Green and the Bottom Line

Everybody is an environmentalist these days, or so it seems. According to the brochures, the product labels, and the corporate spokespeople, every company in America is a devoted friend of the Earth.

There is even a word that applies to false, misleading, or overstated claims about the environmental benefits of a company’s products or practices. It’s called “greenwashing.” The term is used to denigrate rather lukewarm green efforts that are made mostly for marketing purposes and have limited environmental impact.

A company that takes its environmental impact seriously must use some criteria to sort the options and identify the things it can and will do. However altruistic its mission statement, a business must consider ROI when choosing which green initiatives it will pursue.

Getting Serious

Eden Prairie-based ADC is a $1.15 billion-a-year manufacturer with factories in the U.S., Mexico, China, India, Germany, and elsewhere. Its core business is connectivity hardware. Its primary customers are telecommunications companies.

Chief Technology Officer Mike Day chairs ADC’s corporate responsibility and green steering committee. For more than a year, the committee has been studying a question with far-reaching implications: What green initiatives will become standard for ADC as it moves from a “reactive” stance of compliance with environmental regulations to what Day calls a proactive phase?

If compliance is a minimum baseline and corporate resources are finite, Day says, the question becomes, “What degree of proactivity is consistent with our values and our customers’ needs?” Some time this year, ADC expects to emerge with “a multiyear plan to get us to the right level in an orderly way.”

The committee has been looking at environmental issues in three broad categories. They provide a helpful framework for other companies thinking about the subject.

• Facilities-based issues have to do with how the company runs its own offices and factories. Concerns include things like solid-waste disposal, energy efficiency, and air and water quality. Compliance baselines come in the form of local, state, and national regulations (the U.S. Clean Air Act, for instance) in every country where ADC has operations.