An Interview with Gwen Ruta

Posted: 15-Dec-2001; Updated: 16-Jan-2007

Gwen Ruta is Director of the Alliance for Environmental Innovation, a project of Environmental Defense and The Pew Charitable Trusts. The Alliance recently forged a partnership with the firm Norm Thompson Outfitters, which has agreed to switch to recycled paper in its four catalogs. Ruta has been instrumental in efforts to reduce corporate paper use and increase use of recycled paper.

Q: Why is it important to work with corporations on environmental issues?

A: Corporations are huge consumers of materials. They buy products that they use to make other products or to provide services. What we've discovered is, if we can change what companies buy and the way they buy it, they can have a lot of influence on things like forestry, on building a market for recycled paper and just generally reducing materials and inputs. Just as an individual consumer can have an impact on the environment, so can a corporation; a corporation can have that much more effect by changing their buying habits.

Q: What's in it for corporations?

A: We work on projects where, at worst, it's economically neutral -- companies are paying no more and no less for environmentally sound products than unsound ones. At best, they can save a lot of money. For example, in the project with UPS, we worked to help them with their overnight packaging. Part of what we were doing was improving the environmental characteristics of the overnight packaging, but also we were just looking for ways to reduce the total amount of packaging, and so UPS had to buy less packaging materials. It cost them less money.

Q: Tell me about the recent alliance with Norm Thompson Outfitters.

A: This is a project we've been working on for just about a year. We were looking to improve the paper practices of the catalog industry. Catalogs use an absolutely humongous amount of paper, about 3 million tons a year. And as you must know, people get inundated with catalogs. In the year 2000, 71 catalogs were produced for every man, woman and child in America. We thought if we could change the way companies (being such huge paper consumers) use paper and reap it, we could achieve significant environmental benefits.

We actually started this project because we did a survey of catalogers in 1998-99 where we discovered that virtually no recycled paper was being used by any mainstream catalogers -- which was an amazing statistic and totally unacceptable to us.

So we're working with Norm Thompson, who produces four different catalogs, and the biggest part of the project has been to incorporate recycled-content paper into their catalogs. We've shown that the recycled-content paper is as available as the virgin paper the firm had been using. You can get as much as you need, you can get it on the schedule you need, and you don't have to change the way you buy paper. We've shown that recycled-content paper prints just as well as the virgin paper that Norm Thompson had used -- we've done several different print runs without any problems. Paper suppliers can provide the recycled paper at the same price as the virgin paper so the paper had no impact on their bottom line.

Most importantly, what catalogers are about is selling products to customers, and we tested customers in blind tests to show that the paper had no impact whatsoever on orders -- what's called revenue per book -- total size and number that they get for each catalog they mail. And we did that in a very scientific way by sending out catalogs in different ways. We sent out a group of catalogs printed on virgin paper and another group of identical catalogs printed on recycled paper to demographically random groups of people. We showed that in terms of business there's no difference between recycled and virgin paper.

Q: The Alliance has done groundbreaking deals with McDonald's, Starbucks and others too.  How successful have these been and why?

A: They've been quite successful. The deal with McDonald's was definitely a first. It showed that you could work with a company and get real, significant and measurable results -- that's what it's all about. We showed initially with the McDonald's alliance that it wasn't about green-washing and setting new corporate policies that wouldn't get implemented. It was about real, on-the-ground change. And since then we've done projects with Starbucks and with UPS, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Norm Thompson, FedEx. A number of different companies are making a difference beyond the initial change, like the UPS project I just mentioned: We announced the results of the project and very soon thereafter FedEx made the very same kinds of changes to its packaging and so we were able to get two bangs for the buck.

Q: Do you see these kinds of partnerships as a wave of the future?

A: I think so, for a couple of different reasons: One is that corporations are more aware of their roles and responsibilities and are interested in being more responsive to the environment, both because of the cost and business benefits and because in general businesses are seeing themselves in a larger context as players on the world scene. The other reason is that we're in a rather uncertain regulatory period. How aggressive will the government be in the next few years in creating regulations, we don't know. And so we're looking to partner with companies to go beyond regulations. We're not working with companies to get them to come into compliance -- they need to be there already -- but these kinds of cooperative partnerships with companies are a way to keep moving forward, aside from government regulation.