SAM/SPG Sustainability Leadership Award

Winners of the Eighth Award (2008)

Yvon Chouinard and L. Hunter Lovins

Leader Award:

Yvon Chouinard, co-founder and CEO Patagonia Inc., is a rock climber, environmentalist and outdoor industry businessman. His contributions to climbing, climbing equipment and the outdoor gear business are numerous and impressive. He is a writer of issues on mixing environmentalism and sound business practice in the concept of a slow company. As co-founder and co-owner of Patagonia Inc. Chouinard has implemented many environmental improvements in the production of clothing and gear and meanwhile created the organic cotton industry in California. Patagonia has touched off a trend that has big-name brands such as Gap, Levi's, Nike or Timberland incorporating organic materials into their products and taking steps to minimize environmental harm.

Commitment and recognized personal leadership

  • Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of Patagonia, Inc. is famous for his visionary business strategy. Chouinard has built Patagonia, a purveyor of top-quality outdoor goods, into a $230 million company without taking it public.
  • He still maintains his tireless my-way-or-the-highway attitude toward corporate America that has helped him nudge both colleagues and competitors in the direction of sustainability.
  • Chouinard began in business by designing, manufacturing and distributing rock-climbing equipment in the late 1950s.
  • In 1964, he produced his first mail-order catalogue. Today, In Chouinard's book, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman (Penguin Press, 2005), he wrote: "All decisions of the company are made in the context of the environmental crisis. We must strive to do no harm. Whenever possible, our acts should serve to decrease the problem. Our activities in this area will be under constant evaluation and re-assessment as we seek constant improvement."

Documented achievements in making sustainability work

  • Yvon committed his company to only using organic cotton 10 years ago, even when there was no reliable supply. They had to build the infrastructure to obtain the fabrics they needed. He was also the first to convert his line of fleece jackets to using recycled PET bottles as feedstock.
  • Yvon committed Patagonia to an independent environmental audit to determine which of the core fabrics they used had the most environmental impact. This precipitated the above mentioned move to organic cotton and recycled polyester.
  • The luggage line of Patagonia was once made from tough PVC, but on learning of the problems with dioxins, they moved to alternative materials.
  • To reduce packaging waste, they moved through the old plastic vs paper thing, until they arrived at rubber bands. When they implemented these for their underwear line, they stopped 12 tons of material from going to landfill, saved $150,000 USD in packaging costs, and saw sales rise 25%. Over the years they've experimented with swing tags made of paper derived from the likes of lettuce, algae and hemp.
  • Through the enthusiasm of Yvon's wife Malinda, Patagonia was one of the early American businesses to build and run their own onsite day-care facility, so working parents could be near their children.
  • Since 1985 Patagonia, Inc. has given away more than $25 million in cash and in-kind donations to more than 1,000 organizations globally. They've funded this from 10% of their pre-tax profits or 1% of sales, which ever was the greater.
  • Patagonia was a co-founder of The Conservation Alliance in 1989, a network of outdoor industry companies that donate money to environmental organizations. Now 70 members strong, the Alliance has donated almost $4 million in grants.
  • Then in 1993, the Patagonia Employee Internship Program was created. Through this program, over 350 Patagonia staff have been fully paid for two months while working with the environmental group of their choice throughout the world.
  • In 1998, Patagonia became the first Californian company to buy all their electricity from newly constructed renewable energy plants. The Denver store is wind powered, while the Reno store has photovoltaic panels. The Reno distribution warehouse has recycled content steel, insulation and glass. A stormwater filtration system. 100% recycled polyester carpet, 100% recycled plastic restroom counter tops and numerous other fixtures and fittings contain recycled content. Compressed field straw and reclaimed timber are also used. Shop fitouts subscribe to a similar regime of non-toxic, environmentally benign standards.
  • In 2001, with Craig Mathews, Yvon establish the organisation One Percent for the Planet, to provide a simple platform for other businesses to participate in responsible business philanthropy. In the past 5 years, they have signed up 374 members from the US, Canada, Europe and Japan, and donated over USD $10 Million to environment groups.

Pioneer Award:

As the founder and president of Natural Capitalism, Inc. and Natural Capitalism Solutions, as well as co-founder of the Rocky Mountains Institute L. Hunter Lovins is expert in integrating sustainability principles in business. Through lectures at major universities, consulting corporations, governments and citizens' groups she diffuses her solutions widely.

She has devoted herself to building teams that can create and implement practical and affordable solutions to the problems facing the world in creating a sustainable future.

Innovativeness: How to integrate sustainability principles in business

  • For 30 years, L. Hunter Lovins has been a thought leader in promoting sustainability. As a leading advocate for the business case for sustainability, profitable climate protection and community based development, she helped create the TreePeople environmental education program, which went on to educate over a million children a year.
  • She subsequently co-founded Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). As CEO of RMI, Hunter was instrumental in developing the approach of green building, economic renewal, and the now common approach of working with businesses to implement more sustainable approaches.
  • She was co-creator of the Natural Capitalism concept, and founder of Natural Capitalism Solutions (NCS). Secondary Hunter and her staff at RMI were instrumental in the creation of the U.S. Green Building Council. Furthermore she was one of the founders of the International Project on Soft Energy Paths.
  • Hunter Lovins is also founder and president of The Natural Capitalism Inc. (NCI), which implements the concepts of Natural Capitalism and sustainable development by fostering resource efficiency, biomimicry and restorative business practices within companies, and communities. This approach builds core business value for clients, strengthens local economies, creates a higher quality of life, and helps businesses and communities address the world's growing environmental and social concerns. NCI enables businesses to identify and capture the opportunities to increase profitability by behaving in more sustainable ways. It helps governments meet the needs of their communities in more cost effective and restorative ways.
  • Hunter Lovins and her team by Natural Capitalism have a range of project on the go:
    • International Sustainable Economic Development: planning and implementation of sustainable economic development activities, improving the competitiveness of industry and businesses through sustainability and natural capitalism principles.
    • Organizational Implementation of Sustainability Strategies: help for private businesses, communities and governments by implementing sustainability strategies. Including work as providing sustainability education for decision-makers and stakeholders to designing and implementing sustainability management systems.
    • Profitable Climate Change Solutions: provide solutions to industry that profitably reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Implementation strategies reduce the load on the environment and capture the benefits of improving efficiency and productivity along with emerging opportunities in international emissions trading markets.
    • Energy Efficiency and Distributed Generation: assist industry to increase operational energy efficiency and make the transition to a broader portfolio of energy generation options such as distributed sources like solar, hydro, fuel cell, etc.
    • Sustainable Manufacturing: use the Helix and other tools to work with a range of small to medium sized manufacturers and businesses.

Tangible results in making sustainability work in business practice

  • Hunter was one of those who worked to define the term sustainability in the early seventies together with Dana and E.F. Schumacher. She was then one of two people from North America invited many years later to the Norwegian Government sponsored attempt to reframe the Brundtland definition of sustainability.
    • Hunter's books deliver her message even more widely. Her best seller, "Natural Capitalism" was named by GlobeScan as the world's best sustainable development book, followed by the Bruntland Report. In this book she outlines the principles of NCI. Alongside hundreds of articles published in Harvard Business Review, Foreign Affairs World Affairs, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and magazines and newspapers around the world prove her success. As co-author of the LASER manual (Local Action for Sustainable Economic Development) she has worked with communities around the world on more sustainable ways to build strong locally based economies.

Amplification and dissemination of achievements

Hunter is committed to keeping her work free and available to all. The Climate Protection Manual for Cities (www.climatemanual.org), her presentations (slides, audio and video) and many articles and papers are all available for free on the web site (www.natapsolutions.org), which has thousands of users each month.

With the SOLUTIONS AT THE SPEED OF BUSINESS-tool the NCS will engage 50,000 small businesses within three years, helping them to cut their carbon emissions by at least 20%. This will represent a significant carbon reduction in a sector that accounts for 48% of total electricity use in the U.S., and approximately that percentage of carbon emissions

 




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