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If beating climate change is the goal, does motivation matter?
Worried about input costs, beer titan Molson Coors went green mainly to save green. If the end result — less waste — is to the planet's benefit, why should we care what motivated the company to change? (Prelude to a series on sustainable business innovations in Hamburg, Germany.)
Tue, Nov 08 2011 at 4:14 PM
Copper kettles inside a Coors brewery

GREEN DRINKS: Copper kettles inside a brewery. (Photo: zenhikers/Flickr)

 
Just before Halloween, a promising new sustainability blog went live over at Bloomberg News. The official title is “The Grid,” and it aims to cover “Energy, Environment, Economy & Power.” Possibly the world’s foremost business news agency is now on the green beat — as good an indicator as any of the mainstreaming of sustainable business.
 
One of the first posts at The Grid was an interview with Bart Alexander, chief corporate responsibility officer at Molson Coors, in which Alexander explains why the beer brewing giant is building sustainable practices much more deeply into its operations than ever before. Alexander reports that it came down to two factors: 1) the broad public sense that embracing sustainability is “what’s expected of well-run companies,” that their brand value, in other words, depends on being seen as responsible corporate citizens; and more importantly 2) money. More specifically, that “the cost of goods is a huge driver of whether we have a good year or bad year.” The raw materials in a six-pack of Coors Light are as susceptible to volatile energy and commodity markets as the stuff in your gas tank is, and making smart decisions about efficiency and stewardship simply makes good business sense. (Full disclosure: MillerCoors, a joint venture of Molson Coors and SAB Miller, sponsors MNN's Beverages channel.)

A somewhat snarky summary of the interview was posted at Grist under the title, “Molson Coors explains why it decided to give a crap about the environment.” The implication is that because the beer company’s motivation is financial, its attention to the environment was somehow, you know, less substantial.
 
Suspicion of megacorporate "green" campaigns inevitably meets this kind of skepticism — there is even a whole sort of subgenre of analysis of the legitimacy of corporate claims to green altruism that goes by the name of greenwashing. Some such dismissals are well-deserved — BP’s mostly content-free rebranding campaign “Beyond Petroleum” remains the gold standard for fake green, as it were — but I’d argue the kneejerk criticism in this case is unwarranted.
 
In the interview, Molson Coors’ Anderson provides an example of the company’s newfound environmental crap-giving: a series of pumps and reservoirs delivering water to its brewery that used to run all the time, needlessly and wastefully, and now don’t. The brewery now uses less energy and less water. Anderson gives every indication that the brewery decided to do so primarily, if not exclusively, because it saves money.
 
So here’s my question: What difference does it make why they chose to shut off the pumps when they aren’t needed? Does it create less of a reduction in energy use if they don’t first come to some enlightened moment of awareness that it was just plain wrong to waste water and power? Of course not. And I’d argue moreover that this line of argument traps sustainability rather too tightly in a moralistic box — one that insists the right (green, altruistic, unselfish) intent must precede action; that intent, in the end, trumps action. It suggests that corporations are right to tuck their sustainability initiatives into the “Corporate Social Responsibility” silo and pay little attention to them when they're making the big dollars-and-cents decisions.
 
One of the most powerfully transformative things about sustainability is that its logic demolishes the artificial wall between doing right for the planet and doing well at the bottom line. It makes sense to Molson Coors for different reasons than it did to Interface’s Ray Anderson (rightly hailed as the enlightened godfather of corporate sustainability), but the results are the same regardless.
 
This question of intent and action — and in particular of the way sustainability’s unintended consequences are win-win for the planet and the bottom line — is worth exploring in more detail. And as in so many things sustainable, many of the clearest examples are in Germany.
 
In particular, I was blown away during a recent visit to Hamburg by the amazing innovations I found there, particularly in the business sector. Stay tuned for the next week or so and I'll unveil three lessons in how Hamburg became a model city for sustainable business without much in the way of stating its intent to do so.
 
To discuss motivations 140 characters at a time, follow me on Twitter: @theturner.

The opinions expressed by MNN Bloggers and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not reflect the opinions of MNN.com. While we have reviewed their content to make sure it complies with our Terms and Conditions, MNN is not responsible for the accuracy of any of their information.

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starbuck
Starbuck Nov 09 2011 at 10:06 PM
The attitude that I think of as the "holiness factor" does the effort to improve our stewardship of the planet a great disservice, and I guess it's a pretty easy habit to fall into. I peruse the Grist website occasionally and overall I appreciate their content. That said, they might want to offer a white flag to the folks at Molson Coors. The term greenwashing was built off the term whitewashing. Unless you're talking about something like Tom Sawyer's picket fence, you're talking about an effort
.... More
to deceive. We have become very cynical about the activities of businesses and corporations because they so often do attempt to deceive us. For the most part I'd say they have thoroughly earned our cynicism and mistrust. But in the interests of getting the job done we may have to be more diligent in determining what's really going on when a business or an industry makes a claim to be improving their practices. BP not only is not a green company. I believe I read just recently that they have yet to pay the damages awarded to Alaskans from the oil spill at Valdez years and years ago. They will fight til the end of time to avoid their responsibility in that matter. They can talk green from now til kingdom come and it's nothing but words. Their effort to ride on the coattails of the environmental movement to gain the public's confidence is particularly egregious. On the other hand, when a company does in fact make substantial efforts to improve their practices and processes the fact that they are doing it for bottom line reasons is actually a great boon to anyone who hopes to see improvement. Other businesses, other industries, can examine the evidence, see clearly that Molson Coors, for example, is in fact saving money by adopting practices that are also more environmentally sound and perhaps give more serous consideration to changing their own practices. The fact that they are seeking to improve profits has no bearing on the outcome if they actually follow through and implement the changes. You can lecture people all day long, whether it's your next door neighbor or the CEO of mega-mega-mega company, and get exactly nowhere. People don't like to be made to feel bad about themselves. Chewing hide just pisses people off. It's a fact. They'll walk away and say, "screw you, I'm going to be twice as bad now as I ever was!!" The more holy you are about your position, the worse the reaction will be. Personally, I think the folks at the top in BP and the other businesses involved in the most recent tragedy in the Gulf ought to be tried for murder. After all, corporations are people now. They have all the rights, time to pick up a few of the responsibilities. Kill people? You get a trial with a judge and a jury of your peers. That's how I feel about that. But any person, any business, any corporation making a genuine effort to be a better citizen ought to be encouraged. How else can we expect to see enough change to make a real difference? Utopias and utopian thinking are dangerous, no matter who is pushing for them. Go too far to the left, you will sure as the sun rises find yourself on the right.
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