Every employee of Cox Communications in Rhode Island who arrived to work on a recent Monday morning found a green wastepaper basket parked under their desk.
The desk-side recycling effort, part of a comprehensive environmental initiative that Cox launched last year, is just one example of a “green” movement sweeping the business world, as Fortune 500 companies and Main Street shops alike seek to reduce their energy usage and adopt environmentally friendly practices.
The green movement, considered fringe for decades, is being embraced by the mainstream at a pace so rapid it represents a shift in the way business is done across the globe not seen since the dot.com boom, and comparable even to the Industrial Revolution, said Steven P. Hamburg, director of the Global Environment Program at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
“The low-carbon economy is going to change radically the business community, and there will be winners and losers,” he said. “And that’s why you have some fighting desperately to not allow this to happen, to try to prevent this from happening. There are going to be losers, but there are going to be far more winners than losers.”
The rush to go green is being driven by twin forces, Hamburg said: One is that companies are seeking to become more energy efficient to limit their exposure to uncertainty in energy prices. The other is the potential costs of future regulation of carbon emissions linked to global warming.
“They recognize energy prices will be going up and will be unpredictable, and they know that there will be regulatory frameworks that will come into being,” Hamburg said. “No large business believes that there will not be regulation of carbon going forward, and all businesses should recognize that will happen.”
At the same time, the shift to a lower-carbon economy that Hamburg and many others describe as inevitable presents enormous business opportunities in most sectors, including building and design, technology and manufacturing, and land use and renewable energy, he said.
Cox New England recently installed a computerized heating and cooling control system at its West Warwick location, and a new lighting system that gives the same flexibility with lighting that the company has with heat and air conditioning. Cox also replaced the heating plant in the original building with a new, more-efficient unit.
Other efforts include replacing Cox’s fleet of Ford Rangers with Ford Escape Hybrids where possible, replacing paper-towel dispensers with air dryers, and eliminating Styrofoam, providing reusable coffee mugs and composting in its cafeterias, said Brad Shipp, vice president for information technology at Cox New England, who leads Cox’s green efforts in the region.
Not only companies as big as Cox are going green; many entrepreneurs are launching startup businesses aimed at the emerging market.
In January, Kim Solan and her husband founded AskMeGreen.com, a Web site with offices in West Warwick and Bradenton, Fla., offering products and services to environmentally conscious consumers and business markets.
Solan said she and her husband launched the Internet business as an offshoot of another Web site they’ve owned for eight years that markets products and services to the yachting community, which they noticed is increasingly looking to go green.
“If there was no potential, my husband and I wouldn’t even put forth the effort, because you know what it takes to get a business going,” Solan said.
There are still significant barriers for many companies seeking to green their businesses, including a lack of clear information about how to proceed and, sometimes, prohibitive costs, Hamburg said.
But the costs associated with energy efficiency and environmentally friendly building and other infrastructure improvements is quickly coming down as the green movement gains momentum, said Steven Hughes, am architect with RGB, an architectural and engineering firm in Providence.
Hughes, who said he was the first LEED-certified architect in Rhode Island when he received the designation several years ago from the U.S. Green Business Council, worked to design a new residence hall at Rhode Island College that is among a handful of buildings competing to become the first LEED-certified construction in the state.
Tom Perry, managing director of engineering services for Shawmut Design and Construction, a Boston-based construction management firm with offices in Providence and New York City, said he expects the entire construction industry to conform with LEED standards within five years.
“This is going to be the way we build for all our projects,” said Perry, whose firm is currently working on a new academic center at Roger Williams University, and a fitness center at Brown University that are both slated as LEED-certified buildings.
In some cases, industries long identified as among the worst environmental offenders are seeking to join the ranks of the greenest.
In coming weeks, Narragansett Graphics, a printing business in Coventry, expects to receive certifications from the Sustained Forestry Initiative and the Forestry Stewardship Council – the gold-standard certification in the printing industry.
“Green printing is a carbon-neutral, environmentally sensitive movement in the most intensive-user industry in the world of wood, energy and water,” said Kevin Fortin, Narragansett Graphics’ director of sales and marketing. “We have been the bad guys. We no longer are, which is pretty exciting and pretty neat.” •
