When The Customer Values Green

  More than just telling a story of turning what was once "trash" into a commodity, this story tells of how a company realized that having a lighter environmental impact was important to their customers!!!! From The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Palermo's finds a way to recycle less-than-perfect pizza crusts

Company supports efforts to make Menomonee Valley 'green'

By Thomas Content of the Journal Sentinel

Oct. 8, 2014

As workers on the rapid-fire pizza line at Palermo Villa Inc. are churning out nearly 1 million frozen pizzas a day, every perfectly round crust makes it onto the line.
But flawed pies — the ones that are cracked, somehow missed a key ingredient, or don't quite make it into the coveted circle shape — won't move down the line to get doused with sauce.
So they end up on the floor. From there, they used to be tossed in the trash.
Instead of that, workers at Palermo's now toss the faulty crusts into a brown bin that ends up keeping something edible out of the landfill.
Every year, Palermo's is sending 900 tons of pizza crusts to a waste processor, where they are ground up and then distributed as animal feed for livestock.
Feeding animals instead of filling a landfill is among the achievements that made Palermo's the Distinguished Performer in the Environment category this year on the Deloitte Wisconsin 75 list of closely held companies.
Palermo's moved its headquarters to the Menomonee Valley in 2006, deciding to open in what had been a brownfield. Since then it has been working in concert with Menomonee Valley Partners in efforts to "green" the valley, said Laurie Fallucca, Palermo's chief creative officer. That includes support for Three Bridges Park and the Urban Ecology Center's valley campus, as well as work by company employees who help as part of Palermo's stewardship crew.
The Palermo's "stew crew" heads out, usually at midday on Fridays, to help keep the Hank Aaron State Trail tidy and to prevent invasive plants from overtaking native plantings. Palermo's is one of about a dozen companies or neighborhood groups with stewardship crews.
"It's neat to be able to get out and walk the trail in the middle of the day," said Jessica Rautmann, a member of the crew. "People riding bikes will stop and thank us for picking up garbage, so it's a really good feeling."
Sometimes Palermo's is paying extra for its green initiatives. The company has been using cardboard from recycled pulp, with the Sustainable Forestry Initiative logo on it, for both its pizza boxes and the "master cases" that deliver a dozen pizzas at a time to the supermarket.
In all, that's more than 15 million pounds of cardboard a year. Going with the greener packaging option costs the company more, Fallucca said, and Palermo's did marketing surveys to gauge whether consumers really cared about whether the Sustainable Forestry logo was on the package.
"A lot of companies are moving to that. All of that is a lot more expensive than the other packaging, but since we've moved in here we've always done that," Fallucca said.
"If we didn't have to do this, it would cost us less," she said. "We've definitely done research. We're always like, 'Do people really care?' The answer is: 'Yes, they do.'"
Other environmental work at the company included the installation of energy-saving occupancy-sensor lighting in the factory and converting to LED lighting, as well as recycling tons of cardboard, plastic and plastic drums.
The company also donates dozens of large plastic food barrels that are reused as rain barrels in neighborhood gardens in Milwaukee.
Though Palermo's has had labor challenges in recent years, the company has carved out a "slice" for stewardship in its pizza-shaped corporate mission statement.
The company employs 645 people and is finding more and more that new hires want their company to be a good citizen, she said.
"We have a large group of millennials working here. They grew up on 'reduce, reuse, recycle,' so for them it's been a big part of how they grew up," she said.

http://www.jsonline.com/business/palermos-finds-a-way-to-recycle-less-than-perfect-pizza-crusts-b99361422z1-277892451.html

Old Dogs Learn New Tricks

Hmmm........ charging for shopping bags changes behavior..... from The Washington Post -

The surprising reason why those 5 cent charges for plastic bags actually work

By Chris Mooney November 13, 2014

If you live in Washington, you know the drill: After bagging your groceries, the checkout machine asks you how many bags you used. And if you used plastic or disposable bags (rather than bags you brought on your own), you have to pay 5 cents per bag. The District passed a law requiring as much in 2009 -- a policy that states like New Jersey and New York are also considering, and that has been adopted around the world from Ireland and Scotland to South Africa.
Some localities have gone farther still -- California and Hawaii have effectively banned plastic bags outright -- but recent research suggests that charges or fees can also be effective (and have the added benefit of being less coercive). Moreover, it suggests that they work, at least in part, through a surprising mechanism. It's not just the relatively minor added cost, on its own, that impels people to stop using plastic bags and to instead bring their own bags with them to the store. Rather, it's the way this small change disrupts habitual behaviors and helps people draw a tighter linkage between the environmental awareness that they already possess, and actions in the world that actually advance that consciousness and their values.
Such is the upshot of a new study on plastic bag charges published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology by a team of Argentinian researchers, led by psychologist Adriana Jakovcevic of Buenos Aires University. Charging a relatively small amount for bags "produces changes in behavior," says Jakovcevic, "and these changes are not only because of the economic value of the incentive -- there are also some other processes at play that involve environmental concerns."
As the researchers note, Buenos Aires provides a perfect opportunity to study the effects of plastic bag charges because in 2012, the vast city's Environmental Protection Agency put in place bag restrictions that in turn led the leading supermarket chain association to institute a bag charge (the equivalent of 2.5 U.S. cents for bags of medium size and 4 cents for large bags) Oct. 9, 2012. For smaller supermarket associations, meanwhile, the same charge went into effect roughly two months later on Dec. 10, 2012. But for Gran Buenos Aires, the larger area that surrounds the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA), there was no change instituted at all.
This is, the researchers note, a "natural experiment": You have three groups of supermarket shoppers, two of which experienced new bag charges at different times, and one of which did not experience plastic bag charges at all. So the researchers conducted several field studies, observing shoppers leaving supermarkets in low-to-middle income areas in the three different regions at different times -- before any policies went into place, after the first change, and after the second change.
The result was that sure enough, the policies greatly increased the percentage of shoppers who were observed to be carrying their own bag. Here's a figure from their study, showing the effects for the first set of supermarkets to institute the charge (CABA1), the second set (CABA2), and for supermarkets in Gran Buenos Aires that never saw a bag charge instituted (GBA). Consumers were observed at four times: before any policies took place (Time 1), just after the first policy affected CABA1 (Time 2), four weeks after the policy change (Time 3), and then shortly after the second policy affected CABA2 (Time 4):

From Adriana Jakovcevic et al, "Charges for plastic bags: Motivational and behavioral effects," Journal of Environmental Psychology, 40 (2014), 372-380.

Clearly, the bag fees worked to dramatically increase the habit of people carrying their own bags. But importantly, in a second study that involved directly interviewing consumers who were observed to leave supermarkets carrying either plastic bags or their own bags, the researchers tried to get at why they had begun to adopt this new behavior, rather than paying the relatively small bag charges that had been instituted.
First, it turned out that a surprising number of people didn't like the bag charge policy, but started carrying their own bags anyway. According to Jakovcevic, it is likely that the small economic cost is the best way of explaining the behavior of these individuals. Past research, however, has called into question whether a purely economic effect like this is a lasting one, with sustained influence on behavior.
But there was another group of Argentinian shoppers -- those who supported the charge and carried their own bags for reasons of environmental concern. They cared much less about economics and much more about green motives. "The people who supported the policy most, they also say they do it for environmental reasons," says Jakovcevic, "and this is a stronger finding because it was an open question, the people could say anything that comes into their mind, and most of them say it was to protect the environment." For these shoppers, says Jakovcevic, the policy provided an opportunity to "rethink why they are using plastic bags or their own bags, and if they care about the environment, this will push them to change their behavior and change it longer over time."
Thus, the paper concludes that the bag charge might have worked "both by the activation of pre-existent pro-environmental attitudes and by a direct effect of the charge on behavior." In addition, it suggests that the new policy worked in another way as well -- by being disruptive of the status quo and changing people's default options and choices. "After the introduction of the plastic bag charge, customers had to explicitly approve or request to obtain a bag and pay for it," notes the study. They couldn't just get one without thinking about it.
So just maybe, a little 5 cent charge can indeed help the environment. You don't have to confiscate all the plastic bags in the world to save the environment (enraging anyone from industry to the Tea Party in the process). You can just give people the slightest push, and let them fix the problem themselves.

Chris Mooney reports on science and the environment.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/13/the-surprising-reason-why-those-5-cent-charges-for-plastic-bags-actually-work/?tid=hpModule_79c38dfc-8691-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394&hpid=z17