The paperless office

Very funny cover on The Economist last  week  showing  Steve Jobs and his new I-Pad under the header “The Book of Jobs”.

Finally  Apple launched its long  expected I-Pad and the answer or is it more an alternative to the growing  number of netbooks. Intrigued and fond of new gadgets, I certainly  plan on buying  one as soon as its 3G version will be launched. I believe it  is a first  great  step  towards a paperless office.

Does this mean that  we have not  thought  about this before? Of course we did, we have been  using recycled paper for as long I have been with  Ecover and I use an Irex 1000S e-book reader for about 18 months now and it  has saved already  a massive amount of paper from  my  desk. I am not really  using  it  as an e-book reader but  I load lots of reports and documents on it,  which  would otherwise have been  printed and would have ended on top of the multiple piles of paper that  still (unfortunately) decorate my desk.

So the launch of the I-pad and its possible positive contribution to the protection of our forests  is the ideal opportunity to  revisit how much  paper we actually  use in our offices.

A quick research  on the internet gives the following results:

• About 300 Million Metric Ton paper is produced and consumed per year.
• The industry uses 42% of recycled fibres and 42% of virgin pulp, the rest being other pulp 1% and non-fibrous materials, 15% .
• About 17% of the 3.3 billion cubic meters of wood consumed worldwide each year is for papermaking, and much of this wood is in the form of wood chips and other residue left behind from sawmill operations.
• 1 ton of uncoated virgin (non-recycled) printing and office paper uses 24 trees
• 1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (and those add up quickly!), or 8.333 sheets equal an entire tree.   

So 300 million reasons to  go  for recycled paper and electronic documents. Obviously  someone will argue that all those electronics will create their own environmental  hazards and that  is also  true. At least it puts us to thinking  about our consuming habits and that is everyone’s responsibility.

A farewell tribute to Mr. Jørgen Philip-Sørensen CBE

Mr. Jørgen Philip-Sørensen CBE

It is with  great sadness  that we learned  that the Chairman and Owner of Ecover, Mr. Jørgen Philip-Sørensen CBE passed away on Monday January 18^th, in Switzerland. He died at the age of 71 after succumbing to a long  battle with  illness.

Our thoughts and sincere sympathy lie with his family, his wife, children and grandchildren.

 In 1992,  Mr. Philip-Sørensen became owner of Ecover and it is under his ownership that the company has risen to its highest successes. Jørgen Philip-Sørensen acquired Ecover in 1992 and opened  the first ecological factory in October of that year. As Chairman, he strongly supported the further development of  the company as an example of sustainability in the soap and detergent industry.

In 2007,  he opened our second ecological factory near Boulogne-sur-Mer in France.  All of  us who had the privilege of working with  him were touched by  his life in different ways. He was an endless source of inspiration and motivation.

He will be sadly  missed and our thoughts are with his family  during  this difficult time.

Mick Bremans

Managing Director

Ecover

For Media enquiries:

Effi Vandevoorde, Int. Comm.  Manager

vandevoorde.effi@ecover.com

Phone: +32 (0)3 312 86 18

Jørgen Philip-Sørensen was Chairman and Chief Executive of Group 4 Securitas (International) BV between 1964 and 2000, and was then chairman of the board of Group 4 Falck A/S from 2000 until the merger with Securicor in 2004.

Jørgen Philip-Sørensen chaired the board of Group 4 Securicor (now G4S) until his retirement in June 2006, when he became President Emeritus.  Philip died at the age of 71 in Switzerland on 18 January 2010.

He held a number of directorships for commercial and charitable entities, including Ecover International BV, Skagen Food A/S, Danish Yacht A/S, Skagen Harbor, Dormy House Hotel, Sorven Holdings Limited, Cotswold Conference Centre Limited and the Foundation for Liver Research.

Seven Outfits to Start Somewhere

Last week, I was introduced to an impressive young lady who just finished a weeklong internship working the 6:30am shift in our factory. Her name Astrid Anquetil. And she’s not your ordinary 16-year old teenager. On the contrary, she is on a 2 year mission to reduce her own ecological footprint and doing so hopes to earn her nickname ‘Low Impact Girl’. She explained that she, being fond of animals, got the idea from Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” when she saw a polar bear drown out of exhaustion by lack of ice. She added that while she’ll try to reduce her impact on the environment she would love to get other young people to join her in looking for creative ways to achieve her goal and do the same.

As we continued to talk, I started to wonder how does a 16-year old approach a project like this? Besides spending a week interning at Ecover, I mean. Her approach, she explains, is that if you want to make a difference, you have to start somewhere. (Fair enough. That’s been the motto here for years.) So, she decided to start with her own wardrobe. In the next 2 years she will wear nothing but 7 outfits taken from previous collections by Belgian fashion designers. Nice quality clothing made and worn in a sustainable way. That way nothing new needs to be manufactured and she’ll put an end to disposing of clothes that last just one season. And by doing something different than thrift store shopping or buying organic, she hopes to make a big statement, she says. She e-mailed all the top Belgian designers asking for their support until she managed to assemble seven outfits. And it worked.  She even got a book bag that Delvaux donated for the project… a nice vintage bag for the future she explains on her web site. And by the way, did I mention that she found a sponsor who will host her website and blog during the next 2 years? Check it out at www.lowimpactgirl.be. It’s available in English.

Now, all I have to do next is ask her to convince my own daughter to start somewhere as well, preferably with seven outfits.

Coming Clean

There was an interesting article in the New York Times on Thursday, September 17. Under the title "Fight grows over Labeling  on Cleaning Products", Leslie Wayne reports on the fight  that  is going  on between the giants in our industry and consumer groups, regarding the disclosure of all ingredients in washing  and cleaning  products.

Consumer groups demand manufacturers to  disclose all ingredients on the product labels. Manufacturers, on the other hand refuse to  give all details on their formulations, in order not  to  make life too  easy  for competitors and copiers. For an industry that  prides itself on the fact  that  it  understands and fulfills all consumer needs, this consumer need has been  shuffled under the carpet  for far  too long.

Ok, an Ecover label  discloses all ingredients but  in a language that  no  consumer can easily understand but go  to  our website, look up any product and you  will find, on the same page, a full listing of the ingredient names used in this product. It is part of European legislation that  manufacturers must  disclose all ingredients on the web. However, I invite you  to  try  to  look up the ingredients on some other manufacturer's website and you  will see that  it  sometimes becomes a real challenge to  find the information you  are looking for.

The argument that  full disclosure would make life too simple for the competition does not  stand. There are labs in many  places that  can analyse products and return far more detailed description than a simple list  would ever give you.  I also  do not  believe that  consumers will become alchemists  and start mixing their own products and I would also strongly discourage this.

Concerns of consumer groups that  sometimes small additions and additives, which  legally  do not  have to  be disclosed, can be harmful is absolutely  justified. I would therefore strongly support a similar disclosure discipline as used in the Cosmetic industry. The INCI code is a list  of all ingredients used in a product ranked by  the importance of their content.

On the other hand consumer groups should also watch over the information that  is being spread on certain raw materials and substances. Totally  unjustified criticism of certain substances like LAS, has created sometimes hysterical  reactions that  were based on wrong (in this case we better say false) information.

But  that  may  be a subject  for another post.

For the moment, Let Us Come (and stay) Clean.

Some media highlights

As CEO of Ecover for more than 15 years, addressing the media about what we do as a company feels like second nature to me now… even when questions tend to get tricky, like when discussing the EU ecolabel or animal testing. And sometimes I’ll get misrepresented or I’ll say something that is taken out of it original context and poured into a entirely new one. I’ve seen it happen. It also seemed to be much more simple back in the day when there was just radio, tv and the written press. Now, you can google my name on any random day and keep your fingers crossed to see what the search results come up with.

So whether I’m standing in front of the camera or sitting across the table with every last word being tape recorded, my view is to keep it simple, open and honest. I avoid responses that are open to interpretation and always try to get my point across. Over the last few weeks and months, I saw some pretty good coverage come in, interviews, articles, videos ... all reflecting the level of quality that our brand delivers. I picked out some highlights to share below:

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=110251

http://www.forumforthefuture.org/greenfutures/articles/The_Knowledge_73

http://www.green.tv/greentalk_ecover

http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/analysis/2248217/ecover-boss-reflects-move

http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2248199/ecover-shuns-eu-eco-label