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.
