Over the past ten years, e-commerce has transformed the way most of us get our
stuff. You can see the proof in the empty storefronts in major cities and
small towns, or in the increased time we spend glued to our computers and mobile
phones — or perhaps most clearly these days, in the stacks of
boxes
sitting outside millions of US families’ homes.
Without a doubt, these boxes represent a major victory for convenience, one of
the three values in Amazon’s “Holy Trinity” of retail (the other two are
price and assortment). But they are also a perilous reminder that most
companies in the race for faster shipping haven’t begun to incorporate a value
that ultimately has much higher stakes — our planet.
Planet Earth is on fire, as Bill Nye so passionately shared,
recently.
The US generates close to 500 billion pounds of garbage each year, which is
trucked to one of 10,000 landfills across the country. On a global scale, the
World Wildlife Fund reports that since the 1970s, several factors —
including food product and habitat loss — have contributed to depleting 30
percent of global resources and nearly 60 percent of animal populations.
At my e-commerce company, Thrive Market, where we
sell healthy and sustainable products at 25-50 percent off retail, we ship more
than 100,000 products to members all over the country every day. Given these
numbers, you’d think we’d be right there with Amazon and other e-comm behemoths
that are part of the problem. But there is a key difference ...
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As a social enterprise, we made the decision on day one to look at our
operations through two lenses: what’s best for our customers and what’s right
for the planet.
Over the last five years, we’ve built programs to fully neutralize our carbon
footprint from shipping, reduce our net waste to
zero
across our fulfillment centers, and remove 90 percent of virgin plastic from our
packaging. Along the way, we’ve learned a lot — and not always lessons you might
expect.
The first has been how much our customers value our values. When we first
started buying offsets to neutralize our carbon footprint, it wasn’t something
we talked about much. We did it because it was the right thing and because when
we did the research, we found out it was, actually, surprisingly inexpensive.
Yet when we did mention it
publicly
— on social media, on our blog, in emails — we discovered that members engaged
like crazy. Over time, that engagement has only increased, and we’ve seen the
same for our other environmental initiatives. Today, content and communications
about these projects are consistently some of our most effective pieces of brand
marketing
The second thing we’ve learned is that environmental stewardship is deeply
important to our employees. As a business, your customers see some of what you
do, but your employees see all of it — the good, the bad and the ugly. Anyone
who has been inside an e-commerce fulfillment center can tell you there are few
things uglier than the stacks of discarded cardboard and plastic (and that’s
just the packaging used to ship products into the warehouse) piling up on a
loading dock until it’s taken off to a landfill.
When we began the 16-month project to go zero-waste in our largest fulfillment
center in Batesville, Indiana in mid-2016, we set out a plan that required
more than 25 capital improvement projects. Everyone one of these represented
extra work for our Batesville Thrivers on top of the day-to-day to run the
building. Again, we moved forward because it was the right thing to do, but we
hardly expected it to be popular.
We couldn’t have been more wrong. The “Journey to Zero,” as it became known,
ended up being a rallying call for the entire building — and later, the entire
company — because it was a challenge whose impact people could see every day.
Since launch, we’ve offset more than 7,000 tons of carbon — 1,300 tons in energy
usage; and prevented more than 600 tons of paper, plastic, food and other waste
from being dumped into landfills.
The momentum from the initiative, in turn, has extended to work being done in
other areas, as well. To this day, being the first e-commerce company at scale
to go zero waste is among the greatest sources of pride for all Thrivers,
especially in the fulfillment centers.
The last thing we’ve learned, which is the thing that many will probably find
most surprising, is that our environmental initiatives have actually been
demonstrably profitable for us as a business. Sometimes, this has been because
of “externalities” like those described above — engagement and word of mouth
from our customers, retention and discretionary effort from our employees, etc.
But often, we’ve been able to quantify a direct financial impact, as well. When
we went zero waste, for example, we tracked the payback period on our
investments and they averaged under 18 months — an enviable ROI for any
operational project. One of the things we are most excited about going forward
is to “open source” these ROI-positive projects for other companies that might
currently assume sustainable solutions simply aren’t financially viable.
Ultimately, it’s this zero-sum attitude that is the greatest barrier to more
e-commerce companies investing in sustainability. Innovative and effective
solutions are out there and they are getting better — and cheaper — at an
accelerating pace. That pace would be even faster if more companies would begin
thinking beyond the assumed dichotomy of business goals or environmental
stewardship.
Customers, employees and even the hard financial math is already testifying to
the power of swapping this or for an and. It’s time for more e-commerce
companies to do the same.
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Nick Green is co-founder and CEO of Thrive Market.
Published Jun 18, 2019 8am EDT / 5am PDT / 1pm BST / 2pm CEST