Feb 2nd

Posted by Anthony Zolezzi in Uncategorized

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When Bloomberg recently invited me into the discussion of a pro or con blog on whether sustainability is a trend or a fad, my first thought was; how can anything we do not be sustainable? If the definition is basically that whatever we take must be given back so we can live in relative bliss for the foreseeable future, then how can any corporate sustainability program be either a fad or a trend?

All humans know intrinsically that there is a natural order to things and that we cannot exploit the earth’s resources to the point of destruction. I believe this is something we’re all aware of, even though as a race there are times where our expanding this or overlooking that may appear destructive. But at the end of the day, we all know deep down that there is only one way for us to live harmoniously together and to keep our habitat viable for future generations, and that is to keep on replacing that which we take away.

This unwritten rule relates to all ecosystems, every manufacturing plant, every operating business on the planet. So to even suggest sustainability could be a fad is in my opinion an insult to More >

green, sustainability

Jan 11th

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This morning I arose especially early in hopes of getting to my office by 6:30am, and upon going outside, noticed water pouring through cracks in the street. I checked it out and determined it had to be coming from a broken water pipe, which made me realize just how critical it is to repair leaks in the existing municipal water system. In fact, each day, leaking pipes account for the loss of an estimated 7 billion gallons of water, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, due to the fact that a large part of the country’s water system is decades old and in need of replacement. However, as CNN reported last January, federal funding for this purpose has been cut significantly in recent years, and the state of the infrastructure has deteriorated as a result.

Being absolutely fascinated to learn first-hand how the Los Angeles Water and Power folks go about fixing a massive leak of this sort, I stuck around to observe how they planned to tackle the problem. It turned out to be an incredible display of technology, discipline and expertise. First they closed off the street, then proceeded to dig a deep hole that quickly filled More >

leaks, sustainability, water

Dec 9th

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Last Tuesday morning I was able to do something that I hadn’t been able to do in a week, a very simple thing that most of us take for granted, and that was to use tap water to brush my teeth. When you’re traveling in South America, all of your water has to come from bottled or purified sources. There is no such thing as being served tap water in a restaurant, and none of the locals drink water that isn’t either bottled or boiled.

To really appreciate the relatively clean, safe water that flows out of the tap here in the U.S., you have to spend a few days in a locale where it doesn’t.

When you think of the infrastructure pipes, reservoirs, pumping stations and energy it takes to accomplish this, it is really quite overwhelming. Trillions of dollars will be required to provide the populations of developing countries with the benefits of potable, pathogen-free water of the sort that’s readily available to residents of more advanced nations. While this represents a big opportunity, just moving the water will require incredible amounts of energy. If it could be done using renewable sources such as wind and solar, that would sort More >

clean, development, energy, hydro, water

Nov 15th

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While flying out of New York last week with the sun setting in the west, I was witness to the majestic spectacle of clouds reflecting the sun’s rays, and it put me in mind of that old Joni Mitchell song about recalling “clouds’ illusions” and how we “really don’t know clouds at all.” Which is to say, I suddenly realized how clouds don’t get the credit they deserve. We tend to characterize difficult periods of our lives as cloudy ones, or use the idea of a “dark cloud” hovering over someone as a symbol of problems they might be having (as was done in the “Peanuts” comic strip). Even I have been known to feel dejected on occasion by the prospect of a cloudy day. And then it hit me just how much we fail to appreciate clouds and what they actually do for us, just as we take for granted so many of Mother Nature’s other incredible creations.

Clouds are in many ways like the rainforest or the oceans, but even more important, they are the vehicle for moving water from ocean to river or from ocean to atmosphere, and then to land. This is known in technical terms as More >

clouds, ocean, water

Oct 24th

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This past Saturday night I attended the 21st Environmental Media Awards ceremony (the longevity of which is in itself is a major feat). Debbie Levin, the president of the Environmental Media Awards Association, has done an incredible job coordinating this event every year and deserves kudos for the having brought so many personalities from Hollywood and the entertainment industry on board. The presenters were “A list” celebrities such as Nicole Richie, Norman Lear and Amy Smart, while the award winners were movers and shakers ranging from Phil Conserva, producer on CSI, to Justin Timberlake. But while this is a very influential group, and although there were some 500 people present on the Warner Bros. lot for the presentations, it struck me that it really hasn’t made that much progress in reaching the public.

While the event itself was most certainly one in which “fun and fame” held center stage, the themes and the language used were basically no different than they have been for the past 21 years of the EMAs – simply more of the same “guilt and shame.” As I thought about it, I started to become somewhat disappointed both with the fact that there has been no “10X More >

EMA, fun and fame, green

Oct 8th

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As the son of a fisherman, everything I had in my childhood, as well as my education, was paid for by fish. So, with that in mind, I will offer you my unadulterated view of the Food Marketing Institute Summit’s seafood sustainability session that I attended a couple of weeks ago. I had been holding back on this because I did not want it to be too negative, but last night, at a dinner with ten people from the sustainability sector, the question of what seafood they should and shouldn’t be eating arose. That brought me right back to the FMI Summit and the lack of understanding and education on the subject I saw reflected there on the part of the industry.

Do we know how to define sustainability or don’t we? That is the question I took away from this session. True, the Institute deserves credit for sponsoring the summit, as does the Packard Foundation for hosting a seafood session. But the latter event left me scratching my head. How can some of the largest seafood brands in the world claim they are sustainable at the same time the United Nations says that seafood levels left in the ocean are More >

monterey bay aquarium, seafood watch, sustainable seafood

Oct 5th

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This Friday at New World F.E.S.T., I will be speaking on “The New Spirit of Sustainability,” or what I see as the need for a redo in our approach to environmental issues. Rather than being too late in the game to change our focus, I think the timing might be just right. The theme of the speech is that we should dispense with using guilt and shame to change behavior, and make fun and fame our incentives instead.

But how do we make this fundamental motivational shift? The first step is realize that we have not made the progress we need in the green movement, largely due to our having turned people off with a “global boring” emphasis, as I like to refer to it, and now are going through a period of eco-fatigue. But the work our team has been doing at Greenopolis clearly shows me there is a better way to achieve positive change, and it is by making the desired behavioral modifications fun, interesting and competitive. In other words, using “game mechanics” that include rewards and prizes as key motivators for doing the right thing.

The difference is that instead of trying to make people feel guilty for not doing More >

Sep 19th

Posted by Anthony Zolezzi in Uncategorized

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Sometimes you have such an eventful week, you can’t sleep. I’ve just had that kind of week, hopping between a conference on wastewater, the Gamification Summit and the Food Marketing Institute Sustainability Summit (which I’ll discuss in an upcoming blog), as well as meeting with representatives of Central African countries. The adrenaline required to keep pace with this unremitting schedule no doubt accounts for my totally inability to take a nap when I finally found myself sitting on the flight from New York to Los Angeles.  I simply couldn’t get my mind to stop racing.

Why I have this desire to master so many diverse issues at once, I don’t know, but it would be terrific if I could just have an impact on one of them. For now, however, I’d like to share a few of the thoughts that this somewhat exhilarating week has ‘woken me up’ to:

• If we can filter recycled water with membranes or UV lighting, think about how much water and energy we would save – certainly a worthy goal to spend all of one’s time and energy on in itself.

• Retailers could drive public demand for sustainable seafood. Leaders in sustainable retailing like Whole Foods are already making More >

Sep 17th

Posted by Anthony Zolezzi in Uncategorized

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This past weekend, I went on a quest for new knowledge, traveling to Phoenix for my first summit on water, with all the anticipation of a kid going to a new school. Learning new things about a subject or commodity that most people take for granted is always exciting, but what I really find intriguing is that water is the ultimate recycled product. The hydrological cycle of water evaporation to clouds, and its subsequent transformation to precipitation is about as pure as it gets. The most important thing we can do is not to somehow screw this process up.

In fact, the prospect of attending this particular conference had me so excited I literally couldn’t sleep the night before. This is a subject that I have thought about ever since I touredthe Los Angeles wastewater treatment plant two years ago and saw that 70 percent of perfectly potable treated water was being dumped back in the ocean.

So it really resonated with me when I heard one of the speakers at the conference, Cindy Wallis-Lage from the consulting firm of Black & Veatch, emphasize that that where water is concerned, we need to change the language and the whole paradigm to eliminate More >

water

Sep 12th

Posted by Anthony Zolezzi in Uncategorized

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Admittedly, the president’s speech on jobs Thursday night stirred up a lot of emotions in me, although I’m not exactly sure why. I thought I was over politics and watching speeches, and was really only focused on the football game it preceded. In fact, I had already pretty much written off Obama, as have a lot of his early supporters, and couldn’t imagine why I want to hear the same old empty rhetoric. But to my surprise, I watched the entire thing, taking in every word with the same hope and anticipation I used to feel. While I’ll leave the political commentary about the speech to others, I’d like to share a thought that struck me while listening to the president talk about his proposed American Jobs Act. Our little company, Greenopolis, has hired five new people in the last 30 days– and we need more — but I realized that because we are on a tightened budget due to the economy, we have not really done a thorough job of indoctrinating or initiating these new hires into the organization. And that got me to thinking that there’s more to creating jobs than simply creating jobs. We should be creating sustainable, engaging More >