Over the long weekend I managed to find some free time to watch Interstellar, the critically-acclaimed movie about mankind trying to survive by leaving a dying Earth for a new planet in an entirely new galaxy. While the movie was certainly entertaining (almost 3 hours long!), perhaps it is too soon to consider leaving Earth just yet. Here is a fascinating talk on why Earth’s oceans, not deep space, are our next frontier:

From an environmental sustainability perspective, the idea of floating cities or “seasteads” appears very promising. Joe Quirk talks about growing kelp for food and utilizing the ocean’s solar potential for energy. Kelp serves multiple functions in contributing to a seastead’s sustainability: food for residents, food for farmed fish, and waste absorption. Solar energy is an intuitive choice for a city floating in the ocean since oceans receive a vast majority of the Sun’s energy. Despite the benefits, I do have one reservation against floating cities: why can’t we employ these innovations now even without floating cities?

The other argument Quirk makes for seasteads is the opportunity to create better governments that properly serve public needs. In the video, Quirk provides convincing case studies of nations that correlates their economic development with their relatively modern origins. He attributes the success of countries like the USA and Singapore to their newer government methodologies. Applying this concept to floating cities, the idea is that residents will be able to easily establish political rules within their seastead, allowing for advanced social development. While the concept is reasonable, I worry for the feasibility of everyone being able to create their own form of government – what’s going to stop the inevitable rebels from creating havoc?

Despite my doubts, it appears that The Seasteading Institute is close to launching a prototype city and already has 1,000 people ready to take the plunge. All they need now is a host nation in an attractive climate willing to house the prototype on their coastal waters. Come to think of it, I could use a vacation myself!

Initially, two factors drove me to pursue a part-time sales associate position at Banana Republic, an apparel brand under Gap Inc. Firstly, I was seeking customer service experience and one of the best ways to achieve that is through retail. Secondly, I was a fan of their menswear so I really wanted their employee discount. What I had never considered was the sustainability of the company; and it dawned on me that after a year and a half of working at Banana Republic (plus 3 months of sustainability courses), I still had no clue whether Gap Inc. was a socially responsible company!

After a few clicks from Google it became apparent that Gap Inc. had a strong sustainability presence. On their corporate website, Gap Inc. provides 4 infographics about their commitments towards the environment, the global community, their employees, and human rights. Gap Inc. also publishes a Corporate Social Responsibility Report and maintains a hub dedicated to their promise to ‘do more than sell clothes‘. Personally I found the social responsibility initiatives for women in their factories to be the most intriguing aspect of their CSR report rather than their environmental initiatives, especially when you consider the human rights scandals that Gap has faced over the years.

According to their 2011/2012 Social & Environmental Responsibility Report, Gap Inc.’s P.A.C.E. program provides female garment workers with “the foundational life skills and enhanced technical skills needed to advance in their personal lives and in the workplace.” What’s special about P.A.C.E. is that the program’s effectiveness was measured, making the claims more credible. Below is a graph taken from the same report:

As you can see, there was a noticeable improvement with respect to women’s personal lives after implementation of P.A.C.E. With 80% of garment workers in world being women, I believe Gap Inc. is doing the right thing by focusing their efforts on their female workers.

What are your thoughts on Gap Inc.’s CSR report? Is there anything I missed that deserves to be recognized?

Have you ever stood in front of a vending machine craving a chocolate bar only to struggle choosing the one you want? I have, and let me tell you that choosing one chocolate bar among your favourites is certainly as difficult as any exam question! Do I want the biscuit taste of Twix, the pop of Nestle Crunch, the sharing potential of Kit Kat, or the decadence of Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Creme? Honestly, I find all of them to be equally delicious. Thankfully GoodGuide.com is here to introduce an X-factor in my decision making process – the sustainability of each brand!

Which one of these iconic brands is the most sustainable?

Let’s start with Twix. GoodGuide gives Twix’s parent company (Mars, Inc.) an environmental score of 7.0 and a societal score of 6.9. Initially I was impressed, until I saw a 3.0 for ‘Customer Health and Safety Controversies’. Uh oh.

Next up is Nestle Crunch. This was the only brand that GoodGuide provided with a health rating, which was an abysmal 1.7. Environmentally Nestle scored 7.1 and socially Nestle achieved 6.2.

Kit Kat and Cookies ‘n’ Creme are both owned by The Hershey Company, but strangely GoodGuide provided different ratings for each brand. Kit Kat, with an environmental score of 6.2 and and social score of 6.3, is rated much more sustainable than Cookies ‘n’ Creme, which only has 4.6 for both metrics. My best guess is that the folks at GoodGuide forgot to update the Cookies ‘n’ Cream page, because further research supports the Kit Kat ratings. (As an aside, this is a great example on why you should cross-reference your sources, especially for things like sustainability ratings!)

While Nestle Crunch was the only brand with a health rating, I assume that all four chocolate bars would have similarly terrible health scores after comparing their nutritional values. Therefore, based on GoodGuide’s information, I’m going to make sure I purchase Nestle Crunch the next time I’m pondering in front of a vending machine. Despite Twix’s higher overall scores, the 3.0 for Health Controversies is a bit scary, don’t you think?

Feel free to comment on your own usage of GoodGuide before making a purchase decision – I’d love to hear it!

As a senior accounting student, I was very interested in the idea of treating people as an asset rather than an expense that was introduced in HIPInvestor and Sustainable Brands’ presentation – Surprising Business Value from New Metrics of Sustainability. The presentation had some valid points. Firms constantly communicate to external parties about their people being their most valuable assets. Additionally tech firms and service firms, which form a growing majority of companies worldwide, have very few tangible assets. To say that the economic value of one of these firms is tied to the number of desks and computers the firm owns would be plain ignorant.

Human Capital may be the real driver behind profitability.

Supporters of this movement also claim recording Human Capital as an asset to have social sustainability benefits. One common metric of social sustainability is employee happiness and the presence of a positive work environment. Although studies show that companies who invest in their employees to create a positive work environment perform better financially than their competitors, shareholders require more information than study results to justify the expenses. Therefore by capitalizing (recording as an asset) the value of employees, companies are provided an incentive to invest in their employees. Paying for a new office wellness program would be akin to paying for upgrades of machinery within the financial statements, the latter being widely accepted by shareholders as a ‘proper’ use of cash flows.

Studies say that a happy office is a productive office.

Lastly, there is even an argument from a technical or GAAP standpoint that humans should be treated as an asset! However, I will spare you the boredom in this blog post. If you are really inclined to read about it – AccountingToday has got you covered.

While these social and technical arguments are compelling, in my opinion our current accounting system would not function well if every company began recording their intangible assets on their balance sheets. The ability to exploit this idea by greedy evildoers is too great. We finally recovered from the housing mortgage recession of 2008, let’s not enable another potential financial crisis.

In my most recent lecture of Sustainable Marketing I learned about the potential of partnerships and the impact they can have on creating a sustainable industry. It makes intuitive sense – different brands, manufacturers, NGO’s, industry associations, and government should work together instead of against each other in our fight against pollution. An example given was the partnership between the Ontario Power Authority (government) and Air Miles Rewards which gave birth to the Power Pledge Program. An even more substantial example is the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, which boasts a member’s list that includes Nike, Burberry, IKEA among other household names. To  reduce the environmental and social impacts of the global apparel industry, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition has developed the Higg Index to aid clothing companies in becoming more sustainable.

Now you might be asking how ethanol fits into this discussion. Well, years ago agriculture groups in the United States and Canada lobbied government to pass laws requiring gasoline to be blended with up to 10% ethanol to ‘reduce carbon emissions’. The government of both countries passed these laws and to this day all of the gasoline we fuel our cars with contains a minimum of 5% ethanol. While not exactly a partnership, these groups did work together in order to implement this regulation in the name of ‘sustainability’ and were lauded by the public at the time.

A typical gasoline pump.

As it turns out, not all partnerships do what they claim to accomplish. Ethanol is not the solution to the global warming crisis we had hoped for. While ethanol does reduce emissions directly from vehicle combustion, the overall energy input required to grow and transform corn into ethanol is substantial. So substantial in fact, that ethanol actually has a negative net energy rating in some studies – meaning it requires more energy to make ethanol than burning ethanol gives back! Furthermore, ethanol blended gasoline deteriorates car parts which leads to costly repairs more often. For a more comprehensive reading on why ethanol is actually worse for our environment than straight gasoline, check out End the Ethanol Ripoff and The Great Ethanol Scam.

So if ethanol doesn’t benefit the environment, why did the agriculture groups and government agree to mandate ethanol use? I won’t say for certain but receiving approval from an industry as large as the agricultural industry certainly helps during elections:

Money and Politics, a match made in heaven.

For our second client challenge, many groups proposed that Vancouver Film Studios (VFS) ‘greenify’ their property by growing shrubs plants on unused areas and/or by decorating the exteriors of their boring concrete stage buildings with green images. These groups argued that people who ventured onto the lot would be encouraged to be more sustainable themselves after noticing the green buildings or abundance of foliage. However, none of the groups provided any evidence to support their claims that literally making a place greener would make people behave greener as well. The idea itself seemed very intuitive and simple to implement, but the lack of evidence prompted me to explore this idea further.

Would replacing the grey concrete with green paint and foliage really persuade people to behave more sustainably?

After some extensive Google searches, I was unable to find any studies that suggested green spaces transformed litterers into recyclers.

But hope is not lost! While green spaces do not change people’s environmental behaviors, they DO provide a number of other interesting benefits:

• Reduced mental fatigue and stress – spending time in natural settings relieves mental fatigue and soothes humans.
• Safer neighborhoods – buildings surrounded with greenery have lower crime rates.
• Increased compassion – tying into the point above, being around plants improves relationships between people and increases empathy towards others.
• Improved human performance – spending time in green settings heightens feelings of vitality, which in turn increases energy levels leading to improved work performance.
• Improved concentration and memory – similar to improved work performance, the influence of nature sharpens task accuracy and can improve memory and attention span by 20%.

Clearly, VFS should consider turning their lot greener. The points above were taken from multiple studies investigating the effect of plants on human well being – what company doesn’t want their workers to perform at a high level?

Along with VFS, I suggest my fellow classmates to also heed their own recommendations and ‘greenify’ their study areas since finals are less than a month away! Time to take a look at my garden to see what will look good sitting at my desk…

Sources:

Health and well-being benefits of plants

https://www.planning.org/cityparks/briefingpapers/saferneighborhoods.htm

https://www.popularresistance.org/hidden-benefits-of-community-gardens/

Before the advent of social media, companies would have difficulties conversing with their customers because they were limited to conventional promotional methods. It is understandably hard to engage with customers when your only communication channel used to be a 30 second ad on the radio or television! Now that technology has given us tools like Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and Google, it has become easier for companies and consumers to connect and share ideas.

One very prominent example of the benefits of a dialogue between companies and consumers is the story of ‘Smart chopsticks’ by Chinese tech giant Baidu. The idea began as a simple April Fool’s joke released by the company in 2014:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BChk6WOBjsA

However, what the video achieved was more than just awareness of Baidu – it created significant buzz within the Chinese community who made it known that they supported the idea. Since China’s food supply chain is so vast (there are over 1 billion mouths to feed after all), there have been a number of food scandals in recent years. As a result, many Chinese have become wary of the food they consume and the thought of being able to conveniently test their food with a popular eating utensil resonated with them.

Fast forward 6 months and Baidu is introducing ‘Smart Chopsticks’ prototypes at it’s annual technology conference. While not as sophisticated as the chopsticks in the video, the ability to detect food that has been cooked with ‘gutter oil’ is definitely a step in the right direction towards strengthening food safety in China. Just another example of how necessity is the mother of all inventions, but this time the inventor was not tackling his own needs, but those of his customers!

What are your thoughts on ‘Smart Chopsticks’? Do you think we would find any use for this product in Vancouver or the rest of Canada?

References:

http://www.thehindu.com/in-school/signpost/april-fools-joke-inspires-smart-chopsticks-in-china/article6383670.ece

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/15018/20140907/smart-chopsticks-to-detect-chinese-food-gone-bad-why-not-says-baidu.htm

Something I feel that many green enthusiasts often overlook on their crusade against greedy oil companies and people who don’t recycle is the impact of our food on the environment. So as I sat there in a restaurant eating delicious dishes made from all sorts of meats (beef, pork, chicken, fish, shellfish) for Chinese New Year with my family, it dawned on me that I ought to know how all of this food, particularly animal protein, arrived on the dinner table!

It didn’t take long for me to dig up some alarming statistics on how unsustainable meat is:

1. More than a third of all raw materials and fossil fuels consumed in the United States are used in animal production.
2. The world’s cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people—more than the entire human population on Earth.
3. Animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of the total release of greenhouse gases world-wide, which is more than all the cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world combined.

That last fact in particular stood out to me – why are we even bothering with electric cars?! Jokes aside, the point of this blog post is not just to scare you, but to raise awareness of the issue of increasing global meat consumption. An interesting solution I’ve come across is the consumption of insects as a protein replacement for traditional meats.

How gourmet.

Apparently insects require far less resources to produce protein mass than livestock and also produce far less greenhouse gases than livestock. It’s a win-win situation! Or is it?

As we’ve learned in class, a product must be great first, green second if it wants to gain any momentum in the Western market. As it stands now, eating insects for dinner is the LAST thing somebody wants to do after a long day at the office, even if it IS more sustainable. From a marketing perspective, do you think there’s a way we can work around this? How can we make insects “great” as a food product?

References:

http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/facts-on-animal-farming-and-the-environment/

https://woods.stanford.edu/environmental-venture-projects/consequences-increased-global-meat-consumption-global-environment

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130514-edible-insects-entomophagy-science-food-bugs-beetles/

Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few months, you should know that oil prices have dropped dramatically from $115/barrel in June 2014 to merely $49/barrel at the time of this post. As we celebrate how cheap it is to fuel up nowadays (I thought I’d never see gas less than $1/L ever again in my lifetime), I thought it’d be appropriate to bring to your attention another energy source who’s costs have dropped dramatically in recent years – solar generated electricity.

Within the broad spectrum of sustainability, the continued effort to make the world’s energy “greener” has always interested me. So when I came across an article claiming that solar power was the key driver in increasing world-wide renewable energy investments by 16% last year, I was intrigued. If $149.6 billion dollars were invested into solar alone in 2014, which accounted for nearly half of total renewable energy investment, there had to be a reason!

As it turns out, the reason for the boom in solar investment is due to potential returns that solar can earn in the near future. With the rapid advancement in solar technology in recent years, the cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity has fallen dramatically – almost reaching parity with traditional forms of electricity generation involving fossil fuels!

Below is a graph showing the comparative costs of electricity across different resources in 2011:

Note the price of Natural Gas and Coal at approximately 7c and 11c respectively.

Now here’s a graph of the cost for solar power since then, keeping in mind that traditional energy costs have remained constant:

Even with an exchange rate of $1.16 USD/ $1 Euro, solar energy has become as cheap as traditional energy sources in countries with high sun intensity.

This decrease in price is not just in Europe either! India has also jumped on the solar bandwagon, and their reported cost is a mere $0.105/kWh.

With solar costs dropping so rapidly, investors are hoping that solar energy will soon be able to compete with traditional electricity providers for consumer dollars. In fact, this is already happening in California, with solar accounting for 6% of electricity production in 2013. I guess that’s why they’re called the ‘Sunshine State’!

And how will the recent drop in oil prices affect renewable energy (solar in particular) investment? According to Forbes, we have nothing to worry about. As we can also tell from the first graph above, oil is not used to generate electricity in most parts of the world. At this rate of improvement, perhaps in the future when we’ll all be driving our Tesla vehicles around and celebrating cheap electricity prices instead of cheap gasoline prices!

First off I would just like to say that I have had an enjoyable time participating in these marketing blog assignments. At first I was apprehensive, but I quickly realized that the exploration prompted by this assignment has given me knowledge and know-how about current trends that I would never have noticed otherwise. I have found myself actively surfing blogs recently and I attribute that fully to this experience.

Now that the acknowledgements are out of the way, on to the task at hand! Traditional advertisement campaigns usually aired on the radio or television and worked by prompting the audience to act. In other words, traditional marketers were usually more passive in their methods, relying on the attraction of consumer attention.

The allure of television...

But with the advent of social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, marketers are faced with a new medium to utilize. Rather than stick with ads, some have decided to use a more direct approach…

Even Tweeters love money.

BUYING FOLLOWERS!

Indeed a new industry has grown from the popularity of Twitter – the sale and purchase of live Twitter followers. It makes sense though, why spend time slowly nurturing and growing your following when you can simply BUY one?

1000 followers only costs $17 and the transaction is completed within days. Furthermore, all the followers are live and the followers are added in a discrete way so nobody has to know that they are purchased! By increasing your number of followers, the company claims that you will have increased sales.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised though. After all our world is run by capitalism and people have tried to sell worse things on the internet.

If you’re interested in buying some Twitter followers to make yourself stand out, you can check it out here.