Sustainability Opportunity Summit – Denver’s Green Scene

Monday morning early, very early, saw me on the road with a friend driving down to the Denver Marriott for the Sustainability Opportunity Summit. I had never been to the Summit before and I certainly hadn’t been on Hwy 36 that early in a long time. Unfortunately, driving away from Boulder you don’t get the inspiring view of the Flatirons to ease your morning wake-up. Instead,  you see  the big boxes looming large, then whizzing by:  Cosco, Whole Foods, Oracle, Wings and the Flatirons mall.

We arrived at the Marriott Denver City Center, a pretty nice hotel that for some reason has created a subterranean environment for its conference rooms that only a relation of Gollum could truly love. You took two sets of stairs to descend into the conference area, which was wide open and forked to a couple of sets of conference rooms, where the different talks were presented and lunch was served.

The introduction and welcome talk were given by Pete Dignan and Paul Jerde. The keynote given by Auden Schendler was entertaining and introduced some real successes and failures in implementing sustainability projects. Most of the speakers had books they were promoting, including the lunchtime speaker Hunter Lovins.

The meat of the conference – the breakout sessions – were actually quite good. Each one had a panel of experts speaking to a common theme; there was time for introduction and the rest was devoted to Q&A.

In the morning, I attended:
Going Deeper. Panelists from successful large corporations along the Front Range discussed their business cases for sustainability and what it has meant to each company.

and

Riding the Sustainability Life Cycle – Winning the Yellow Jersey. Tools Track 3: Life Cycle Tools – Their Variety and Use. Starting with an overview of tools available in the market today, this session will focus on the “tools of the trade” used by Life Cycle practitioners and deliver an understanding of their strengths and limitations, how they fit into the overall scope of supply chain management, and when to apply them.

and

BREAKOUT SESSION 4: Business + Sustainability – When 1+1 = 3 Strategy Track 4: Using a Systems Thinking Approach to Integrate Sustainability. More than simply looking at discrete processes, such as energy efficiency or water conservation, in this session you will hear first-hand stories from diverse industries about how they embed sustainability in the culture and context for doing good business. These companies are, in their own unique ways, a bit further along in the sustainability journey than most.

There was ample time to visit the Expo center, where there were some great companies showcasing their sustainability products and efforts. And it was refreshing to wander around a bit, taking a break from the “Grin and Grip” circuit if only for a few minutes.

What were the key ideas I learned:

• The sustainability group (at least in Denver/Boulder) is large enough for new ideas and people to feel welcome but small enough that you could quickly learn who people were.
• Implementing sustainable business practices is still relatively new, so there’s lots to learn and there’s no single path.
• Sustainability is still angling a bit for legitimacy and validity in the business world; we’re still using burning landscapes and drowning polar bears to advance the conversation. (This doesn’t work because if it did we probably wouldn’t be in this position. ).
• There’s less talk about us vs them and the single-minded focus on only using renewables; there was candid discussion around coal and nuclear power.
• Lots of talk about standards: GRI, ISOS, EPA, etc I like this. You need a baseline, no matter how flawed, to know where you are and where you are going.
• I understood the Sustainability and Summit parts of the title but not the Opportunity, which may be a character flaw on my part.

On the whole, I enjoyed the conference. It might be interesting to one day attend a conference where you take a current issue and allows the attendees to apply some of the methodologies and tools discussed. I’m not suggesting they’ll solve the problem but what an interesting concept to have a group like that look at transportation issues or clean water availability.