It's good to be green: For- and non-profits look to recycling

Random House commits to recycled paper. Phillip Morris wants a seat at the table. It looks like corporate America is rediscovering the beauty of being green.

This week's announcement (PDF) by Random House that by 2011 it plans to increase its recycled paper usage to 30 percent caught some by surprise. People aren't surprised that Random House is embracing the concept of corporate social responsibility but rather, the surprise is that the commitment to recycled paper didn't occur long ago.

In the '80s and '90s it was a mandate in many businesses that all printed material--brochures, annual reports, employee guides--had to use recyled papaer. There was such an emphasis that for many of us it was just an assumption that recycled had become the gold standard.

The disconnect between corporations use of recycled paper and the reality of that use first came to my attention three years ago. I was chatting with a friend of mine who happens to be a printer and he mentioned that none of his clients had requested recycled paper for at least five years ( that would go back to 1998).

I wrote about lack of recycled paper in corporate America a column for Skyway News, now The Downtown Journal, in 2003. Yesterday, I recycled a portion of that column at FunnyBusiness.

It seems that Random House is not the only company taking a stand on corporate social responsibility. The team at INSIDE WWF PHILIPINES has a post about a conference on sustainability that just ended this week. Phillip Morris was one of the companies that attended.

There were interesting discussions one of which came early in the workshop in response to the question "Why should business become sustainable?" The obvious answers came up, long-term profits, good for the brand, cost-efficiency, etc. Then the representative from Philip Morris responded, "For a place at the table." When asked for clarification on the response, she began quite an emotional explanation of how Phillip Morris was being turned away by everyone including NGOs unwilling to accept their money despite the environmental projects they were undertaking. She said words to the effect, "You don't know how it feels like being turned away because your company produces cigarettes and kills people." Jimmy Brannigan, one of the British facilitators replied, "Does anybody know how many people the cement industry has killed, or the mining industry?" No response. "Cigarettes are a personal choice. Do people have a choice in the pollution of a cement plant or the devastation caused by a mining or logging concession?" No response.

Meanwhile businesses that are interested in learning more about becoming a social entrepreneur can check out Social Edge, a network of social entrepreneurs.

Social Edge has an audience of tens of thousands of current and aspiring social entrepreneurs around the world; it is particularly targeted at social entrepreneurs with limited access to other local resources and practitioners due to the nature of their work (e.g., international development) or their location (e.g., developing countries or in rural areas.)

Diana Reid, formerly part of the Public Affairs team at Starbucks where she was a key business partner to Starbucks Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) team, is part of the Social Edge network. She began blogging four months ago at Reid On Marketing about providing advice on marketing for social entrepreneurs.

While some corporations may have turned their backs on the green movement in the late 90s, it feels that many are rediscovering the beauty of being green in the word's of Kermit...

But green's the color of Spring.
And green can be cool and friendly-like.
And green can be big like an ocean, or important like a mountain, or tall like a tree.

When green is all there is to be
It could make you wonder why, but why wonder why? Wonder,
I am green and it'll do fine, it's beautiful!
And I think it's what I want to be.

Image Credit: Flickr member zenroxie