Healthy Environment

at Home and Work

It is hard to spend more than a few minutes in our Burlington, Vermont headquarters without sensing the environmental commitment of our motivated employees — many of whom have chosen to work at Seventh Generation because they share the company’s values. Our office's LEED gold interior has an open feel that brings nature — and natural light — inside. The beautiful stone and wood surfaces were sourced within 500 miles of our office. Visitors also notice our kitchen composting operation, our own healthy products in use throughout the office, the many bikes parked out front, and the hybrid cars in the parking lot. These all speak to a deeply held concern for our planet. We translate this into scrutiny of the full range of our office operations to see if there are more sustainable approaches we could adopt. Our purchasing, IT, waste management, and interior design decisions are driven by this sense of purpose.

Electricity (KWH)	up 3%	217,361	211,520	150,600
Natural Gas (cubic feet)	up 5%	9,946	9,507	9,735
CO2 Emissions (metric tons)	up 4%	144	139	115
Composted Food Waste (gallons)	down 50%	1,500	3,000	780*
Recycled Cardboard (pounds)	down 19%	5,720	7,040	5,120
Other Recycled Materials (glass, plastic, metal, etc.) (gallons)	down 9%	153,192	167,856	141,180
*Composting service was disrupted for part of 2008 and composting was estimated for part of 2010.

Renewable Energy Goal: By 2012, we want to ensure that all of the electricity used in our headquarters is from renewable sources. As we rent space within a building with an odd-angled copper roof, putting solar panels on our own roof is not a realistic option. We are exploring the feasibility of supporting the placement of solar panels on the roof of a nearby elementary school. The Sustainability Academy at Lawrence Barnes is the nation’s first K-5 magnet school with a sustainability theme. We plan to go beyond solar panels to develop a relationship based on our mutual passion for protecting our planet. This would place our staff in their classrooms and their students in our lab.

As the financial arrangement for the solar panels is likely to be complicated, we have no immediate plans to use the offsets to reduce our Scope 2 emissions in our GHG calculations to support our GHG reduction goal. We plan to offset our energy use because we believe it is the right thing to do and helping this local school complements our community engagement focus on many levels. We will not take “credit” for the offsets unless we can find a clear, verifiable way to do so.

Personal Commitments

We try to live The Great Law in our home life as well as our work. We have made a conscious decision to work at Seventh Generation and we believe deeply in the values the company espouses. Those beliefs naturally carry over into our personal lives. To give life to those values, our company made a pledge in 2006 to help each of us reduce our personal carbon footprints 20% by 2010 — a goal that we are proud to say we have met.

From a carbon reduction perspective, our home state of Vermont suffers from both extremely cold winters and a poor-to-non-existent public transportation network. Targeting these problems, Seventh Generation established two employee loan/grant programs. Employees are eligible for a $5,000 loan for the purchase of a fuel-efficient vehicle (at least 34 mpg) or a $5,000 loan for home energy efficiency improvements as long as these were recommended in an energy audit. Both of these loans become grants if the employee remains with Seventh Generation for five years. Other companies might have channeled this grant money into carbon offsets to equal the carbon footprint of their business operations, but we prefer to make a difference right here at home.

With two-thirds of our associates having benefited from one of these grant programs (half to each program), we tallied up the results and found that 16% of our footprint reductions came from car loans with only about 4% from home improvements:

• Car loans provided the biggest bang for the buck as recipients doubled their mileage per gallon from about 18 mpg to 39 mpg with three-fourths of us purchasing hybrids. Our Seventh Generation employees average 90 miles per week in commuting time and many more miles in our daily lives so this represents a tremendous saving. By driving cars with better mileage, we collectively prevented 239 tons of CO2 emissions in 2010.
• Home energy improvements included efficient windows and doors, insulation, heaters and solar hot water systems. The avoided CO2 emissions from these projects proved more difficult to quantify. We used carbon footprint estimates for a typical Vermonter and the average energy efficiency gain from home improvements to estimate the impact of this program.
• Loan modification: To help our loan money go further, we reduced the loan amount to $2,500 in 2010 for those employees earning more than $70,000 per year.

Additional gains were realized through our annual offer of $500 to help employees purchase energy-efficient appliances. Our employee-led “Green Team” also inspires us to make further lifestyle changes by educating us through lunch-time seminars and personal example.

What’s next? Our commitment to reduce our personal environmental footprints is as strong as ever although we do not currently have a numeric goal. We are taking time in 2011 to evaluate how we can more powerfully motivate employees to dramatically reduce their commuting footprint and are confident that we can strengthen this program in creative and effective ways.