Posts in 'Partnerships'

This is a guest post from Dominique Browning.  It ran on her blog "Personal Nature" on November 4th.

Because electricity is so readily available, we take it for granted. We forget how quickly we’ve gotten used to turning on the lights. As recently as the 1930s and ’40s—within living memory—Lyndon Johnson was just beginning to electrify rural areas of central Texas, which today include the state’s high-tech corridor. Watching the lights come on across the beautiful Hill Country was one of the proudest moments of Johnson’s life.

So it is fitting that the most exciting new development in the story of electricity is happening in the capitol city of Austin. The city is becoming a clean energy lab, staking out a leadership position in our energy future. The goal of the ambitious Pecan Street Project is to invent and deploy, at a significant scale, the most innovative urban power system possible. EDF has partnered with the city, Austin Energy, the University of Texas and corporate partners like Cisco, Oracle, Gridpoint and Applied Materials to develop the project.

Read the rest of the post on Dominique's blog.

If you listen carefully, you just might hear the quiet hum of over 250 new hybrid trucks coming down the road. States and regions around the country are slowly but surely announcing the winners of grants from EPA’s Diesel Emissions Reduction program and the Department of Energy’s Clean Cities programs, which, together, received $600 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Projects are still being announced, but we expect to see at least 270 new medium- and heavy-duty hybrid trucks hit the road in 2009-2010 because of these funds. Maryland’s Clean Cities program is using $6 million to partially fund the purchase of 150 new hybrid trucks, with 50 going to ARAMARK alone. Maryland anticipates that its program will “displace upwards of 460,000 gallons of petroleum per year, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 262,610 lbs. per year and create a total of 205 fulltime jobs for workers in distressed local economies.” Now that’s what we call stimulus!

These major investments demonstrate that when the price is right, there is a strong demand for hybrid trucks. It’s this kind of demand for cleaner technologies and better practices that the Corporate Partnership model is so effective at creating.

Check out the new video that tells our story through the success of the hybrid truck market. It’s time to sit back, relax, and watch the hybrid truck market drive itself.

Video is worth more than a thousand words, so we'll keep this post short. In a recent blog post, Marc Gunther highlights a new EDF video about our unique approach to working with corporations. The video uses our collaboration with FedEx and other industry leaders to jumpstart the transformation of the hybrid truck market to illustrate how our partnerships galvanize groundbreaking environmental innovation. At EDF, we are laser focused on using market forces to create environmental change that is good for business and the bottom line. Our goal is to work with market leaders to create a green “race to the top” where companies and suppliers compete not only on price and quality but also on the environmental value they can bring to their customers.

Here at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), we look for market based solutions to environmental problems. As the guy in charge of managing our partnership pipeline process, I’m constantly on the lookout for new win-win environmental and business solutions we can pioneer with companies. I’m often asked how we identify the companies that we partner with. And increasingly the word I use is LEVERAGE.

Read more »

As the second Geballe Fellow, I have the benefit of stepping into the Green Portfolio Project just as enthusiasm and momentum for our work with KKR and the private equity sector is beginning to take off. This spring, KKR announced that five additional portfolio companies would join the Project and I look forward to rolling up my sleeves and helping them to identify opportunities to increase business value while reducing environmental impact. Read more »

Award-winning journalist Edward Iwata, chatted up our very own Gwen Ruta for a post on his CoolGlobalBiz.com blog.  Check out his post to see what she had to say about:

• Companies forging ahead on green strategies, despite the global recession
• Corporations going beyond lip service and window-dressing on green issues
• Charting the real progress of companies on their environmentally-friendly practice
• Private-equity firms going green

A little over a year ago, EDF kicked off a partnership with private equity (PE) leader Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR). The goal of the project is to develop and implement a system (we’re calling it the Green Portfolio Framework) for improving environmental and business performance across KKR’s portfolio companies. Through the process, we hope to create significant business benefits for KKR and its portfolio companies and a new model for the PE sector. The PE industry has a history of building lean businesses through a laser-like focus on financial and operational performance.

Our hypothesis is that environmental measurement and management can make companies even more efficient and successful. If we’re right, we expect to see environmental management adopted across the PE sector as a new best practice for operational improvement and value creation.

Based on the initial results, we’re off to a good start: Read more »

Partnering with leading corporations to demonstrate that good environmental strategy is good business strategy is not a new concept at EDF. In fact, we’ve been doing it for 20 years. What has evolved are the partners we select, the goals we set and the scale of the impacts that we try to achieve.

We’re still learning every day about how to create even better partnerships with truly transformational impacts. Our search to find the highest leverage opportunities to create environmental and business results has recently led us to a place that may look unusual from the outside. In fact, a recent CNNMoney.com story called our partnership with private equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) “An environmental odd couple.”

We see things a little differently. Read more »

The partnership between Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co and Environmental Defense Fund is now officially just over a year old. Our announcement of the partnership in May of 2008 laid out our joint vision for improving the environmental and business performance of KKR’s portfolio of companies. We proved the concept with three companies in the pilot project phase. Through this effort, we identified an impressive $16.4 million in savings and reductions of 25,000 metric tons of CO2e, 3,000 tons of paper, and 650 tons of material waste collectively at US Foodservice, Sealy and PRIMEDIA. That was all with low or no-cost investments.

The response to this project has been inspiring. Other private equity firms and their investors are reaching out to EDF for information and guidance. Business school students have sought opportunities to help us. Media outlets as far away as Japan have expressed interest in writing about our efforts. We're not done yet. Read more »

By Gwen Ruta

With the global economy in turmoil, corporate environmental initiatives could have faced a fatal blow. The good news is that companies today have not forgotten that green business is good business. The question that remains for many executives is not whether to embrace environmental sustainability, but how to get it done.

One path of action that has gained traction in recent months is for businesses to partner with Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) on environmental initiatives. On a macro level, this is a good thing. Both businesses and NGOs have a lot to learn from each other; neither can solve today’s global environmental challenges going solo; and it will take a newfound collaborative spirit and sharing of best practices to both address challenging issues like climate change and succeed in today’s challenging economy.

But on a micro level, businesses and NGOs should avoid the dating game unless their relationships are meaningful and lasting. It’s not the volume of business/NGO partnerships that will change the world, but the quality of the results produced.

It’s been almost twenty years since Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) worked with McDonald’s on our first partnership to conserve resources and cut waste. Since then, we’ve found time and again that these unique relationships can achieve remarkable business and environmental results. Most recently, our “green portfolio” partnership with KKR, the giant private equity firm, resulted in $16 million in annual savings from measures that included reducing truck fuel usage at US Foodservice, cutting paper consumption at Primedia, and improving material use at Sealy. And that’s just the start. We’re now working with KKR to roll the project out to its entire portfolio of companies.

So what’s the recipe for success? While no two partnerships are alike, we’ve found the following principles invaluable for us over the years.

1. Have a clear end goal in sight. Both partners must be clear about what they are trying to achieve together. Tons of greenhouse gas avoided? Costs savings through efficiencies? Employee awareness around eco-innovation? Spell out the goals and ensure that all parties involved are committed to them.

2. Measurement is key. We’ve all heard the maxim “you manage what you measure.” Progress can only be celebrated when you know where you started. And quantitative results make is clear when success has been achieved.

3. Mutual commitment is a must. If one side of the partnership is doing all the work, the risk is lack of buy-in from the other side. The project will lose momentum and results will be far less impressive than they could be.

4. Timelines matter. Set up check-ins and updates to make sure that both sides are achieving intermediate objectives, increasing the likelihood that partnership goals are achieved within the agreed upon timeframe. This keeps stakeholders focused and engaged in the project at hand.

5. Objectivity ensures transformational change. At EDF, we take no funding from our corporate partners. We act as advocates for eco-innovation, not corporate consultants. This enables us to push our partners beyond their comfort zone and keeps our eyes on the right prize – transformational environmental change.

6. Transparency enables economies of scale. Even if a partnership involves only two partners, the results can transform an entire industry – as long as they are widely and publically shared. For example, EDF teamed up with FedEx to develop a cleaner, more fuel-efficient delivery truck. We spread the news and the technology, and within two years of our partnership, no fleet tradeshow was complete without a hybrid offering.

7. Communications shouldn’t be taken lightly. In any NGO-business partnership, it’s critical to track communications closely. Both sides need to agree on how the partnership will be characterized to outside audiences and not over – or under-state the commitments and the work at hand. This will prevent message distortion and avoid “greenwashing.”

NGOs have deep expertise in social and environmental issues combined with an unwavering passion to make the world a better place.

Corporations have the power of commerce and markets on their side, helping catalyze change quickly and enabling scalable concrete results.

This combined ability to capitalize on rather then cower from today challenges, both environmental and economic, will enable companies and NGOs to achieve and maintain long-term success.

Partnerships will play a significant role in this success, but only if they are treated as value-creating relationships, not marketing maneuvers. Through such collaborations, the environment moves out from the sidelines to become a key driver of innovation and growth.

This column originally appeared on Environmental Leader.