Green and the Bottom Line

• Products and services issues are about product composition and the end of a product’s life. “Anything that gets produced in a factory sooner or later winds up in a landfill,” Day says. Led by the European Union, countries including the United States are adopting or considering legislation that affects manufacturers, rather than just those who dispose of old products. These regulations target matters including the chemical composition of products that may be sold within a nation’s borders. Acronyms like RoHS (restrictions of hazardous substances), WEEE (waste from electrical and electronic equipment) and REACH (registration, evaluation, authorization, and restriction of chemical substances) are becoming increasingly familiar to manufacturers around the world.

• Customer issues involve ways that ADC can help its customers stay in compliance with changing regulations, or cut their energy consumption, or operate in a more sustainable way. For instance, Day says, ADC sells products that help data centers stay cooler and use less energy. And it has a service division that removes obsolete equipment from offices for telecommunications companies.

Day says that a swarm of strategic and tactical issues spring from each of the three categories. Considering products and services, for instance, ADC sells equipment in more than 130 countries with different and ever-changing environmental regulations. A strong business case probably can be made for a proactive approach to manufacturing operations and product development that would get out in front of the global regulatory wave, ensuring that ADC products could be purchased confidently by customers anywhere.

In other cases, Day says, the business case for particular green initiatives will be less clear. ADC often receives surveys from various interest groups “that clearly are designed to pressure us to make some investments that don’t align with our market interests.” He declined to name examples.

3M, which already has entire catalogs filled with products that offer energy savings or other sustainable advantages, has a long-established process for deciding which green possibilities to pursue. Keith Miller, 3M’s manager of environmental initiatives and sustainability, says that product ideas go through a life-cycle analysis that looks at their impact on health, safety, and the environment from the raw material stage through manufacturing, customer use, and disposal.