Green Technology Conference: Joel Makower Keynote

Covered by Cutter Hutton of Kaiju Studios.

Yesterday in Providence, Rhode Island the Brown Forum For Enterprise held its Green Technology Conference where a wide range of “green” related presentations were made. Kicking off the event was Joel Makower’s excellent keynote, Business, the Environment and the Bottom Line. For those unable to attend, his presentation was a diverse discussion of sustainability in the business world, a few of the key points being:

- Industries that were traditionally unrelated are finding themselves in the energy business as sustainability becomes a driver. Automotive firms will need to focus on the nation’s electrical infrastructure to implement plug-in cars, while Tyson chicken is attempting to use its 2.3 billion lbs of chicken fat waste as bio-fuel.

- Surprising savings can be had when a company begins to measure where its environmental impacts and inefficiencies lie and addressing those issues with innovation solutions. By replacing traditional wood pallets in its manufacturing plants with cardboard versions, GM was able to save $100,000 a day in costs, and switch from a non-recycleable waste product to a recyclable alternative which is purchased after use by outside firms, saving an added $50,000 a day.

- Many companies are silent on the environmental improvements they are making out of fear of enlightening consumer’s to a problem they were unaware of, and that this would lead to demands of more improvements or face a consumer backlash.

- Joel uses 3 questions to determine if a company is “good enough” in improving their green impact.

1- what do you know? You have to know your impacts to solve it.

2- what are you doing about it? There has to be tangible action to improve those impacts.

3- what are you saying about your improvements? How are you telling the public about what you are doing.

Joel’s talk was an informative and entertaining opening to get the audience primed for the other presentations at the conference. He also provided the take-away line of the day: “Sustainability is like teenage sex; everyone says they do it, few actually are, and those that are doing it don’t do it well.” Find out more at Joel’s site, where you can read his fantastic blog Two Steps Forward.

For more information about the Brown Forum For Enterprise click here.