Wow! How many people can say this in the media business and he is well on his way. Something to learn from….
“I built this business to throw off a billion dollars in profit,” Mr. Ailes said. “That was the goal from Day 1. In my own mind.”
via Roger Ailes of Fox News Has an Agenda – Profit – NYTimes.com.
The palm oil Cadbury uses in Australia and New Zealand comes primarily from Malaysia and is not sourced from Sumatra, Borneo or any of the regions where the Orangutan is under threat. Cadbury also has a long and proud record on the environment. Our ‘Purple Goes Green’ initiative has been widely recognized with Cadbury winning independent recognition on everything from packaging reduction, water reduction and sustainable agriculture. Furthermore, as a business we have a target to reduce our carbon footprint by 50% by 2020 – a commitment that goes far beyond what most Governments are requiring, and a commitment that we are currently on target to meet.
Cadbury stands unashamedly behind our decision to reduce the size, and the wholesale price to our customers, of our Cadbury Dairy Milk range in order to ensure that it remains a treat all Australians can enjoy. We have taken this action to ensure Cadbury Dairy Milk remains affordable, but not at the cost of the environment. That is why we pay an additional ‘social’ premium through the GreenPalm certification process to ensure the palm oil we purchase comes from sustainable sources. This premium is directly passed on to the growers and producers of sustainable palm oil so that they are rewarded for sustainable business practices, and have an incentive to grow more palm oil in a sustainable manner.
We want consumers to continue to love our chocolate, and it makes no sense whatsoever for us to make changes that the majority of people won’t appreciate. We believe as a business we are doing the right thing and are acting far more responsibly than many other companies that use palm oil without any of the assurances Cadbury are able to provide.
We remain immensely proud of our products and continue to believe that Cadbury Dairy Milk is the best tasting milk chocolate in the world.
via Palm Oil.
That is a very clear statement from a company which wants to do the right thing and make money at the same time. The language used and the direct communication used is very impressive.
What you measure gets managed. That is what Wal-Mart is doing with their plan. Check out the 15 questions (PDF) it is asking suppliers.
As the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores is on a mission to determine the social and environmental impact of every item it puts on its shelves. And it has recruited scholars, suppliers, and environmental groups to help it create an electronic indexing system to do that.
The idea is to create a universal rating system that scores products based on how environmentally and socially sustainable they are over the course of their lives. Consider it the green equivalent to nutrition labels.
Rather than a retailer or a product supplier’s focusing on only a few sustainability goals — lower emissions or water conservation or waste reduction — the index would help them take a broader view of sustainability by scrutinizing and rating all sorts of environmental and social implications.
Did this T-shirt come from a cotton crop that was sprayed with pesticide? Was excessive packaging used to ship these diapers?
Wal-Mart’s goal is to have other retailers eventually adopt the indexing system, which will be created over the next five years.
via At Wal-Mart, Labels to Reflect Green Intent – NYTimes.com.
More here:
GreenBiz.com stories – 1, 2
Sustainability Consortium
The goal is to reach the point where there’s some harvesting going on. The first sales might cost you a hundred or thousand dollars each to make. At some point, though, you want sales to happen for free, people to show up with money. At some point, you want word of mouth to replace promotion and to earn back the money you invested up front.That’s why it’s astonishing to me that people develop projects where harvesting is difficult or impossible. Here are some of the elements of a market where you are likely to reach the point where you can harvest the benefits of your investment:
* Word spreads. You want a market where stories of your success and reputation will reach other prospects.
* Needs are similar. You want a market where the skills you developed to help one person can also be used to help another person.
* Budgets exist. You want a market where there is more than one player with money to spend (on you) to solve a problem.
* Barriers exist. The market should reward insiders (like you) but make it really difficult for copycats to come in and steal share and lower prices.
* Price should rise with value delivered. As your work spreads and your reputation increases, you should be able to charge more, not less.I think 90% of all markets don’t meet these standards, and given the choice, I’d avoid them.
Akash Ganga is a company based in India which has developed a product to create clean drinking water from air. I blogged about the founder earlier .
Akash Ganga in Hindi translates to the “the perrenial river Ganga from the sky”. Very apt.
I admire the intention behind it and I think it is a great product innovation coming out of India. Now that they have launched a new website with their productI want to figure out their strategy.
Their website and news articles suggest that they are going for the home and office market as a fresh water solution. Is this the right strategy?
It will be interesting to check out the economics.
First, they provide a comparison with reverse osmosis. I think number 4 should be the other way round.
|
S. No
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Criteria
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RO
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AME
|
|
1
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Durability
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Less, because with increasing use, the ground water TDS load on the RO plant increases, till the membranes break-down.
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More, because it does not use ground water, but uses only air. Much longer life than RO plants.
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2
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Effectiveness in ensuring purity of water
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Yes, but depends upon frequent changes of filter membranes. Over time its effectiveness declines.
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Yes, and remains so for ever, because its effectiveness is independent of any component of the machine. Effectiveness never declines.
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3
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Effluent water
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Yes, and effluent ratio keeps rising as ground water level is depleted
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None at all
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4
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Short run costs per liter of potable water
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Lower. Operating costs are lower as are capital costs
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Higher on both counts.
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5
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Long run costs per liter of potable water
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Possibly very high. In the long run (i.e. after 6 years) the RO plant might have to be abandoned due to excessive TDS in ground water leading to frequent collapse of membranes.
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Very low, because atmospheric water quality is always very high and stable.
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6
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Environmental resource depletion
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Certainly very high. RO often uses up nearly 2.5 liters of ground water to obtain 1.0 liter of potable water. High rate of depletion of ground water.
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None at all. Generation of water vapor in the atmosphere is the only perennial source of water.
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|
7
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Microbial presence
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Yes if membranes are inefficient; water might need UV treatment
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Nil
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This may not be the right comparison as they both have their uses. Also, most reverse osmosis plants function from sea water and not ground water.
The market for Akash Ganga is different and it works only under some specific circumstances in terms of high humidity, temparature and continous energy.
Their basic product – AS-650 – 40 liters/day – requires a relative humidity of 80% and temparature of 90 Faranheit consuming 750 watts of power per hour and takes 24hrs to produce 40 litres.
Let’s calculate the cost of running this product.
 Appliance |
Watts | x | Hours per Day | x | Days per Year | ÷ | Convert to kWh | KwH Per Litre | kWh Rate | = | Cost per Litre |
| Akash Ganga | 750 | x | 24 | x | 1 | ÷ | 1,000 | 40/18=2.22 | Rs 5.5 | = | Rs. 12.2 |
It takes about 2.22kwH to generate 1 litre of water and costs about Rs12.2 a litre. Average cost of electricty comes from here .
If we add the capital cost and running costs, it may not be an economical alternative in a home.
Next, what about the right conditions for maximum efficiency. It works I think at 50% relative humidity too but provides the maximum output at 80%.
If we look at today’s map of India there are not many places where this product will provide the maximum efficiency.
(Source: Intellicast )
To really take this forward they need to predict the relative humidity in the various cities in India. A journal article like “Prediction of monthly-mean hourly relative humidity, ambient temperature, and wind velocity for India” could be a good start.
Then combined with temperature averages we can narrow down to a possible list of places.
For Bombay these are the following averages for decades.
| Unit | Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | |
| Average temperature over 21 years |
°F | 80 | 75 | 77 | 80 | 84 | 86 | 84 | 82 | 82 | 82 | 84 | 80 | 78 |
| Average high temperature over 21 years |
°F | 87 | 84 | 86 | 89 | 89 | 91 | 87 | 84 | 84 | 86 | 89 | 89 | 87 |
| Average morning relative humidity over 19 years |
% | 82 | 75 | 73 | 79 | 84 | 81 | 84 | 88 | 89 | 91 | 86 | 75 | 73 |
| Average evening relative humidity over 18 years |
% | 58 | 42 | 41 | 48 | 57 | 61 | 72 | 80 | 81 | 74 | 58 | 44 | 39 |
Add to this the availability of power. There is a 14% shortage of power in India in general due to subsidized power for farmers.
Once locations are filtered through this constraints then market scenarios need to be looked at.
Are homes the best place for this?
I think there needs to be a better strategy in place if this product needs to succeed.
I am writing this after talking to a good friend of mine from California. That has inspired this post.
He is an Indian residing in the US. Stayed there for 10 years now. A Masters degree holder, successful, married the love of his life, makes enough money to lead a decent life and works in the environmental/water field. What else can you ask for a good life?
But he is frustrated and he wants to do something good, especially for India. Can he travel back to India and do something there which makes it a good deal for him and for India?
I have faced that conundrum before and I do not have a solution. What I do have is some stories and experience.
Our work in Deeshaa revolved around doing good. That did not go well.
One thing I have learned from my experience and better still, the experience of others is that doing good is not a strategy. Doing good can be a principle. For example, Google says ‘Do no Evil’ and that is its principle of running business. It’s strategy is making money from ads. Then Google can give some money to its charitable arm and invest in some good stuff.
However, do no evil is not a strategy. In the same sense, we cannot go out with a goal of doing good as a strategy.
Because that will not help you to determine a market, a consumer, a business model and how you can going to sustain yourself or a company.
And what is true for a company is true for an individual too.
Does this contradict with the whole purpose of this blog? Yes and No. If sustainability is the only goal then it is wrong however, if sustainability can drive business strategy then yes.
Business Spectator – Lifting the carbon fog – Giles Parkinson
Amid all the political posturing about to take centre stage as the government’s emissions trading bill works its way through the House of Representatives, there have been moments of great clarity in the debate in recent days that business will do well to take on board.The first was the admission from opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull that an emissions trading scheme is inevitable. If not now, then sometimes very soon.
If this was a statement of the bleeding obvious to those who have followed the issue closely, the admission bursts through the political fog as a clarion call to business: There will be a carbon price in the global economy that needs to be factored into all aspects of the business, and up and down the supply chain, and with carbon-conscious business customers at home and abroad. This will create impacts and opportunities, and the sooner Australian business comes to grips with it – particularly with its dependence on fossil-fuelled energy – the better.
The second piece of clarity in the debate was the emergence of Santos CEO David Knox into the public arena on the issue of the ETS and its potential delay.
The Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs – BusinessWeek
No. 1 With 36% of the vote, online bookseller Better World Books led the pack. The 200-person company makes money selling books it gets for free from a network of individuals and institutions across the country. Co-founder Xavier Helgesen says the Mishawaka (Ind.)-based company has donated over $6 million to literacy programs and libraries around the world since it launched in 2002. “Right now, one out of seven people has the economic means to buy books from us,” he says. “If we can bring people up to levels of equivalent literacy, we’re helping our long-term business model.” Helgesen expects Better World, which has secured around $4 million in equity investment in total, to bring in $30 million in revenue this calendar year and be profitable in 2010. The company sells about 10,000 books a day.
| A plug for the book from Gil Friend. I am waiting for a response to see if there is a digital version of the book. |
Atanu Dey points to this article on cities in the SEED magazine by Geoffrey West.
Doubling the size of a city increases wealth and innovation by about 15 percent, but it also increases the amount of crime, pollution, and disease by roughly the same amount. Apparently, the good and the ugly come hand in glove, an integrated, almost predictable, package. A person drawn to the city by innovation, a greater sense of “action,” and higher wages can also expect to confront an equivalent increase in smog, garbage, theft, stomach flu, and AIDS.
[...]
In contrast, the social networks that underlie the “superlinear scaling” of wealth creation, innovation, crime, and pollution behave in exactly the opposite fashion: The bigger the organization, the faster the pace of life. In big cities, disease spreads more quickly, business is transacted more rapidly, and people walk faster — all in approximately the same systematic, predictable way (the same ~15 percent rule).
[...]
In contrast, in social organizations where growth is driven by superlinear scaling, growth is unbounded, never reaching an “asymptotic” stable state, and proceeding at a rate that is faster than exponential. To sustain such growth in the light of resource limitation requires continuous cycles of paradigm-shifting innovations such as the discovery of iron, steam, computation, and most recently, digital technology. Indeed, the litany of such breakthroughs is testament to the extraordinary ingenuity of the human social mind when it comes to overcoming resource limits. There is, however, a serious catch: Theory dictates that the time between successive innovations must get shorter and shorter. So if we insist on continuous growth driven by wealth creation, not only does the pace of life inevitably quicken, but we must also innovate at a faster and faster rate!
[...]
The challenge is clear: The key to long-term sustainability of the planet lies in applying a scientific lens to cities, with the goal of understanding their dynamic structure, growth, and evolution.
