Social Entrepreneurship

A Sustainable Fast Food Industry?

Story by Karmen Cheung, contributing author for the PeoplePlanetProfitBlog.com.  This year McDonald’s became the first fast food chain to make it onto the EPA’s Top 50 Green Power Purchasers list. Over the last ten years, McDonald’s and other leaders of the fast food industry have made efforts to improve their image through incorporating socially and environmentally responsible strategies into their business models. While fast food restaurants may never be 100% sustainable, there are many ways in which fast food companies can reduce their footprints. Small steps have already been made over the past several years but true impact is still far beyond our reach.  Some ideas that fast food industry leaders have started exploring include:

Powering restaurants with green energy

Increased investment in wind or solar energy could have immense impact on the renewable industries as well as lead to energy savings for fast food chains.

Thirty percent of McDonald’s electricity use at company-owned restaurants comes from wind power and the company is buying 306 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of Green-e certified renewable energy certificates (RECs) annually.

Chipotle announced in 2009 that they would be installing solar panels at approximately 75 of its restaurants. When complete the installations are expected to produce 500 kilowatts of electricity collectively, and make Chipotle the largest direct producer of solar energy in the restaurant industry. Solar panels located on rooftops would not only help restaurants generate enough electricity to power the restaurant in the summer months but would also provide shade to decrease energy demand.

Recycling used cooking oil

The simple recycling of cooking oil to power diesel vehicles will reduce US spending on foreign oil by billions of dollars. Shake Shack, a rapidly growing chain of burger, hot dog and milk shake restaurant, already recycles all of their cooking oil into biofuel. Across the country, other restaurants, including McDonald’s are also slowly starting to adopt this practice.

Reduce impacts of packaging

The amount of packaging used in fast food restaurants has a large impact on the timber, paper and paper packaging industries. According to Dogwood Alliance, Starbucks and McDonald’s have been leaders in promoting sustainable packaging policies. Starbucks has been slowly working towards its goal of providing only reusable or recyclable cups by 2015 and McDonald’s has reduce the paper in its napkins by 21 percent and cut out 84 tons of paper in 2010 by reducing the size of bun tray liners. In October of this year, KFC has also issued a new sustainable packaging policy after two years of pressure from Dogwood Alliance.

LEED certify buildings

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is a voluntary, consensus-based, market-driven program that provides third party verification of green buildings. Participation in and international acceptance of LEED has grown rapidly over the past twenty years. Subways already has three LEED certified buildings and KFC opened up its first LEED certified restaurant in Indianapolis last year (this was also the first LEED certified retail building in the state). McDonald’s took the lead in green fast food restaurants recently with their participation in the LEED Volume program in which they pledged to build 25 LEED certified restaurants in the next three years.  Burger King has also laid an aggressive strategy to spend three billion dollars on remodeling more than half of its stores to become more energy efficient. The project, known as 20/20 stores are already being designed and rebuilt.

The initiatives mentioned in this article are not meant to be comprehensive in anyway but simply represents a small sampling of projects undertaken by fast food industry leaders.

About Karmen Cheung

I’m a New York City native currently attending Yale University focusing on Environmental Studies. I’m a big fan of large cities and good public transportation systems. Recently, I had the amazing opportunity to work with American Wind Association and while I’m not sure where life will take me next, I hope to work on issues of sustainability and corporate social responsibility in the near future. I believe in the power that businesses have and the role they need to play in efforts to create a more sustainable world.

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North American Power’s Mission to Millions Fundraising Program Rapidly Accelerates Power to Give in First Six Months

As Thousands of Customers Opt into Successful Customer Referral Model, Company is on Track to Give More Than $150,000 to Deserving Charities in 2012

SOUTH NORWALK, Conn., Nov. 29, 2011 /PRNewswire/ – North American Power, one of the nation’s fastest growing retail electricity suppliers, has accelerated charitable giving through its new philanthropic initiative Mission to Millions, which allows customers to direct company funds to deserving charities each month when they pay their electric bill. Within the program’s first six months, North American Power has seen exponential growth in charitable donations with thousands of new customers participating in the program each month and current donations reaching six times what they were when Mission to Millions launched in April 2011.

“Social responsibility and philanthropic giving will always be at the core of our mission,” says North American Power CEO, Kerry Breitbart. ”But the fact that we’re giving our customers the choice of where to give, and that they’re acting on this choice in record numbers, means the world to our non-profit partners.”

Mission to Millions has allowed North American Power to rapidly increase charitable giving as the company grows. Since March 2010, North American Power has placed more than $75,000 in the hands of worthy charities – with $40,000 of those donations resulting directly from Mission to Millions.

“It’s amazing what a dollar per month per customer means when you multiply it across our growing customer base,” says North American Power Chief Marketing Officer, Greg Breitbart. “Our goal is to donate $1,000,000 by the end of 2013.”

Mission to Millions is comprised of more than 20 local, national and international organizations including Dress For Success, Home For Our Troops, Malaria No More and Heifer International. For more information visit: http://napower.biz/102376/renewable-wind/video

ABOUT NORTH AMERICAN POWER

As one of the nation’s fastest-growing retail electricity suppliers, North American Power places community at the center of its mission; helping consumers make smarter energy choices, giving back to non-profits through fundraising programs including Mission to Millions, creating sustainable income opportunities and offering customers a variety of energy choices that positively impact the environment, including American Wind, a new, national 100% renewable energy product. For more information, visit http://napower.biz/102376/renewable-wind/video

About Justin Ragusa

I am an Eco-Entrepreneur, author, and webmaster of PeoplePlanetProfitBlog.com I love living green and try to incorporate all I do in this industry. Let me know if you have any questions, I’ll show you how to make a rewarding and profitable career in the Energy Industry… just contact me.

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North American Power Earns Spot on Forbes’ List of America’s Most Promising Companies

Prestigious Honor Proves Connecticut-Based Retail Electricity Supplier is Changing the Way Americans Think About Energy

SOUTH NORWALK, Conn., Nov. 30, 2011  /PRNewswire/ — North American Power (http://napower.com/goferenergy), one of the nation’s fastest-growing retail energy suppliers, was today named one of Forbes’ America’s Most Promising Companies, securing its spot as the number one ranked Connecticut-based company on this year’s list.

“It is an honor to have been recognized by an established and respected publication such as Forbes,” says Kerry Breitbart, CEO of North American Power. “Our company remains committed to providing consumers a choice to take advantage of affordable and more sustainable energy choices, while staying true to our core mission of social entrepreneurship, charitable giving and providing an opportunity to gain financial independence through our rapidly expanding customer referral program.”

Forbes’ list of America’s Most Promising Companies features 100 privately held up-and-comers with compelling business models, strong management teams, notable customers, strategic partners and precious investment capital.

“Sizing up younger, privately held companies is hard: Their fortunes can change very quickly and there’s a dearth of public data,” says Forbes Executive Editor Brett Nelson. “We took a more comprehensive approach to evaluate their health and potential.”

To sharpen its search, Forbes teamed up with CB Insights, a Manhattan-based data firm that tracks investment in high-growth private companies. With $650,000 in grants from the National Science Foundation, CB has developed complex software called Mosaic that mines myriad online sources (from press releases and social networks to job boards and court filings) to come up with one, algorithmically derived score that measures a private company’s health. Forbes married Mosaic’s data-crunching with old-fashioned reporting to assemble a list of rising stars with bright growth prospects. To view the complete the list, please visit http://www.forbes.com/ampc.

ABOUT NORTH AMERICAN POWER
As one of the nation’s fastest-growing retail electricity suppliers, North American Power places community at the center of its mission; helping consumers make smarter energy choices, giving back to non-profits through fundraising programs including Mission to Millions, creating sustainable income opportunities through its innovative customer referral program and offering customers a variety of energy choices that positively impact the environment, including American Wind, a new, national 100% renewable energy product. For more information, visit  http://napower.biz/102376/renewable-wind/video

About Justin Ragusa

I am an Eco-Entrepreneur, author, and webmaster of PeoplePlanetProfitBlog.com I love living green and try to incorporate all I do in this industry. Let me know if you have any questions, I’ll show you how to make a rewarding and profitable career in the Energy Industry… just contact me.

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John Doerr – “Green tech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century”

Doerr Gives U.S. a ‘C’ for Alternative-Energy

By Ari Levy – Aug 4, 2011
Source Bloomburg

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-03/john-doerr-gives-u-s-a-c-for-alternative-energy-development.html

John Doerr, head of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s alternative-energy practice, said he would give the U.S. a C grade for development of green technology, which trails innovation in Internet and biotechnology.

His grade would have been a D or F without $20 billion in loan guarantees for clean-energy projects under President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan and collaborative work between the government and private sector, Doerr said yesterday at an event in Palo Alto, California. He and other members of the White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness spoke on a panel about entrepreneurship.

“Thanks to this administration and the fundamental sciences, we’re in the game,” said Doerr, 60. “That stimulus was and is intended to be timely and temporary, and we have to develop in America the markets for this sustainable clean energy and the financial capability to cause it to grow.”

Kleiner Perkins, a venture firm based in Menlo Park, California, introduced the $500 million Green Growth Fund in 2008, two years after it started investing in alternative energy. Doerr’s clean-technology investments include Bloom Energy Corp., a fuel-cell company, and MiaSole Inc., a thin-film solar panel startup.

Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill provided tax breaks and other incentives to projects such as those focused on developing alternative sources of energy, modernizing the electricity grid and creating advanced batteries.

Still, the marketplace has been slow to emerge because of a lack of privately funded research and development, and the failure of the financial markets to support the industry, Doerr said in an interview after the event. The U.S. spends more money on potato chips than clean energy research and development, he said.
‘Huge Change’

There are some positive signs, Doerr said. Automakers last week agreed to double the fuel economy of the vehicles they sell in the U.S. to a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The proposal was negotiated with automakers including General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp.

“That is a huge change,” Doerr said.

Doerr was joined on stage yesterday by America Online Inc. co-founder Steve Case, Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Netflix Inc. Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings and the Obama administration’s technology chief, Aneesh Chopra. The event, at VMWare Inc.’s headquarters, was held to foster discussion among entrepreneurs about how the government and businesses can work together to encourage innovation and job creation.
Internet, Mobile, Social

For information technology innovation, including the Internet, mobile and social networking industries, the U.S. gets an A-plus, said Doerr, who was an early investor in Google Inc. (GOOG) and remains a board member at the Internet-search company. In biotechnology, the U.S. is falling behind other countries in drug and medical-testing development, though it still merits a B grade, he said.

Doerr, who joined Kleiner Perkins in 1980, also backed technology companies such as Intuit Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) He changed his focus and began investing in alternative energy in 2006.

“Green tech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century,” Doerr said in February 2006.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ari Levy in San Francisco at alevy5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net

About Justin Ragusa

I am an Eco-Entrepreneur, author, and webmaster of PeoplePlanetProfitBlog.com I love living green and try to incorporate all I do in this industry. Let me know if you have any questions, I’ll show you how to make a rewarding and profitable career in the Energy Industry… just contact me.

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