I have had the fortunate pleasure to work with many interesting clients on branding and corporate communications projects. In the last few years, naturally, many of these companies have been creating so-called "Sustainability Reports." When this was a hot and new topic, it made sense to produce something special, a piece outside the realm of more typical corporate marketing materials. In fact, this approach reflected what many companies were doing, which was tacking-on green initiatives to their regular course of business operations. However, there are some companies for whom "sustainability" is not an initiative, but simply a way of doing business.
Tandus, a carpet manufacturer, is one of those companies, and I have had the good fortune to work with them. When I first visited their offices in Georgia, it became clear that environmental awareness was a part of everything they did: not only had they developed a complete, closed-loop process for recycling carpet, but people at every level of the organization were making interesting, innovative, and postive changes to reduce, reuse, recycle, and in general, think differently about resources. Sustainability was so much a part of their corporate culture that they didn't think of it as some kind of distinct discipline; in fact, they'd been doing great things for so long, that others in their industry who were doing less had grabbed the sustainability spotlight.
However, instead of doing the typical "sustainability report", we (I worked with the New York office of Gensler on this project) decided to do a corporate report that showed all the ways the company was turning conventional wisdom on its head -- closed loop recycling and other efforts were just one more demonstration of the company's innovative approach to business. Sustainability is part and parcel of their mission and their brand. We supported the larger corporate piece with a smaller brochure that focused on education about various sustainability topics relevant to their industry.
I bring up this project as an object lesson in how designers and others working in corporate communications should begin to think about how they're developing green messaging for their clients. It's no longer good enough for companies to say they recycle and buy carbon offsets -- that stuff should be a given, like producing decent products. Consumers are looking for companies that are making SYSTEMATIC change to the way they operate. Our communications program should therefore also reflect systematic change.
Another interesting Tandus initiative that I didn't work on comes from Tricycle, a "sustainable design company" in Chattanooga, TN. They helped Tandus do away with the resource-intensive carpet sample books used throughout the industry. They created a program called Blink that combines a website and sample books that use printed swatches instead of carpet samples to assist designers in interior planning. You can read the whole story and get more ideas on sustainable design innovation in the book SustainAble.
