It takes courage, as a company, to stand up and lead towards a different way of doing business. At Blue Practice we are lucky enough to represent the kinds of change-makers that are willing to take that first step, and for that we are incredibly thankful!

For these and many more reasons, it was an inspiring week at Greenbuild 2011 when Blue Practice client Construction Specialties (C/S) unveiled the building industry’s first-ever ingredient label for building materials. C/S teamed up with leading design firm Perkins+Will to develop the label, which details the complete make-up of a product, highlighting critical lifecycle information and potential human health impacts. This intensive effort, launched at Greenbuild 2011 in Toronto, Canada, is a collaborative step toward market transformation through increased disclosure on the part of building product manufacturers.

As the industry stands now, no disclosure on the part of building product manufacturers is necessary regarding the chemicals and ingredients in products. However, with this label, C/S and Perkins+Will hope to transform the market and nudge it towards more transparency around the make-up of the materials that surround us every day. The EPA estimates that Americans now spend about 90 percent or more of their time indoors and so we are increasingly exposed to the chemicals in these products. If more companies disclose what is in their products, everyone who touches the product, from the architect / specifier to the person who is charged with removing the product at the end of its life will be able to make more informed decisions.

While there is a vulnerability that comes with being first, C/S believes there is a business case for offering the world the ingredient and product information they obtained through the Cradle to Cradle certification process. Their Cradle to Cradle Certified(CM) Entrance Flooring product Pedisystems PediTred® G4 has the distinction of being the first product to carry this historic label. The company plans to attach similarly designed labels to other entrance flooring products as well in the belief that C/S customers will value this information. Competitors may have new insight into C/S’ leading products’, but that is the price the company is willing to pay to lead the way forward towards a more transparent and healthy industry.

Leading also has it’s benefits. Blue Practice was able to secure some wonderfully in-depth and rich coverage for the company. No one could deserve it more. Please read on for the clips here:

Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com/1784776/a-nutrition-label-for-building-products
Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-mannle/new-ingredient-label-for-_b_995254.html
Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddwoody/2011/10/05/new-label-to-promote-green-building-materials/
Contract Magazine: http://www.contractdesign.com/contract/PerkinsWill-Constr-6192.shtml
Inhabitat: http://inhabitat.com/top-green-products-found-at-greenbuild-2011-in-toronto/
Green Source: http://greensource.construction.com/blogs/thegreensource.asp
GreenBiz: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2011/10/11/nutritional-label-building-materials-other-tools-transparency

Marco Krapels had just come from a flight from Zambia where he was laying the foundation for Empowered by Light’s first project: Solar:Zambia. The project will involve delivering 5,000 Lemnis Lighting produced Pharox Solar Kits- a solar-powered LED light/cell phone charge kit- to rural families who do not have access to electric power. Marco  described how the solar-powered LED lights are already making a difference for rural communities in Africa. Instead of spending 20% of their income on toxic kerosene lighting, which causes lung cancer, families are now able to gather around the clean light from the Pharox kits and study and read into the night.

Blue Practice is working to increase awareness about Empowered by Light in the days leading up to the Solar:Zambia mission. To read more, visit the Examiner piece and see a great recap of the night on The Bold Italic.

Photo by Drew Altizer

Photo by Drew Altizer

The lunch following featured several key players in the LEED certification process and ended with a reciting of USGBC’s mission: Buildings and communities will regenerate and sustain the health and vitality of all life within a generation.

I wish we had written that!

The theme here is really about smart design. Several of the products were designed by Yves Behar and his studio FuseProject, where they have a way of making human-friendly products that consider all sides of an object’s utility and aesthetics. And Cradle to Cradle thinking is the ultimate smarter way to design. Planning for the entire life-cycle of a product with ingredients that are healthy is the right thing to do but also challenging, we know.

This Earth Day we want to hand it to the change-makers that are out on the front lines elevating expectations about what consumer products can and should be. We love you BP clients!

Here is the Video: http://tinyurl.com/4xkfo56

And here is the Story: http://tinyurl.com/4xvdyst

Here at BP, we do technically have a printer but you might not know it as we rarely use it. When we design a print piece for a client we work with green printers to do the job right and we try to print all materials only when necessary. That’s why I love the new WWF file format – it’s a PDF that cannot be printed out. All you have to do is save a file with a .WWF extension and it becomes unprintable. Awesome branding for WWF too. Wish I had thought of it!

“SAVE AS WWF, SAVE A TREE “

www.saveaswwf.com

Replenish founder Jason Foster is a true visionary- while ironing shirts years ago (and you have to hand it to a guy that irons instead of dry cleans), Jason conceived of the concept of a reusable bottle with a twist-on concentrate pod that would update the design of the cleaning bottle that we have been using in the U.S. since 1943 when the founder of Windex debuted the classic plastic spray bottle. At the ironing board that day, Jason started down a path asking questions about this outdated bottle design’s inefficiency in light of the fact that the majority of what the classic Windex bottle contains is water.

Jason had the opportunity, as a young innovative entrepreneur, to start from scratch and imagine what a cleanser would and should be and the result is Replenish- the first eco-friendly, household cleaning product with a reusable bottle and replaceable concentrate pod. Jason worked hand in hand with Blue Practice client MBDC to develop the cleanser to be non-toxic to aquatic life, readily bio-degradable, and 98% plant-based. Replenish is also pH neutral, which means it’s non-sensitizing to the skin and contains only food grade dyes.

Beyond the environmentally-sound ingredients in the cleanser, the bottle design is at the core of the product. Consider the heft and beauty of the classic glass milk bottles that were refilled by milkmen. The bottle was designed to withstand repeated washings and refillings but also stood as a thing of beauty, almost vase-like in its permanence. Replenish’s bottle also has a classic silhouette that is timeless and still looks like a cleaner bottle with the twist of providing the complete integration of the cleanser pod into the bottle. The bottles sell for $7.99 at www.myreplenish.com and www.Alice.com while the pods go for $3.99 a pod with each pod being the equivalent of 4 bottles of regular cleanser. The cleanser pods come in four scents: Sun Lemon, Fresh Lavender, and Green Tea.

What the bottle/ pod system ultimately nets out to, however, is that Replenish is not shipping water around the country, just pods. Replenish is not asking consumers to recycle this bottle after one use, because they know most people won’t (of the 60 billion pounds of plastic discarded annually, only 7% is recycled and billions of pounds of plastic go into landfills.) Instead, Replenish is asking consumers to think long-term and sign on to a relationship where over time, a small decision like a change in cleaner can amount to saving money and waste. It’s also one less huge plastic bottle this working mom needs to lug home from the grocery store.

Early praise for Replenish includes:

Fast Company

Inhabitat

Core 77

GreenBiz

I was in awe this week at Lightfair 2010. With record attendance, it was the largest Lightfair ever. And some of the biggest news came from Blue Practice client Lemnis Lighting. Lemnis announced a whole suite of Pharox consumer LED bulbs aimed at making it simple for consumers to swap out all the most common inefficient incandescents and mercury-ladden CFLs in their homes, with retrofit bulbs that will burn for 25 years and use on average 85% less energy. Warner Philips is a born spokesman (being the great-grandson of the founder of lighting giant Philips Electronics, one might say lighting is in his blood) so it was a delight to see him connecting with lighting enthusiasts and journalists eager to discuss how Lemnis has been able to sell 2.5 Million LEDs in 2009, be named to Fast Company’s Top 10 Consumer Products list for 2010 and participate with the Clinton Climate Initiative, all while revolutionizing lighting products with much warmer colors of light (the Pharox Flame series) and one of the brightest bulbs on the market (the Pharox 500).

CNET’s Martin LaMonica,  Earth2Tech’s Katie Fehrenbacher and Greentech Media’s Michael Kanellos had some great things to say about the new Pharox bulbs.

Lemnis Lighting continues to inspire me with their commitment to educating consumers about LEDs and looking for creative ways to distribute their product around the globe to places in the world most in need of lighting. Check out their new website for Pharox products at http://www.thepharox.com and get on the pre-order list for a 500!

SPUR  (San Francisco Planning and Urban Research) is a San Francisco gem. I became involved with SPUR’s newly formed Young Urbanist group aimed at the under 40 age group several years ago while still at EDAW, a global planning firm because I was fascinated by the influence the group was able to have on local public policy. The Young Urbanist series of events are held after work in SPUR’s SOMA urbalism museum and always draw a great crowd of smart, inquisitive citizens.

Last week I had the privilege of inviting CEO Jason Kibbey of Blue Practice client PACT to participate in a Young Urbanist event focused on “doing good through economic activism” as part of a panel discussion.

Jaosn spoke about the consumer power that comes from knowing where the product you’re purchasing came from, who made it, and how it got to you. PACT underwear is produced within a 100-mile supply chain in Turkey, and the company has gotten attention for their innovative compostable packaging, so much so that much larger companies have expressed interest in duplicating their bags, information Jason is thrilled to share. Reducing waste in the production, packaging and shipping processes — no matter how innovative — is not treated like a competitive edge or industry secret by PACT.

In addition to Jason’s talk, Brent Schulkin from Carrotmob shared his company’s platform that allows businesses to bid against one another to pledge socially responsible reform within their operations, with the winner reaping the rewards of the wallet-wielding mob of shoppers. Daniel Kaufman talked about how the One Percent Foundation is bringing philanthropy back to the masses through what is, effectively, a very large, organized and democratic giving circle that optimizes the power of small donations in order to help organizations achieve bigger results.

The mix of organizations and approaches brought to light some new ways in which consumers can harness and collectivize our purchasing power to produce positive changes in the marketplace.

Shopping has always been a social experience, but as the concept of crowd-sourcing capitalism evolves, so too expands the social element of the experience. We can connect our values to our dollars and participate in something larger than ourselves by merely purchasing every day essentials. It’s not about buying more, it’s buying better.

Pete is up for long conversations about urban renewal and planning issues and enjoys art, music, biking, hiking, and photographing the rich urban landscape of San Francisco.

On February 17, the London Design Museum opened an exhibition showcasing the nominees for the Brit Insurance Designs Awards. These are “the Oscars of the design world,” honoring the most innovative and forward thinking designs from around the world, so you can understand how excited we are that PACT underwear is among the products on display. Last year’s winner, the unofficial Barack Obama poster campaign by Shepard Fairey, demonstrated the power that design can have at a grassroots level.  This year’s winner will be decided by a jury chaired by Antony Gormley and announced on March 16th.

Many who are aware of the PACT brand understand how diligent the company has been in creating the most sustainable profile possible. Underwear is shipped in zero-waste, compostable packaging, made of organic cotton and sewn in a vertically-integrated, socially-conscious factory.

What may go without saying most of the time, however, is just how truly eye catching and unique the design of each print is. With contributing artists including PACT partner and design guru Yves Behar, painter and former graffiti artist Sage Vaughn, and new prints by Tucker Nichols (the de Young Museum’s first roving artist-in-residence), the caliber of the artwork reflects the belief by the company founders that design can be a vehicle to change behavior.

Behar’s three inaugural prints for PACT will be on display at the museum until June 06, 2010.

For more information on the exhibit, go to http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/2010/brit-insurance-designs-of-the-year