Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction, Tamminen is Operating Advisor to Pegasus Capital Advisors, which focuses on innovative clean-tech companies, and where he heads a team that works with states to develop and implement environmental policies. He's also the Cullman Senior Fellow with the New America Foundation, where he spends his time advising world leaders on how to design and implement climate-change solutions.

What are the biggest trends in sustainability that you see for 2009?

There are three big trends to watch out for: sustainability labels, virtual meetings, and zero waste.

What is a sustainability label?

Labels provide information about sustainability to consumers so they can make informed choices, but there's no standardization yet. Some companies, looking for a competitive edge, would do the labeling voluntarily. But retailers like Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) would standardize some of it, because they want to differentiate one type of product from the other.

The labels will break down into a few categories, with the first and most obvious being a carbon footprint. Secondly, retailers will always want a whole sustainability index measuring recycled content, what materials are used, how sustainable are the raw materials etc. Retailers like Wal-Mart are already devising these metrics – I've been working very closely with them on this. A third label is for food miles traveled- you're already seeing Tesco doing this. This leaves it to customers to decide whether, all things being equal, they really want to buy the pound of lamb from New Zealand when they could buy one from Idaho.

So there will be a lot of different types of labels. Some will be confusing but over time various regulatory agencies will get involved. That's where it helps to have this driven by retailers and not just companies.

Are consumers initially going to be able to -- and are they going to want to -- absorb all that information?

Absolutely not. But it's kind of like with nutritional information – that program is 20 years old now and it's only in the last few years that people have begun paying attention. If you don't have that type of information available to consumers, the opportunity to engage them is lost.

People do want to feel good about what they give their kids or what they use themselves, especially after all the horror stories coming out of China with melamine etc. Having these types of labels will also put consumers' minds at ease.

And what about virtual meetings, why are they on the rise?

Nowadays when it comes to travel, the conversation is not just about environmental impact and costs, but inconvenience, security lines, delayed flights and bad weather. All this will result in more video conferencing of meetings and even expos/conferences. The future consists of webinars instead of seminars.

How feasible is the implementation? Is the technology affordable and easy to use?

There are a lot of options available already and those products are getting better and better. There are web conferencing tools like GoToMeeting, where someone can walk you through a PowerPoint presentation just as if you were sitting in front of them. You can either see the other participants, you can press a button that's effectively raising your hand to get into the conversation – this circumvents the lack of body language that is sometimes a problem with virtual meetings.

Even the government is getting the idea - - Governor Schwarzenegger installed video terminals in many major state offices to cut down on travel by state employees.

As for usability -- my family and I were in London a while ago and my 14-year-old son video conferenced three of his friends in and gave them a tour of our hotel room. If he can do it, so can an executive.

And the third trend: zero waste. Why is 2009 the year to watch for it?

People are beginning to understand that CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions are a measurement of waste at their very core. Nobody wants to have waste in their business.

Procter & Gamble now makes Tide detergent in concentrated form to reduce the amount of packaging and filler. They found they were selling a gallon bottle of liquid detergent and two-thirds of that was water. So now they've reduced the packaging, the weight, the transportation, the size -- all of it. The driver again here is reducing your carbon footprint. If your product is being shipped with a lot of waste in it, that's adding to fuel and shipping costs, which adds to your carbon footprint.