(This blog post is a wrap up of the San Francisco event on May 24th featuring Jeff Mendelsohn, CEO and Co-Founder of New Leaf Paper)

"The paper industry is one of the most resource intensive industries in the world, and one of the slowest to change."

From NewLeafpaper.com

"The paper industry is one of the most polluting and resource intensive industries in the world. It is responsible for over a third of worldwide timber harvest and over 40% of all landfill waste in the U.S. When New Leaf Paper was founded in 1998, the paper industry had demonstrated a high resistance to change. With low margins, a commoditized international market, and huge capital investment in the status quo, paper companies resisted efforts to integrate sustainable principles into their business practices," said Jeff Mendelsohn, founder of New Leaf Paper.

It was inspiring to hear Jeff Mendelsohn talk about the process of changing the 'stuck-in-its-ways' paper industry into a more sustainable system.  How did New Leaf accomplish this? How did New Leaf survive in a challenging industry and succeed in making positive change.

Prior to New Leaf, Jeff started New York Recycled Paper Company in 1991 and is a pioneer of this industry. Around the same time various other recycled paper companies popped up around the US but all of them disappeared - except for New Leaf. 

What did New Leaf do differently to be successful as a mission driven company within a challenging industry and actually drive change with in it? 

How do you change an industry? 

Jeff says, "There's a lot of barriers and it's challenging. The paper industry is very resistant to change. Paper mills were designed to make paper a certain way for a quarter of a century, non-stop, to make money. To overcome these challenges, New Leaf created a strategic brand strategy. To change an industry, Jeff mentions you have to first present a positive vision for it. Despite the unsustainable ways of the paper industry, New Leaf never pointed fingers at anyone or pointed out how bad they are.  Instead they approached the industry with a "Think and Smile" approach. 

"Think and Smile" came to New Leaf due to the understanding that they would never win on a "commodity tunnel vision scenario." "We need people to think about what they're buying and we need them to smile, due to good design, and good products. A lot of environmental messaging before was 'think and frown', which doesn't get you very far."

Four principles New Leaf used to change the industry

• Positive vision
• Partnership up and down the supply chain
• Transparency
• Quantifying benefits 

Jeff says that a company has to start with a Vision and ask questions, such as "What would a sustainable paper industry look like?" 

It all boils down to a sustainable design. Designing an industry, designing a process.

What is sustainable design?

Wiki: Sustainable design (also called environmental design, environmentally sustainable design, environmentally conscious design, etc.) is the philosophy of designing physical objects, the built environment, and services to comply with the principles of economic, social, and ecological sustainability.

New Leaf created a vision for a perfect sustainable mill and identified existing mills that met this vision. At this time, there where only about 3 or 4 in North America; New Leaf wanted to increase this number. 

New Leaf's goal became to make the mills even greener. "In changing the paper industry, no one is just going to invest in a green mill without researching the markets. Our role was to "seed" markets and create new products in all these different product categories where nothing existed beyond 20 or 30% recycled paper." To do this, New Leaf bumped up the recycled content to 100% and gave it a clean bleaching process. The goal: "Attract demand, attract competitors and then eventually shift mill design."

Jeff discussed, "attracting competitors," which sounded counter-intuitive to me at first. However, it makes sense when your goal is not just for your own personal gain, but for the betterment of humanity and the planet at large. It would be quite difficult for one company to change an entire industry alone. In this instance, attracting "competitors" is also attracts a more sustainable future. New Leaf was then able to sell their vision to their customers and leverage the demand of these huge companies to drive change up through the supply line. 

Bank of America approached New Leaf

B of A wanted to change their letter head to 100% recycled post-consumer paper. New Leaf created their first 100% post consumer letterhead for Bank of America, inspiring most mills in this arena to create competing grades of paper, creating a permanent shift in the market for high-end corporate collateral. 

Book publishing - Harry Potter

In 2001, New Leaf created book paper. In 2003, the company provided the paper for the viral book, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," catching the attention of the entire book publishing industry. New Leaf decided not to pursue using book paper in its product line, but is proud of the impact it had on getting larger publishing companies to start using 100% post-consumer paper.

The event last month went well, and we were very lucky to hear about such an inspiring, dynamic company that truly cares about creating change in their industry.

- - -

Prior to meeting Jeff I already owned a New Leaf notebook which I keep on me as an alternative to taking notes on my tiny-keyboard smart phone. When I open the 'made from old milk carton' notebook, on the first page of the notebook are cool facts on the amount of post-consumer waste New Leaf has saved (greenhouse gases, fully grown trees, gallons of water, etc.) A live updated version of these stats are found at the top of their website.

Silicon Valley EcoTuesday is very excited to have moved our monthly event from Sunnyvale to Palo Alto. I personally am very excited to have taken over the Ambassador role and hope to organically grow the Palo Alto event. I know this area is full of eco-minded individuals so I hope to merge Silicon Valley's various green industries for a monthly night of networking. 

Not only do we have a great speaker for our first event, Scott Cooney, Principal of GreenBusinessOwner.com and author of Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur but we are very excited to have Frey Vineyards, America's First Organic Winery, sponsor our opening event in Palo Alto on November 16th! 

Cooney will discuss what happens to the Progressive movement given some inevitable political stalemate in DC, top opportunities in green business and entrepreneurship, and powerful ways to affect change every day and not just on election day!

Frey Vineyard's is the first maker of certified Biodynamic Wines in the US. EcoTuesday is very excited to be part of Frey Vineyards 30th anniversary year. They are nestled on the slopes of the Redwood Valley in Mendocino County, California. Not only do they produce organic and biodynamic wine but with their 17 kilowatt solar system half of the vineyards energy comes from the sun. I was fortunate to try their wines at the Green Festival in San Francisco last weekend and must say it is worth coming to the event just to try their delicious wine. Frey's wines are all made with no added sulfites. For all those people out there that get headaches, sniffles, and other allergic reactions to the synthetic preservatives in most wines can now enjoy wine again! 

Organic grape growing resists the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers through implementing mechanical cultivation instead of toxic herbicides. Frey Vineyards uses natural sulfur and biological controls instead of chemical fungicides to fight powdery mildew and botrytis brunch rot. Elimination of insecticides through creating a bio-diverse farm landscape that encourages natural predators. Throughout their winery their fertility needs are generated through cover cropping and making compost.

In the fall cover crops are planted and tilled under in the spring using green manuring, a fertilization technique. A variety of grasses, legumes and mustards are used as cover crops that protect the soil from erosion, fix nitrogen into the soils and offer a habitat for many beneficial insects. The benefits of cover cropping can be seen in the health of the soil and the quality of the vines. Not only do cover crops keep the soil healthy but they are also a form of companion planting. When mustards are grown alongside grapevines they help discourage soil born nematodes that would otherwise feed on grapevine roots.

The use of compost in the vineyard is another important organic practice. To achieve sustainable soil management, Frey Vineyard's recycles all of their grape pumice after it is composted with other organic ingredients including manure, old hay, and garden waste back into the vineyard. Compost helps to maintain a healthy level of organic matter in the soil.

Long established USDA organic wine standards are under attack. A proposed amendment would allow the addition of sulfites to organic wine for the first time! Organic wine is defined in the US as "made with organic grapes and no added sulfites". The World Health Organization recognizes the preservative sulfite as a known allergen, which is why the "Contains Sulfites" warning now appears on all non-organic US and European wine labels. 

Take Action to Keep Sulfites out of Organic Wine!

I hope to see many of you on Tuesday, Nov. 16!  Click here to register!

Organic Wine Information from www.freywine.com

Though this week’s GoingGreen Silicon Valley Conference (San Francisco, Oct. 12-14) was billed by producer AlwaysOn as a serious, venture-capital event “where green entrepreneurs take on big business,” it also had elements of a “playground” filled with inventions using wind, solar, waves, algae, corn cobs, lights, leaves, and waste.  --Why a playground?  In full disclosure, even though I am a long-time consultant and published author addressing sustainability for the high-tech industry, my specialty is reducing conventional tech companies’ environmental impact profitably—not helping green-tech companies launch.  Most of these inventions were news to me, and I dove into the presentations and demonstrations with a new learner’s fascination and playfulness.
 
For example, I imagined bracing myself on the bright-yellow, heavy-duty ocean platform capturing wave energy.  The invention is from an Irish company named WaveBob (admit it, this really could be the name of a playground feature).  The Wave Energy Convertor is a floating buoy that harnesses the immense power of ocean waves to generate clean, renewable energy, then sends it to shore in conventional undersea cables.  In three years the company will be ready to create WaveBobs in commercial volume.
 
Another presentation prompted me to think about all the corn stover (cobs, stalks, husks, leaves) that normally is burned or left to waste, and how great it would be if feedstock for everyday items could be made of stover and other byproducts), instead of from petroleum.  Genomatica is an example of a company using biotechnology to produce chemicals from renewable feedstocks instead of from oil.  (Non-food crops or non-edible waste from food crops are best to us, in my view.)
 
And then a speaker had us visualize powering everything from a building to a bus to a laptop computer with the same photosynthesis principal that allows a giant leaf on the forest floor to capture dim sunlight.  Solar Print, another Irish company, enables energy conversion in low, diffuse, and even indoor light with a material applied to the surfaces of existing glass, metal, and plastic materials.  One can even make a fashion statement – printing the solar-collecting materials in colored patterns – on wireless electronics or anything else you need to power.  Solar Print’s motto is “printing energy that does not cost the earth”; a film at http://www.solarprint.ie/the-company/about-us helps us visualize the technology.
 
And beyond showcasing these “playful” inventions, the conference speakers forecast the very serious business to be generated by these technologies --  valued in dollar figures mainly ending in 9 zeros.
 
So, from experiencing the conference and hearing the CEO’s investor pitches, I’m longing for the rapid deployment of the most workable of these products toward a world in which dependence on petroleum-based products and energy is a distant memory of playgrounds past.