As the world’s greatest soccer players take to the fields at the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, many are wearing jerseys made almost entirely from plastic bottles rescued from landfills in Japan and Taiwan.
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Nike, via Business Wire
The Nike shirts modeled by World Cup players are made from recycled plastic bottles.
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It is, if nothing else, good publicity for Nike, the maker of the jerseys and the official sponsor of nine teams, including the United States, Brazil and Portugal.
Yet what many might view as a gimmick is also part of a broadening effort by the company to incorporate sustainability, or environmentally responsible practices, into its product design. Around the globe, a growing number of manufacturers are including more recyclable or biodegradable components into products.
Companies making changes run the gamut — there are furniture makers, carpet manufacturers, clothing retailers and makers of shampoos and household cleaners. And with big-box retailers like Wal-Mart joining in, industry analysts say the sustainable philosophy is no longer viewed as the province of high-end sellers like Nike or Herman Miller, the furniture maker.
In 2008 alone, American consumers doubled their spending on sustainable products and services to an estimated $500 billion, according to a survey that polled more than a 1,000 people by Penn Schoen Berland Associates, a market research firm that studies the green economy.
The movement can be confusing to navigate and goes by many monikers — ”cradle to cradle,” eco-efficiency, life cycle improvement, closed-loop production. In its most utopian form, it envisions a world in which all products are made from natural materials and are 100 percent reusable, recyclable or biodegradable, never ending up in landfill.
At its most pragmatic, it is mainly about cutting costs — by reducing waste, selling recyclable components and reusing byproducts like rubber or plastic to create a new product. For a large company, this can mean millions of dollars in annual savings.
“When sustainability burst onto the scene, it was in the responsibility category, something that a company should do because it was the right thing to do,” said Beth Lester, a vice president at Penn Schoen Berland Associates. But now it is equally about saving money, she said.
For example, Wal-Mart attributed more than $100 million of its 2009 revenue to a decision to switch to a recyclable variety of cardboard in shipments to its 4,300-plus stories in the United States. Now it sells the cardboard to a recycler rather than paying to ship the waste to a landfill.
The company also sells photo frames made from its polystyrene waste and recycles plastic scraps leftover from producing Wal-Mart-brand diapers into material used in building new Wal-Mart stores.
“It’s coming from economics,” said Marc Stoiber, vice president for green innovation at the Chicago-based business consultancy Maddock Douglas. “If you look at the big guys like Wal-Mart, they embrace green because it’s all about efficiency.”
Matt Kistler, the senior vice president of sustainability at Wal-Mart, agreed. “If this was not financially viable, a company such as ours would not be doing it,” he said.
In its most ambitious project, Wal-Mart, after surveying more than 100,000 suppliers worldwide, has embarked on a yearlong effort to tag every product it sells with information about its production and life cycle.
Nike first dipped its toe into sustainability in 1993, when it began grinding up old shoes and donating the material and other manufacturing scraps to builders of sports surfaces, like tracks and basketball courts. That program continues, but the company has shifted gradually from one-of-a-kind initiatives to a long-term plan to “minimize or eliminate all substances known to be harmful to the health of biological or ecological systems.”
In the last four years, the company’s sustainable design group, known as Nike Considered Design, has brought shoes and athletic clothing to market that incorporate waste from the factory floor and a less toxic type of rubber. Some of Nike’s clothing incorporates zippers and cords made from old shoes.
The company has also reduced its use of solvents, the toxic glue used to cement soles to the bottom of shoes.
”Our customers expect this from us,” said Lorrie Vogel, general manager of Nike’s Considered group. “It’s not about two or three green shoes — it’s about changing the way our company does things in general.”
As companies move to reduce waste and analyze the components of their products, many are turning to outside consultants for help. Among the most prominent is William McDonough, co-author of a 2002 book called “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.”
He runs a consultancy that evaluates companies’ policies in areas like toxicity, renewable energy, water stewardship and sustainability and awards corporations Cradle to Cradle Certification if they make the necessary changes.
His firm, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, has worked with Nike, Herman Miller and Shaw, the world’s largest carpet maker. Herman Miller says that 50 percent of its revenue now comes from products that are Cradle to Cradle-compliant, and it is aiming for 100 percent.
Shaw has collected 300 million pounds of used carpet in the last three years and reused 85 percent of it.
“I’ve never met one C.E.O. who said ‘Give me a toxic product,’ ” Mr. McDonough said. “But they need business models that are effective for them.”
Still, companies can be reluctant to make trade-offs when performance or aesthetics suffers.
Method, a maker of household cleaning products, shuns chemicals like ammonia, bleach and phthalates and maintains a list of earth-friendly ones. But when it came to the design of its bottles, the company stood firm, declining to reduce the plastic content beyond a certain point because it believed that it would make them less visually attractive, according to a recent report in The McKinsey Quarterly, an online business management journal.
Companies may also have to weigh a product’s toxicity level against its longevity. The retailer Patagonia is viewed as environmentally conscious — 75 percent of the clothing it sells is recyclable — but it has had difficulty finding nontoxic dyes. For now, Patagonia prefers to stick with colorfast dyes, although not all are harmless to the earth.
“It’s super-easy to find an environmentally friendly dye that will fade in three washes,” said Jenn Rapp, a spokeswoman. “But a garment that lasts 20 years is much more friendly than one that lasts five months.”
Even champions of sustainability say that consumers should be wary of giving companies too much credit or accepting all of their claims. Makers of cleaning agents in particular may offer an expensive “green line” of offerings but leave the rest of their products untouched, some say.
“I think the cradle-to-cradle concept is great,” said Wood Turner, executive director of Climate Counts, a nonprofit group that scores manufacturers of consumer products makers on their track records. “The problem is that most companies are not as inclined to push that into all their products and all their brands.
“I have to ask, is this really just an example of green tokenism, or does it reflect deep thinking on a company’s part?”
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