Green and the Bottom Line

ROI and brand image factor into 3M’s decision process, as they will at ADC. But how does 3M identify green initiatives that it won’t undertake?

As an example, Millers offers the fact that the company makes many products for the wind and solar power industries, but it has no wind turbine or solar collectors to power its corporate headquarters. Though the PR value might be significant, and some employees, in fact, have expressed interest in a turbine, the environmental impact would be miniscule in terms of 3M’s “overall footprint,” Miller says. “[A turbine] doesn’t have the ROI to compete with other projects. We can do energy conservation in a lot of ways with better returns.”

Yes or No?

Decisions about which environmental initiatives will make the largest impact will vary depending on the company. St. Paul–based Ecolab, the Fortune 500 maker of cleaning and sanitation products, spent about $500,000 to redesign a research and development center in Eagan that then earned LEED Gold certification in 2009. But considering the nature and scope of Ecolab’s business, that green effort arguably amounted to a token gesture.

“If you take a look at our business, most of the environmental impact we can have occurs at our customers’ locations, not in our own facilities,” says Bruce Cords, Ecolab’s vice president of environment, food safety, and public health. The company’s products are used to wash more than 250 million dishes a day in restaurants and other food-service operations, he says. “We wash a lot of hands, too. Then throw in packaging, because except when we load bulk tanks, the packages we ship become the customer’s problem to get rid of.”

Thus, he argues, Ecolab not only pleases its customers but makes a very real environmental contribution when, for instance, it switches from shipping its Warewash detergent product in 40-pound, five-gallon pails and begins sending the stuff to customers in plastic-wrapped capsules. “People only need so many minnow buckets,” Cords says.

Likewise, he says, Ecolab’s Wash and Walk floor-cleaning product, which cleans greasy floors in restaurant kitchens with no need to rinse after use, has attracted 80,000 customers in North America alone. It also saves more than 500 million gallons of water per year for those customers.