When you fuel up your car, do you have any idea where – actually, physically, where — the fuel comes from? We don’t either.  As our company doesn’t ship our products ourselves — we hire carrier companies to do it – we don’t have direct visibility to or authority over the choices our carriers make about the fuel they use to keep their trucks moving.

We do measure the greenhouse gas emissions associated with burning fuel to ship Timberland products.  And like most people, we pay attention to our fuel consumption for cost and climate reasons. We have a dedicated team that spends a lot of time and effort calculating the most efficient transportation routes from Point A to Point B in order to reduce shipping time and save fuel, which helps us cut costs and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Other ways in which we’re working to reduce our transportation emissions include making modal shifts (e.g. moving products by barge instead of truck),  and participating in a group called Clean Cargo that convenes brands and the carrier industry to measure and identify ways to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with shipping consumer products. We also have one-on-one conversations with our carriers and potential carriers during our contracting process to understand what steps they’re taking to reduce their carbon footprint. This information informs our decision about whether to hire or keep carriers.

We also partner with organizations that can help us better understand environmental issues and how we might contribute to positive, sustainable solutions.  For more than a year now, Forest Ethics has been teaching us more about the carbon intensity associated not with shipping, but with the feedstock that makes the fuel that goes into our carriers’ trucks.  What we’ve learned is that some fuels require more energy to extract and refine than others. This information has helped us to realize that we need to look at the emissions associated with shipping our product the same way we look at the emissions associated with producing our product – from the original source (such as the well, in the case of fuel or the cow, in the case of leather) right through to the finished product.

Easier said then done, since we don’t own any of the trucks that ship our products or employ the people that fuel them up. We’re a very small fish in the very large ocean of brands that ship products all over the world – but what we can do is facilitate conversations with our partners that lead to holistic solutions that improve social and environmental impact. Currently, we ask our carriers to tell us what they’re doing to measure and reduce their greenhouse gas footprint from well head through to fleet efficiency and route optimization. We do not boycott fuels because as mentioned above, we don’t have enough visibility into the fuel sources our carriers use to do so intelligently … and also because we don’t believe boycotts are the best path toward collaborative problem solving or positive sustainable outcomes.  We do stand committed to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and to continuing to push the boundaries on what is considered part of our carbon footprint through measurement, productive conversation, and holistic action – not boycotts.

Betsy Blaisdell
Senior Manager of Environmental Stewardship, Timberland

Next month marks the launch of City Year London – the 21^st City Year corps and the organization’s second international location (City Year South Africa was launched in 2005).  50 young people – City Year London’s inaugural corps members – will spend ten months working in schools as tutors, mentors and role models, while also receiving valuable training and support themselves. City Year London will serve in primary schools in Shoreditch and in communities across London.

London Mayor Boris Johnson will be on hand for City Year London’s opening day celebration on September 27^th, which will kick off with corps members performing physical training (PT) outside City Hall at 6:30 pm (City Year PT is an inspiring sight, if you have a chance to watch it).

As a longtime City Year partner and supporter, Timberland is excited about the UK expansion of the City Year team and their efforts.  Our best wishes to City Year corps members in London and around the world as they embark on a powerful year of community service, leadership development and civic engagement.  For more information, please visit CityYear.org.

What started as a simple, one-plot patch of white radish is now a lush, green community garden enjoyed and maintained by numerous community “farmers” who have fostered a friendship in and around a flourishing vegetable garden.  These farmers watch over each other’s crops, share seeds, and help each other with sowing, weeding, watering and harvesting.

Growing community and veggies at the same time … that’s good Earthkeeping.

Xiao Qing’s community garden

Case in point: earlier this summer, Timberland was included in an “Outdoor Gear Special Report,” published by Ethical Consumer, a group in the UK who defines itself as the “leading alternative consumer organization.”  Their gear report reviews and rates more than 60 outdoor companies on their environmental and supply chain policies and provides readers with “best buy” advice based on their research.

Therein lies the problem – as it is with many of these kinds of guides and reports – the research.  The Ethical Consumer report includes several inaccuracies and incomplete or outdated information … not to mention ratings based on the opinions and judgments of editorial staff, rather than validated third parties.  Among the deficiencies in the Ethical Consumer report:

• Companies (Timberland included) were repeatedly chastised for not responding to Ethical Consumer information requests.  Timberland has asked Ethical Consumer to let us know who their inquiry was directed to several times — so we can figure out where the communication breakdown occurred — but we haven’t yet received any response.

• Timberland received poor ratings in several categories because, lacking complete information, the Ethical Consumer team assumed the worst.  For example – they called us out for selling merino wool socks.  It is true that some merino wool comes from Australia, where mulesing is a serious animal rights issue.  And since the Ethical Consumer team didn’t see anything on our website stating that Timberland does not contribute to the issue of mulesing, they assumed that we do.  As a transparency and reporting expert, I’ll be the first to admit that we should make our merino wool policy (which requires non-mulesed certification from our suppliers using any Australian wool fiber in our products) prominently available on our website – a fix we’re in the process of making.  However, assuming the worst leads the report writers to make judgments without real information – a practice the report in itself is trying to discourage.

• Timberland and howies, a Timberland brand based in the UK, were both included in the report … and treated as one entity, sharing one supply chain, when in fact the two are entirely separate.  In some instances the Ethical Consumer team used Timberland information to “rate” howies, which was both confusing and incorrect. This leads me to wonder what else they may not have had clear or complete understanding of. As a related error, in several instances the report references Timberland’s 2006 social and environmental performance … but we publish quarterly CSR updates and our most recent (longer) report of CSR data and performance was released in 2009.

Lest this feel like sour grapes from a company that received bad marks, Timberland was not alone in being criticized in the report … nor in criticizing the report.  Other articles and blog posts have discussed the Ethical Consumer report and its shortcomings, including The Adventure Life, Treehugger, and Herald Scotland.

The Ethical Consumer report does have pockets of factual, useful information that consumers could learn from and companies could use to improve their sourcing and manufacturing operations. However, due to many inaccuracies and assumptions it’s nearly impossible to weed out what’s true from what is based on opinion. And Ethical Consumer’s gear guide is not the lone report that has inaccuracies or creates a list of recommendations or rankings that can’t be validated. A recent blog post by Marc Gunther makes a similar argument about another popular report (the 100 Best Companies list published by CRO Magazine). Opinions matter, but they shouldn’t be regarded as facts … and good intentions don’t necessarily make for fair and balanced reporting.

Without third-party standards to truly measure products sustainability, there will continue to be an abundance of rankings, lists and reports that raise awareness in general (which is a good thing), but don’t give consumers real tools to make responsible purchasing decisions (which is the detail we all lack for translating ideas into real change). To the folks at Ethical Consumer – whose tagline reads, “challenging corporate power since 1989” — I invite you to consider that there is often a missed opportunity for rankings organizations to verify information with the brands being scored. As someone who has worked for several advocacy and non-profit organizations, I don’t think such information sharing would skew factual evaluation, but instead could lead to accurate analysis of disclosure rather than judgment (or methodology)-created-in-a-vacuum.

As an example of how outdoor brands and editors with consumers’ best interest at heart can work in concert, I invite readers to visit www.ecoindexbeta.org. Here, stakeholders can review the Outdoor Industry Association’s Eco Index – a standardized tool (developed by more than 200 brands, including Timberland, and with input from external groups) to evaluate outdoor products’ sustainability performance. Is it the holy grail of transparency and product comparability? We’ll see what the beta test shows… hopefully the next Gear Guide will be better informed as a result.

Beth Holzman
CSR Strategy & Reporting Manager, Timberland

In July and August, Hong Kong NGO Wave5 and Pou Yuen footwear company organize a summer camp for nearly 700 of these “left behind” children, and Timberland employees in China volunteer for the project.  Below, photos and first-hand accounts from Timberland volunteers who are spending their summer making a critical difference for these children … and creating impact for themselves in the process.

“I admired the volunteers from Hong Kong tremendously. They were full of love, used their own vacation time, paid their own fee to come and take care of these ‘left behind’ children. Although many of them could not speak Mandarin very fluently, they used their hearts to convey knowledge, happiness and love to the children, the future of our mother land.”

“(At dinner one night) one of the girls carried her plates to the dining table, crying. The food almost fell. I hurried to help and by the time I reached the table, five or six of other little girls were crying as well. I asked them why they cried. From their broken sentences, I realized this was the last meal and their volunteer teachers had to leave. These girls didn’t want to say goodbye to their teachers.  They made cards with red hearts for us, saying they would remember us and would love us forever. I saw them working on those hearts and folding paper the day before during my class … it was only now I realized they were making gifts for us.”

“In the past week, I didn’t think I taught them anything, but they taught me to be pure, honest, simple … to trust and love. In the name of volunteering, I gained tremendous amount of love and blessings.”

At the Homole Gully/Pieniny Mountains service site, 5,400 liters of rubbish, pipe, bathtub pieces, and linoleum were collected, sorted and prepared for recycling. And at the White Water Preserve, 480 liters of rubbish was removed from the green landscape.

In total, the Timberland Poland team members completed 500 hours of service. We applaud the Earthkeepers in Poland for their hard work in celebration of our shared planet.

Photo courtesy of AFP.com

The Plastiki just completed a 4-month journey across the Pacific Ocean, traveling from San Francisco, CA to Sydney, Australia … all in the name of plastic pollution awareness.

Along the way, Plastiki crew members endured rough weather and giant waves, and sailed by the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” formed by millions of pounds of plastic debris that have clustered together in the water.

Last spring, we shared the story of a similar vessel – JUNKraft – that sailed from California to Hawaii to raise awareness for the same environmental issue.  In the 2 years since JUNKraft made its journey, the “garbage patch” has continued to grow … indicating that there’s still more work to be done in controlling and reducing the plastic pollution problem.

Sailing the seas to create awareness is good … even better would be to sail the seas to create positive impact.  Anyone have a design idea for a plastic bottle boat equipped with a vacuum attachment?  If you’re going to make the journey, might as well pick up some trash along the way.

I was in Washington yesterday, on business unrelated to climate legislation — I was invited to a Congressional briefing on the role of private enterprise in rebuilding a devastated Haiti.  That’s a topic for another blog post … but it almost doesn’t matter why I was there, since the experience is so often the same regardless of the focus.  Too many so-called “leaders” posturing and posing and blowing hot air in form of prepared, approved, predictable remarks.  Too many politicians that have been entrusted to lead, to put the best interests of their states and their constituents first, instead doing predictably nothing to fulfill their duties or address any interest that isn’t their own, or that of their party.  Senate Democratic leadership shelved their cap-and-trade effort?  The most astonishing part about that news to me is that the effort ever made it this far.

The article could have stopped there, one paragraph in, but goes on to offer half a page of familiar excuses from climate legislation opponents for why cap and trade is to be feared and avoided like a deal with the devil.  I can see them — did see them, yesterday, our principled “leaders” — wringing their hands and shaking their heads and trying to work up expressions of earnest concern: “Cap and trade would kill jobs!  Cripple our industries! Put us at a disadvantage to Chinese rivals! Force higher costs for consumers!” From Congress and the President — instead of legislation, instead of engaged democracy, we get the EPA setting guidelines in a backroom somewhere.  This is not the way to make America energy independent, or to ensure that American business is sustainable–financially and environmentally.

Washington can – and will – continue on the path of pretense, working hard to appear to be working hard on the crisis facing our natural environment, while actually doing nothing — except making cheap headlines, by demonizing “fat cat bankers” or “scurrilous CEOs,” which earns a cheap laugh from the press, and maybe even earns votes from the manipulated masses. Is this what the greatest democracy in the history of humankind is reduced to — toxic rhetoric from the left and the right?

In the meantime, thank goodness for the creative power of the private sector.  The solar industry will continue to expand (especially in China, where that government has decided that clean energy is a priority).  And despite the absence of a clear policy, or even any real policy on sustainability, private enterprise, maligned by this administration regularly, will continue to reduce their emissions and lower their energy costs. It is good business, common sense, and competitive advantage to lower your environmental impact.  No wonder our “leaders” in Washington don’t get it.

Timberland has reduced our carbon emissions by almost 40% against our 2006 baseline–lowering costs, making our business more profitable and more sustainable. We are a mid-size business competing in the global economy, and we are doing what our “leaders” say can’t be done — we are being competitive, and we are building sustainability into our business model.

Would a clear government policy on carbon help — the way a minimum wage or CAFE standards help industry? You bet.  But as the Wall Street Journal article demonstrates clearly — if you’re waiting for leadership from the Beltway Denizens on climate change, settle in.  Rhetoric aplenty … leadership, not a whit.

Someone let me know when there’s actual news breaking about principled leadership regarding climate change from this administration … in the meantime, I’ve got a responsible business to run.

Jeff Swartz
President & CEO, Timberland

Billy was interviewed yesterday on NPR’s program Talk of the Nation, as part of the program’s coverage of the issue of childhood hunger – a critical issue impacting millions of children in the United States, and one President Obama has pledged to end by 2015.  You can listen to the entire program here:

How to help?

• Support your local food bank in their efforts to get nutritious food to the families in your community that need it.  (Timberland’s front-lawn “Victory Garden” produce is sold to our employees and proceeds go to the NH Food Bank … employees love the fresh veggies and the food bank appreciates the support!)
• Email your Senators and Representative in support of the Child Nutrition Bill, critical legislation that will further the efforts to end childhood hunger in America.