PROVIDENCE – To Robert Hildreth, the sustainability movement has to move beyond just the environment in order to maintain its momentum. It has to become personal.

He was one of the keynote speakers today at the Brown Forum for Enterprise’s daylong 2008 Green Technology Conference. Other sessions focused on sustainable design and architecture, the greening of polluted brownfields sites and the possible effects of nanotechnology on the environment, as well as a discussion of energy initiatives.

Hildreth – vice president of global strategy at green marketing firm Saatchi & Saatchi S, which works in part with corporations interested in making moves toward sustainability – told the gathering at the R.I. Convention Center that the key is making the sustainability movement “irresistible.”

“The green movement in general suffers from one of the largest communications problem that’s out there,” Hildreth said. “We need to orient ourselves more around making the problem so compelling that it draws people in.”

How? He recalled how Wal-Mart had contacted his firm, seeking ways of making the mammoth retailer and its employees more mindful of sustainability.

Instead of giving Wal-Mart executives a list of actions to take, Hildreth’s company developed the Personal Sustainability Project, in which Wal-Mart’s 1.3 million employees were asked to tackle a small problem that was important to them – quitting smoking, losing weight, recycling more, walking to work one day a week.

“This was based on a lot of different things that we learned don’t work in the environmental movement,” Hildreth said. “What doesn’t work: Working on a big problem that you don’t really care about.”

For instance, “green teams” at some other companies lack enthusiasm, he said. “Nobody really cares about it; they’re just sort of doing it.”

But so far, the Personal Sustainability Project has enlisted about 700,000 Wal-Mart employees – and that spirit of sustainability is spreading, Hildreth said.

Case in point: He said one employee looking to save energy noticed that the lights of the soda machine in the snack room were always on. He convinced the store manager to turn off the lights. “Within three days, every single store turned off the lights on the back-room soda machines,” Hildreth said. Savings for the company: $2 million annually.

For more information about the 2008 Green Technology Conference at the R.I. Convention Center, or other programs of the Brown Forum for Enterprise, visit BrownEnterpriseForum.org.