How to Green Your Green Business (A Sequel)

What will drive the change?

A few years ago I wrote an article asking how ‘green’ your green industry business
was. This is a follow up to that article.

I remember reading an interview of a famous architect who stated that the more
limitations that were placed on him, easier it was to design a beautiful building. To
prove this, he gave half his class a project to design a church to seat 200 people, on
a local mountain side, using only wood and to hold the cost under $200,000. The
other half of the class was to design a church, but they could build it any size,
anywhere, using any materials, and money was no object. The two teams had a 2
month limit.

As you might imagine, at the end of the 2 months, the second group was still trying
to narrow down the choices, while the first had completed the project designing a
beautiful and practical structure. Many of the changes in our lives and businesses
have followed the same path. The tree with a limited landing zone, a crane, one
climber and an XL-2 Homelite will pretty well set the stage for how the removal will
be accomplished.

How long has it been since you saw a car going down the street followed by a big,
blue cloud of smoke. In my days at Southern Illinois (60’s), this was known as a
mosquito fogger. Why the change? Do they no longer have oil in the engine to
burn? Are all vehicles perfectly maintained and tuned? Did the car makers all
suddenly decide that this looked bad and they should correct it? No to all. The
state of California mandated that emissions be reduced to a specific level by 1970

First the automakers said it could not be done that quickly, then they said it would
cost too much and finally they gave up on changing the law and had the engineers
solve the problem. The solution was to add a catalytic converter to the tail end of
the system to absorb the pollutants before they exited the tailpipe. A side effect
was to create sufficient heat to completely burn the oil smoke in your clunker,
making it easier to sell to the next sucker.

This was not the only way to handle the problem. As soon as the mandate was
issued, Honda, rather than lobby congress, told their engineers to look at their cars
and see how they could meet the standards by 1970. Their solution was the
Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion (CVCC) engine. By starting the
combustion in a pre-burn chamber ahead of the regular cylinder, pollutants were
burned in the engine, eliminating them from the exhaust, adding power, and
increasing fuel mileage to industry leading levels. When the oil crisis of 1973 led to
long lines at gas pumps, who had a new, revolutionary, efficient car ready to hit the
market and who had an old dog with an extra can tied to its tail?
Okay, how does this apply to your business? You have benefited from this “green”
mandate by not pulling up to your customers house in a 2 year old mosquito fogger,
no matter how bad the engine is running. Many of our vehicles no longer use the
old catalytic converter which got hot enough to set pastures on fire if you parked
with your sweetie too long (I am told). Newer mandates on air quality are the
driving force behind the new, more efficient 4 stroke engines on power boats,
snowmobiles, lawn mowers, trimmers, chainsaws and other equipment. The advent
of better batteries and motors is leading to many of these things going cordless
electric in the near future. My Prius took me on a 4200 mile trip to climb a
redwood on 85 gallons of gas, averaging 50+ mpg in the mountains and 46 mpg on
the prairie.

I am sure you have all heard of the ANSI Z-133 standards. Which were adopted
first, the “shoulds” or the “shalls”? Why do we notice the absence of PPE on job
sites? Why has most of the industry adopted it? Could it be that through OSHA the
mandate has some teeth? Was the change good or was it just too costly? Think
carefully before you answer this about how your insurance costs might change with
that 2” stub coming from 60’ toward your groundie.

Are you living the good life, with more money than time to spend it? I am betting
that a couple of you are, but probably more are not. Who is making the money? Is
it the low-baller, who is working 60 hours a week, with cheap, unskilled help and old
equipment held together with baling wire and duct tape? Is it the fellow, whose
good equipment is parked in front of the professional’s house caring for his well
manicured landscape, selling phc advice and information as well as providing a little
care from a well trained staff.

Competition is the driving force in the greening process. The business man must
learn from the lion, who knows that he must be able to outrun the slowest gazelle or
he will starve, and the gazelle who must outrun the fastest lion if he is to survive.
At sunup they had both better be running. If you are able to meet the new
standards before your competition, you will survive and prosper. If you put all your
energies into fighting the changes, you will not only be tired, but in at least second
place. The state of the art in tree care has changed a lot since I started in 1967.
Those who are still praising the control of insects formerly achieved with DDT and
Lead Arsenate are back in the dust.

In the early 80’s, a group of kids looked at the new computers and said why don’t
we write programs that will turn this into a neat game, rather than a boring number
cruncher. We old timers knew that computers were serious research tools and
would not take to entertaining the masses without a fight, but they didn’t. Guess
who is rich now!!

We may have to change our business drastically in the future, particularly if we

have not been updating to the newest and best ideas on a regular basis. Also the
next big mandate or invention may be in the making now. The sooner we hear
about it the better. GE Transportation of Erie, PA is an example of a company
taking the bull by the horns. They asked their engineers to solve a problem rather
than their lobbyists. Faced with the Tier II standards for emissions per loaded mile
for locomotives, their engineers bypassed their highly successful 16 cylinder diesel
and designed a new stronger more powerful 12 cylinder, which, besides being
cleaner burning, is also 5% more fuel efficient than its predecessor, saving an
average of 300,000 gallons of fuel over the life of the engine. China has ordered
300 at a cool $4 million per locomotive. The biggest energy savings is that which
you do not use in the first place. GE engineers are now working with regulators on
developing both, the Tier III and IV standards, as well as the engines to exceed
them.

The future belongs to the country, industry, business or individual who sees the
future first and directs their energy toward creation of the ideas, equipment and
techniques to meet the needs of that future. It is not the person who is able to
follow trends, but even this person is ahead of the one who does not change. Will
the United States retool and rethink for the future before the Chinese? Which will
be ready with the cars, tools and technologies first? Even if the threat of global
warming is found to be greatly exaggerated, the principles of cleaner, more efficient
and fairly priced alternatives will not go away. If we are on the right track with
wind, nuclear, geothermal, fuel cell and other technologies, who will be the first to
market and adopt them on a global scale?

The United States is one of the few countries governed by lawyers rather than
scientists and engineers. It shows in the decision making process, when things are
discussed to death and drowned in special amendments, rather than just
recognizing the problem and solving it. How many hours of discussion are required
in your business to formulate a plan, delegate authority, assemble equipment and
personnel and implement the plan? What concessions have to be made to the
groundie to get him to work with the climber and use a rake selected by
management? What sort of incentives are the clients given to allow you to do their
work? Shouldn’t government work more like real life?

What is going to be the driving force in the green industry? I do not look for the
government to mandate pruning standards, beyond the safety ones that OSHA now
addresses. Organizations such as ISA and TCIA are developing suggested standards
through ANSI and other avenues to nudge the industry in what is currently
perceived to be the proper direction. Personally I feel a solid base of well educated
customers may be the force to locally drive change.

How this education comes about will be interesting to say the least. In the past we
often visited with our neighbors or coworkers to find who they hired to do a job and
what their opinions were. This is still one of the best methods of getting
customers, assuming that they are learning about your good points and telling their
high budget friends. We still have some who will call AAAATree due to their place
of status in the yellow pages. Many will look up on the internet to check out your
ads and customer comments. And there is a growing base of young people who
equate price with quality. These are the easy ones, just double your rates and here
they come.

Hopefully you will impress them more with your knowledge of how their trees can
be maintained in a sustainable fashion, than with your big crane truck doing the
removal. It is awful hard to sell a second pruning on a takedown.

The sad thing is that many people equate a large load of chips and a good cleanup
with a well done tree job.

--- For further thoughts on these subjects, check out “Hot, Flat and Crowded” by
Thomas Friedman