The Sustainability Scorecard: How to Implement and Profit from Unexpected Solutions

"Where Judy speaks as an insider from a business perspective, Bhantnagar and Anastas speak from the perspective of scientists. Bhantnagar is also a health executive, and Anastas, once the chief scientist at the EPA, is known as the father of green chemistry. What they argue, and our experience at Patagonia bears this out, is that if you want to take sustainability seriously and make that integral to your business, you have to make it integral to the business model. What Sustainability Scorecard is designed to do is to integrate sustainability efforts into the production of products. If you habitually confound yourself by not buying into the existing practices and, instead, look at what will not only reduce the harm that your products cause in their manufacture but also create positive good, that creates a virtuous circle—and products that otherwise would not have been made. For instance, Paul came up with an idea for a process imitating photosynthesis that sucks carbon out of the air. That turns out to produce a pretty good vodka. But the vodka is just a beginning. Paul and his partners believe that the same process can eventually be used to make jet fuel. To me, this is an example of how business, out of all the sectors in society, government, and civil society, has the potential to be economically self-sustaining—and do the right thing. Business don’t need to raise tax money to operate, though one of the books we get to later will argue that government has provided a lot of the research and development that gets passed on for free to business. Businesses don’t have to go to rich donors to to fund our activity. We can create products that actually sustain our enterprise itself and does something worthwhile and necessary. I love their book and their idea because I think that they’re really showing the way. If I were an entrepreneur right now, I would look at that book very closely. I was the original catalog editor and writer, so that’s how I got that moniker. It’s a complicated question to answer. We’ve been talking for 35 years about the environmental crisis and about defending nature, focusing on specific issues like the need to preserve wilderness. Our own work on sustainability grew out of our love for wilderness. Our storytelling goes back to our start as a climbing equipment company. Climbing stories have a natural arc. You try to attain something, you’re going to the heights. You run into some existential problem that may prevent you from reaching the top, but then you succeed (or not), and make your descent back into the ordinary world and life. The earliest writers for the company, including Doug Robinson, and the founder, Yvon Chouinard, were great mountain storytellers. It’s also important that the number of customers we had for climbing equipment was small. There was no question of trying to manipulate our customers or use transactional language. You didn’t create a focus group to see which tone of voice would go over the best. You were speaking to people as friends and equals. Particularly when we started to make environmental arguments, we spoke the way you would talk to friends about something that they may not know about, that you had just started to learn about. We would be enthusiastic, and also respectful. I think that informed the way we talk to our customers. When we’re at our best, we still follow that rule, to treat friends and customers as equals."