What is your PSP (no, not Sony)?

Last night I read an absolutely fascinating article in Fast Company Magazine about former YE (now 34) Adam Werbach entitled Working With The Enemy. Werbach, who was a leading environmentalist and president of the Sierra Club at the ripe old age of 23, has pulled a 180 and aligned himself with Walmart. His speech in 2004 "Is Environmentalism Dead" sent shockwaves through the community that supported him.

Werbach asked a simple question to the head of every major environmental agency: "Have you achieved your goals?" We all know that the answer is "no" and that the world today is probably in the worst shape it has ever been in.

I've never been one to call myself "green" at all - but over the past year I've been buying more and more into the philosophy that we have to do SOMETHING or else the world won't be around for our grand kids. The beauty in this disaster we've put ourselves in, is that we HAVE to rise to the occasion and that means that we're going to see great entrepreneurial efforts to try to get us there.

Back to Werbach. What has he done since being ostracized? He sided with the enemy - Walmart - and has implemented a project called PSP, or Personal Sustainability Project (read the case study).

What IS PSP? Werbach was impressed that Walmart is taking it's role in going green seriously (senior execs now have sustainability objectives built into their evaluations and bonuses). His company, Act Now, teamed with Walmart to try to get each employee to care about sustainability. Each employee is being encouraged to make one small change in their routine that supports sustainability - their own Personal Sustainability Practice. Like it or not, with 1.3 million employees spanning the country, Walmart employees have a huge influence on society. The strategy is to spread PSP practices (such as quitting smoking or walking to work) to the communities through these employees.

So far it's worked. Some accomplishments from their site:

Some noteworthy accomplishments of the Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club Associates are:

• lost more than 60 tons of weight;


• walked/biked/swam more than 380,000 miles


• created over 16,000 “Idea Groups” to support one another around Personal Sustainability; and


• quit or reduced smoking, with more than 10,000 Associates to date making a healthier change!


• Recycled more than 5 million pounds of aluminum, plastic, and paper

Associates across the U.S. are eager to take PSP to the next level, ready to “pass it on”, to their customers and community, and feel proud to work for an organization that is committed to sustainability.

Here's why I buy in: it's impossible to completely change people. But if everyone focuses on doing a few little things, the impact will be measurable. Instead of striving for perfection (impossible anyway), try to make real and quantifiable changes that will add up over time to make a substantial difference.

So what is my PSP? I thought of a few things I've been doing or have done in the last year that help:

• I now make a conscious effort to recycle anything that can be recycled (I threw everything out previously)
  
• I've reduced my bottle water consumption by about 6 per week (I'd say I was at 1/day before and now it's 1/week) by buying purchasing a reusable bottle from Think Outside the Bottle. Bottled water wastes plastic in production and energy in transportation, and on top of that the water is sometimes bottled in areas (FIJI is a perfect example) where the citizens don't even have drinking water!
• I programmed a system to automatically PDF and archive all invoices for Detailed Image. Previously we were printing paper copies of everything.
  

Don't get me wrong, I still do a lot of wasteful things. But I'm not a hypocrite. If I was operating at 100% un-sustainability before, I'm probably operating at 90% right now. Where would we be if everyone made a 10% improvement? People who criticize the simple changes and do nothing because "it won't matter" are the ones preventing us from making progress.