'Green' easy for companies to tout but hard to guarantee

For Laura Wood Habr, it started with smoke.

The owner of Croc's 19th Street Bistro made the restaurant smoke-free last year after proposals for a statewide ban failed to pass in the General Assembly. Since then, Habr has looked for more ways to make Croc's environment healthier.

The restaurant installed low-flow toilets to conserve water, uses linen tablecloths instead of disposables, and sends take-out food home in biodegradable containers. Its menu emphasizes locally grown produce, seafood harvested with sustainable practices, and cocktails mixed with liquors made from organically grown grains. On Saturdays, Croc's hosts a local farmers market in its parking lot.

The changes have saved money and brought in business, Habr said. "For our consumers, they want to go to a property that is making at least an effort to do what they can to have the least impact on our environment."

Habr has turned into the green guru of the Virginia Beach hospitality industry. She's one of the more enthusiastic examples of business owners, both local and national, who have embraced practices to benefit the environment, their images and their bottom line. These days, businesses in almost every corporate sector - from oil producers to coffee chains - tout efforts to go green.

Consumers, however, usually have no way to tell whether or how much a company is actually helping the environment. Green claims remain largely unregulated. And there are many.

Around Earth Day in April, Wal-Mart officials hosted a tour of the Tidewater Drive store in Norfolk to emphasize new environmental initiatives. They pointed out displays of organic cotton clothing, skylights that cut electricity usage, and products with reduced packaging.

Retailers from The Heritage Store in Virginia Beach to national chain Kohl's purchase carbon offset credits that help fund renewable electricity projects such as wind and solar power systems. Ads burnishing the environmental efforts of giant power, railroad and paper companies appear on TV and grace the pages of newspapers and magazines.

"It's still a Wild West out there," said Ferris Kawar, vice president of sustainability for Greenopia, a publishing company and Web site that compiles city guides of green businesses. "That's what we're dealing with at this point, because there are so few measurable standards."

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Croc's was among the first restaurants to join Virginia Green, a marketing program that the state Department of Environmental Quality launched in fall 2006 to boost tourism. Businesses can apply for the program and certify themselves for the Virginia Green logo if they meet basic environment -protection criteria.

Hotels, for example, must recycle, eliminate or minimize use of Styrofoam; conserve energy and water by an unspecified amount; and offer optional linen service so they don't necessarily wash a guest's towels and sheets every day.

The Founders Inn and Spa in Virginia Beach took those and a few extra steps. To save energy, the inn installed motion sensors that darken meeting rooms when not in use. It buys coreless toilet paper that leaves no cardboard roll behind.

But no one checks to make sure those businesses are doing what they promise. The state relies on consumers to keep tabs on the places they visit and hold them accountable, said Tom Griffin, Virginia Green coordinator for the department's office of pollution prevention.

"None of this stuff is an exact science, the whole green thing," Griffin said. "It's a moving target. All it really is is a commitment to do better over time."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency aims to back up some of its green initiatives with science. It grants its Energy Star designation for appliances that use less electricity. Energy Star status also is granted to companies that show they are within the top 25 percent in low-energy consumption in their industries. It evaluates each industry separately, accounts for climate differences, monitors energy bills to determine usage, and verifies findings with an independent engineer.

"It's something that you can have confidence in, you can have faith in," said Maria Vargas, spokeswoman for the Energy Star program. "You can see real numbers."

The government has yet to determine such a precise way to assess the carbon offset programs that have grown popular among corporations looking to compensate for the greenhouse gases they create with their energy consumption. Some buy renewable energy credits; others plant trees.

"Offset is still something we're trying to figure out exactly," Vargas said. "It's a very tricky and very sophisticated way you have to measure this stuff."

Quantifiable or not, carbon offsets are what the American Water Resources Association wanted to create when it held a conference at The Founders Inn in late June. Attendees planted 115 trees and shrubs along part of the inn's pond to offset their carbon contribution and reduce storm water runoff into the pond, which seeps into the region's waterways.

For the three-day conference, the organizers estimated that the electricity needed for almost 300 attendees - to air-condition rooms, prepare and serve food, and illuminate meeting space - would produce 15 to 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide. That didn't include the emissions from each person's travel, said Al Todd, the conference committee's chairman and a watershed program leader for the U.S. Forest Service.

Research shows that 1 acre of forest can sequester between 0.5 and 2.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, Todd said. So, after the trees grow to an acre of canopy, it'll take 20 more years or so to offset the conference's energy consumption.

"We've got a lot of work to do, don't we?" he said.

Most claims of greenness today stem from efforts made in one or two areas, often related to energy use, said Nicole Darnall, an assistant professor who specializes in environmental policy and social sciences at George Mason University. Companies highlight their accomplishments without identifying other environmental imprints made in bringing a product to the marketplace, she said.

Organic produce at supermarkets, for instance, often comes from foreign countries. "We don't know how much energy was consumed in shipping that apple from Fiji to the United States," Darnall said. "Is that really better for the environment?"

After choosing The Founders Inn for its environmental policy, the water resources association asked the hotel to substitute water pitchers for the bottled water it otherwise would have served. And while the carbon-offsetting saplings stand at one end of the inn's pond, a fountain in the center churns continuously, sucking up electricity.

"We, in no way, would try to position ourselves as being the perfect green property just so we could take that and use it as a way to market ourselves," said Jean Vinson, a Founders Inn spokeswoman.

Some critics have charged companies with "greenwashing" - overstating environmental stewardship or making changes more for marketing than moral reasons. They also point out that many steps are taken primarily to save money.

Wal-Mart said it encouraged laundry detergent manufacturers to shrink container sizes, reducing packaging, but also allowing the retailer to fit more product in each delivery truck. That took trucks off the road, cutting emissions but also trimming the company's fuel costs.

Laundry detergent, however, poses more serious problems than packaging for consumers, environmentalist Kawar argued. Rather than concentrating on cost savings, Wal-Mart could have pressed manufacturers to diminish use of ingredients that don't biodegrade easily or release toxins into the water supply.

"I don't mind if 100 percent of it is profit motive," said Donald Welsh, director of the E PA's regional office in Philadelphia. "I don't need to know why you want to do something. I just need to measure its benefit for the public."

Even if the environmental benefits are arguable, the efforts of a big business such as Wal-Mart influences the whole supply chain, Welsh said. When the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team announced it would purchase renewable energy credits to offset the carbon generated by its ballpark, Welsh decided the dubious gains of the program mattered less than the public attention it directed to environmental issues.

"Overall, it's kind of a good problem to have," he said, "if somebody's scrambling to get green."

Carolyn Shapiro, (757) 446-2270, carolyn.shapiro@pilotonline.com