What Does It Take to Be Environmentally Sustainable in the Retail Sector? - Part 2

By: Alexandra Kueller

Two weeks ago, we introduced the Retail Industry Leaders Association’s (RILA) brand new Retail Sustainability Management Maturity Matrix. The Matrix hopes to be a tool that will be used by sustainability executives, individual companies, and industry-wide. We also noted that while the Matrix is designed with the retail industry in mind, we think that is has a wide applicability beyond just the retail sector.

Last week, we discussed the first three sectors that are featured in the Matrix. Today we are focusing on the final four of the seven sectors. Hoping to provide a more in-depth look at how RILA hopes to benchmark across the industry in terms of environmental sustainability, we are going to look at what it would take for a company to become a leader in that sector.

Retail Operations

Environmental sustainability extends to all aspects of a company, including their retail operations. Whether it is a store or corporate offices, a company should be putting in effort to make these areas as sustainable as possible, such as having facilities be LEED certified. Other ways to make your retail operations more "green" can include incorporating green standards for all new warehousing and participating in the ENERGY STAR program.

The Retail Operations sector has three different dimensions:

  • Store/Corporate Offices
  • Warehouses/DCs
  • Data Center & Applications

Supply Chain

Supply chain sustainability might not be the first aspect of a company's sustainability plan to come to mind, but it is no less important than any other aspect. To be a leader in the retail industry when it comes to supply chain sustainability, a company must demonstrate the reduction of environmental impact through the optimization of transportation, work closely with suppliers to help improve their sustainability metrics, and be more transparent when it comes to audit statistics (e.g., percent of non-compliant factories).

The Supply Chain sector has three different dimensions:

  • Transportation/Logistics
  • Supplier Engagement
  • Supply Chain Transparency & Traceability

Products

When someone thinks of a retail organization and sustainability, often times their first thought is "how sustainable is the product?" RILA recognizes that product sustainability is a key component in a company's overall environmental sustainability and offers some suggestions on how to be a leader when it comes to making a company's product more sustainable. Some examples are using renewable energy sources during manufacturing, offering take-back services, and designing products with a "cradle to cradle" outlook.

The Products sector has three different dimensions:

  • Product & Packaging Design and Development
  • Owned Manufacturing/Production
  • Product & Packaging End-Of-Life Stewardship

Environmental Issues

And finally, true environmental sustainability cannot happen if a company does not focus on the environmental issues at hand. How a company addresses these issues - energy, waste, recycling, etc. - in the context of the retail sector is telling, and some industry leaders are already paving the way. Some of these companies are implementing leading waste technologies and policies, establishing green chemistry programs that helps reduce toxins, recycling and reusing water, using alternative energies, and more.

The Environmental Issues sector has four different dimensions:

  • Energy & GHG Emissions
  • Water & Wastewater
  • Waste & Recycling
  • Chemical & Toxics

Last fall we attended the annual RILA Sustainability Conference. Read about some of our thoughts on the conference here.

4 Tips for Getting Closer to Zero Waste

Here is a 2012 blog post from when we attended the 2degrees webinar “Beyond the Bin: From recycling to zero waste.” We think that the advice is worth sharing a second time around! Check out the tips and add your own suggestions in the comments below:

1.  Choose “single stream” – by allowing employees to sort recyclable material into a single receptacle, you can expect to see an increase in recycling of up to 50%. Make it easy for employees, and they’re more likely to participate!

2.  When crafting a zero-landfill strategy, don’t just focus on recycling. Be sure to include options like: closed loop solutions (reuse), composting, and supply chain management.  Remaining materials that can’t be recycled or reused can be converted to energy through conversion technologies: waste to energy, plasma gasification, and anaerobic digestion.

3.  When designing new facilities, be sure to think about waste conveyance design. Make sure you consider the following:

  • Internal areas for collection, storage, and separation of materials
  • External space for multiple container sizes and service areas
  • Design for ease of use

4.  To improve recycling in existing buildings, review the following items to make sure you’ve covered your bases:

    • Signage
    • Bin size
    • Bin type
    • Tenant education, key component to gain buy-in maybe have a kick-off meeting and continuous reminders with metrics and goals
    • Space constraints
    • Service area

      If your organization wants to get a better handle on its waste, a great first step is conducting a waste audit. We’ve developed a toolkit (webinar, guidance, and templates) all around How to Conduct a Waste Audit. If you find that your team doesn’t have the gumption to sort through all that trash, contact us to arrange a waste audit done by sustainability professionals!

      Featured B Corp of the Month: Green House Data Shows Why it is Cool to Focus on Heat Containment

      We’re big supporters of the principles behind the B Corp movement, but we want to do more than just "spread the love" about it, we want to share the sustainability success stories from other B Corps!  Each month we’ll be publishing an interview with a sustainability champion of a B Corp – and this month we are featuring Green House Data!

      Green House Data is a cloud hosting and colocation services provider with highly energy efficient, green data centers located across the country. The company helps its clients reduce the pressure that comes with lower IT budgets and increasingly high demands. Green House Data is a certified VMware service provider, SSAE 16 Type II and HIPAA compliant, as well as an EPA Green Power Partner.

      What made your company decide that sustainability was a priority?

       Green House Data is a data center service provider that offers cloud hosting and colocation solutions for businesses of all sizes. Unfortunately, data centers have a growing reputation for their negative impact on the environment, which is driven by their huge power consumption and heavy reliance on carbon producing fossil fuels. In fact, it is estimated that 2% of global energy usage is from technology driven by data centers and Greenpeace recently reported that their energy demand is expected to grow by 81% by 2020.

      When we began our business plan in 2007, we were already seeing how quickly the data center industry was growing, and knew that we wanted to make a difference for the environment through energy efficient design and the use of renewable energy resources. We wanted to not only offer a more sustainable data center solution for businesses, but we wanted to be an example of how it is possible to provide exemplary infrastructure and services which exceed customer expectations, while still offering competitive prices.

      What is your company's greatest sustainability accomplishment to date?

      Our cooling system designs have made the biggest impact to our sustainability efforts.  Servers perform their best when they are running in a climate-controlled environment. It varies by the server, but the optimal temperature range is between 68-80 degrees Fahrenheit. Depending on both the data center design and geographic climate, it can be very costly to maintain this range, as it typically takes about as much energy to cool a server as it does to power that same server.

      Traditionally data center operators would install HVAC systems that would cool the entire data center floor. In this type of layout, however, as servers pull in the cool air through the front and exhaust hot air out the back, there is a continual mixing of hot air and cold air and the cooling system has to work much harder to maintain the target temperature. If you’ve ever put your hand behind your computer, you can feel the hot air blowing out the back. Servers work very similar to this, although you may have hundreds or even thousands in one room.

      Because of a focus on sustainability, Green House Data is able to maintain a 75% cooling cost reduction off industry averages. Both our location and facility design have allowed us to achieve this.

      • Location: We are headquartered in Cheyenne, Wyoming which has an average annual temperature of 46.4° F. This cool climate makes it possible for us to utilize filtered, outside air most of the year, with no additional cooling methods needed. Even as air temperatures rise in the summer months, the low humidity levels in the region allow us to use a low-energy, supplemental evaporative cooling system without requiring the use of refrigeration-based computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units.
      • Hot/Cold Aisle Containment: Green House Data employs a hot/cold aisle containment system, which keeps hot and cold air separate, so that our cooling system doesn’t have to constantly battle the hot air exhausted by the servers. The hot aisle is contained within thermal panels and the hot air is released through openings in the roof. 

      What is the biggest sustainability challenge facing your industry today?

      Historically, the industry has favored performance over energy efficiency, but it’s starting to see that it is possible to have both. However, in order to be sustainable, companies need to make a capital investment in energy saving technologies and plan to recoup those costs over time via energy savings. With the limited technology budgets of enterprise data centers and the need for public data centers to offer competitive prices, it can be hard to push those initiatives through budget seasons.

      In the Greenpeace study, researchers highlighted how some of the bigger cloud industry players, with focus on Amazon Web Services, have a negative impact on the environment. Hopefully, this attention will encourage more focus on their climate impact and even the possibility of increased reliance upon renewable energy resources.

      How do you stay on top of emerging sustainability issues?

      In our industry, because the vast majority of sustainability impact comes from power efficiency, we’re always working towards designs that allow us to add capacity without increasing consumption. When we visit other data centers, we see very few operators as focused on heat containment (which maximizes the cooling efficiency) as we are. We custom built our containment to minimize the amount of heat bleed-out. For us, much of it is around having the most up-to-date technology and physical infrastructure.

      Five years from now, what sustainability goals do you hope will be accomplished?

      In the future, we hope to be able to start to produce some of our own onsite power via a renewable energy source, such as wind or solar power. The challenge is that it has to make sense financially for both our customers and our business. As new technologies to generate renewable energy are continually becoming available, it would be a great example for our industry to be able to tap into that effort and reliably power our facilities, while still providing competitive prices for our enterprise services.

      Shawn Mills, President, is a technology entrepreneur and founding member of Green House Data. 

      Contact Information: smills@greenhousedata.com, 866.995.3282, @tshawnmills (Twitter)

      Visit their website, www.GreenHouseData.com, to learn more, view demos, or request a free cloud trial.