A ‘Price to Pay’ for Not Going Green, Conference Told

The U.S. is trading a “command and control” model of regulation on the environment for “market-based regulation” that “sets a price to pay for environmentally unfriendly behavior,” Esty said. Damage the environment, and in a few years, “you'll pay for every increment of harm you cause,” Esty warned his listeners, mostly executives of major studios’ home entertainment divisions. The old model let business leaders “wait for the EPA to send out the latest guidance,” said Esty, a former EPA official. Under the new approach, the environment “becomes more of a front-burner issue,” he said.

DVD marketers “can’t just do a good job on packaging” and legitimately claim to be green, Esty said. “You have to be comprehensive.” And home entertainment can’t be the only part of a studio conglomerate talking eco-friendliness, he said. “Watch your weakest link” in a big company, he warned. “I promise you, environmental groups will give you too little credit for all the good things you do and all the blame for the things that go wrong.”

Retailers and consumers “are now asking questions” to see which companies are environmentally conscious, Esty said. Wal-Mart efforts to cut the carbon footprint of products sold “has changed the behavior of everyone upstream in the supply chain,” he said. It has caused Wal-Mart suppliers to “change their game,” he said. “Wal-Mart is very serious about this and will do it in the Wal-Mart way, which is to drive down costs that they can extract from you.”

Esty’s data show that no company’s environmental policy can succeed “without top-level leadership” and its CEO’s vision, he said. Environmental efforts fail when a company “refuses to be strategic,” misreads the market, promises too much, or expects a “price premium” for going green. A company that does it right can land new business and build its brand with new customers, he said. Surveys show that younger adults with high disposable incomes are more attuned than others to green companies and products, he said. Strangely, a “gender gap” shows women more concerned than men by 10 to 15 percentage points, he said.

Thinking green is “here to stay,” Esty said. Packaged- media suppliers will adopt an “industrywide solution” for going green, he said. Industry’s “bigger risk is you can’t afford to have any bad actors,” he said. “There’s a strong argument for doing it together.” Industry innovations can drive economies of scale, lowering costs for all but leaving room for companies to differentiate themselves, he said.

A DVD accounts for about 1.1 pounds of carbon dioxide on average, said Larry Wilk, vice president of worldwide operations, Disney Home Entertainment, citing 2006 Fox research. That the industry ships hundreds of millions of DVDs a year means it has a profound effect on the environment, Wilk said. But Disney has cut its DVDs’ carbon footprint 5 percent since 2006, he said. The goal is a 25 percent drop by 2018, “and we're well on the way to doing that,” he said.

Industry faces a challenge getting “factual information that gives us accurate analysis” for cutting carbon emissions, Wilk said. Using an eco-friendlier plastic for a DVD package moots the environmental savings if the material “needs to be flown in from Taiwan,” he said. Disney’s “dream” is an industrywide database. Pooling resources in an industrywide research project is another goal to gauge what consumers expect of green packaging, he said.

Finding “a better solution” for green DVDs and packaging without hurting their utility isn’t something soft-drink makers face, Wilk said. Finish a Coke and you throw away or recycle the bottle, he said. Finish a DVD movie, and you put it back in the box.

Green Media Summit Notebook…

“'Eco-friendly’ is not just a catch-all phrase, but a new way of thinking out of the box,” DEG Chairman Bob Chapek, president of Disney’s Buena Vista Home Entertainment, said at the conference. Chapek and Amy Jo Smith, DEG executive director, hope to make the Green Media Summit an annual event, they said. DEG asked the 200 guests to carpool to the event at the Luxe Hotel in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles. Conference handouts and badges were on recycled paper and badge holders were made of EnvyPak, containing biodegradable polycarbonates. Giftbags distributed as the conference ended were recycled from advertising billboard sheets.

----

NBC Universal’s “Green is Universal” campaign has reached 200 million consumers with eco-friendly messaging since its November debut, said Lauren Zalaznick, chairwoman of NBC Universal’s Green Council. To show employees that “Green is Universal” wasn’t hype, NBC Universal installed an “action plan” in every division, he said. For example, January and February “eco-audits “kept 400 tons of discarded paper from NBC’s 30 Rock headquarters out of landfills, she said. “We're only at the beginning,” she said. Universal Studios Home Entertainment wants to make its DVD packaging “100 percent sustainable,” she said.

----

Paramount’s An Inconvenient Truth won DEG’s Green Entertainment Award as best “pioneering eco-friendly DVD,” the group said Wednesday. Universal’s Evan Almighty won for green bonus features, Disney’s Bambi for green educational tool, and Fox’s Futurama: Bender’s Big Score for carbon- neutral DVD release of the year. Disney’s Wilk was named DEG green ambassador of the year.