Green: It's the Color of More Than Just Money

The Dallas Morning News
Belo Corporation

May 13, 2007

Not that long ago, if someone called you a conservationist, it was an accusation, not a compliment.

Many Texans reveled in a guiltless pursuit of prosperity, and progress was measured in green.
But it was the color of money, not the sign of being Earth-friendly.

In 1980, for example, a wrecking ball was secretly moved into downtown Dallas in the middle of the night to demolish the Volk Building, which had been nominated as a national landmark.

The ensuing public outcry? Little more than a whimper.

So it was startling last year to see prominent Texans go toe-to-toe with TXU Corp. about its plans to build 11 coal-fired power plants. Even more amazing was the way the group beat the power goliath with its high-voltage public persuasion.

What has changed? There's a confluence of motivations.

*Many successful entrepreneurs want to leave lasting legacies.

*North Texas is under the gun to meet clean air standards.

*The debate about the reality of global warming is melting faster than the glaciers and icebergs.

*People are beginning to realize that every little bit adds up.

*And going green is increasingly seen as an opportunity to make green.

If you want to sell paper products to FedEx Kinko's, for example, your company had better be replenishing its forests and making goods with recycled contents.

The Home Depot helps vendors promote products that it deems eco-friendly.

And the Clydesdale leading the bandwagon is Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which encourages vendors to make environmentally sensitive products and reduce packaging waste or lose out to a competitor that has.

Wal-Mart's stated goals are nothing short of awesome: to be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain our resources and the environment.

One of the retailer's imperatives is to reduce packaging on its products. Last year, 40 suppliers and 200 Wal-Mart vendors showed up for its first packaging expo. This year, 100 packaging companies gave ideas to 2,000 direct suppliers, a company spokesman says.

Detractors say Wal-Mart's effort is a public relations ploy to offset its less-than-shiny reputation as an employer.

Container Store co-founder Garrett Boone, who co-chaired Texas Business for Clean Air in its battle with TXU, says who cares? "If Wal-Mart going green is a way to improve the company's public image, more power to them," he says.

Mr. Boone was spurred into activism by mass e-mail in 2002. A friend asked everyone she knew what he or she was going to do about the fact that North Texans were breathing some of the worst air in the nation.

"My first thought was to mobilize the business community," Mr. Boone says. "And then I thought, 'Wait a minute. Our family has five cars, and four of them are SUVs.'

"I literally went out the next week to a Toyota dealership and bought a Prius."

He's since retired three SUVs and a guzzler in favor of three hybrids and two cars that get better mileage than most. "For Christmas, my daughter Katherine bought us carbon offsets for all of our cars. That puts all of our cars officially at zero for emissions."

He did keep one SUV to use for Home Depot runs a couple of times a month. "I feel like I'm preventing someone else from driving it by keeping it," he says.

T. Boone Pickens chafes slightly when I suggest that he's a recent convert to the eco-friendly movement.

"This isn't some recent revelation of mine," says the 78-year-old oilman, investor and philanthropist. "The only time I could have been suspect about not being environmentally sensitive was back when I was running an oil company. But I think we were good even then."

In his speeches, Mr. Pickens often asks the audience how many consider themselves environmentalists. Nearly every hand goes up. Then he asks how many would pay $1,000 to be an environmentalist. Almost every hand drops.

"People still don't want to pay much to be an environmentalist," he says.

For years, Mr. Pickens has been preaching the virtues of natural gas as a cleaner transportation fuel.

But major initiatives like one to convert trucks at the Port of Los Angeles to natural gas gives him hope that others will follow suit.

Marrying smart business with eco-benefits was Bobbie Cox's motivation for overhauling her line of lockable mailboxes.

"We realized that there are materials we could use that are eco-friendly and that would help reduce landfills," says Ms. Cox, founder and owner of Postal Vault Corp.

Her units look like granite but are made out of recycled milk cartons and plastic water bottles. "It's weather-tested and will look as good five or 10 years down the road as it does now," she says.

And she intends to go a step further. "We're doing research so that we can make our own proprietary resin out of things like tree mulch, banana peels and corn shucks - the byproducts of ethanol."

Billionaire Sam Wyly refills water bottles with tap water to reduce the amount of plastic he buys.

It's one of the little ways he pursues a green path. A wider one is through Green Mountain Energy Co., which he founded in 1997 in response to an earlier challenge by his daughter, Christiana Wyly.

Sixteen years ago, the fifth-grader came home from school and asked pointedly: "'Dad, what are we going to do about putting toxic waste into the air?' And I said, 'Wow! I don't know.'

"Somewhere in the Bible, there's the verse about out of the mouths of babes. The truth hit me like a hammer."

Mr. Wyly says he's encouraged that more companies are doing the right thing regardless of the economics. "But secondly, more and more of them see that it's good economics to do the right thing."

Mr. Boone agrees. "Conservation is not an additional cost. It may be a short-term investment, but in the long term it actually saves money."