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01.27.08 Andrew Sullivan (of all people!) wrote a wonderful, salient argument for Obama's candidacy in December's issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It's old enough (in our 24-new cycle) to be a bit behind the current state of the race, but it's poignant and well thought as well. It doesn't quite address some of the concerns I have about fully supporting Obama (I'm interested, I'm just not all the way there yet) because it's an article about Obama's intangibles, and an argument constructed on his feel-good qualities and not on his policies, which I fear I still know too little about. But it's an interesting article and an interesting argument, well worth a read by anyone still on the fence. And there are some choice, fascinating observations on his first book (Dreams From My Father) like this one: "And there are times, I confess, when Obama's account of understanding his own racial experience seemed more like that of a gay teen discovering that he lives in two worlds simultaneously than that of a young African American confronting racism for the first time." # 01.13.08 I've been working on an independent project at work recently and it's been consuming my brain-space. Simply put, I'm trying to suss out more details from our suppliers about their environmental practices and policies. They're all being generally cooperative (they sort of have to be, or at least that's the implication that I'd rather not test). But I'm having a hard time with the complexity of the paper manufacturing industry. It's a complicated system. I started out with one objective and have since realized that I need to focus deeper into the process. How deep, I'm still not sure. On top of this, I'm trying to get information about raw materials that's usually at least four business relationships removed from the person I'm talking to. My company (and I don't think I'm revealing anything with this) has a contract to purchase it's paper from a merchant middle-man. I don't typically think it's the most economical business model (direct-buy is my preference, over the directed-buy model we're working under) but there are lots of back-end financials to these kind of deals that I'm neither privy to nor savvy of. In respect to this business relationship, I originally tried to work through our merchant partner to get this information from the paper mills (there are about 8-10 mills that we work with, depending on various internal post-merger organizational structures). Once I realized how reluctant (or obtuse or obstructionist or just ignorant) the mills were being at giving complete and thorough answers to my questions, I cut the merchant out of the equation and went straight to the mills, knowing that I would need to start playing 20-questions. What I originally set out to determine was simple: where are the mills located and where does the raw material come from? I was looking at these things in a kind of Basic Algebra way. I imagined the utility to a buyer like myself of knowing how many miles the component materials were traveling to make a job; this could serve as a way of evaluating it's environmental footprint (not necessarily the carbon footprint, something that's much harder to figure out without any agreed-to, quantifiable standard for either determination or measurement). But as I dug into this more, I realize that most of the paper mills were buying the wood pulp from pulp mills. So the answers I was getting didn't actually tell me how far the materials had traveled, only how far the pulp and paper had traveled. Where is the wood coming from? The pulp mills are getting their wood from forests that they either own or manage (if vertically integrated) or from independents, with whom I assume they have leased logging rights. On top of that complexity, there's the problem of pulp type. Most paper is made up of a mix of hardwoods and softwoods, each of which might be coming from different suppliers. So each mill might make 2-3 papers that we use on a regular basis. Each of those papers might include 2-3 pulp types, each from a few suppliers. So if I really want to know where my raw materials are coming from, I suddenly need to be evaluating and tracking as many as 180 suppliers. Of course this is a big, old industry. There's been a ton of consolidation and realistically, there are probably only 4-5 major players in the business. But...I don't know where to get that information. I know who my paper mills are, but who are the major players in the pulp business? Where are they getting their wood? Are they good guys doing this relatively dirty work the right way, or are they cutting corners and using international trade laws and their relative obscurity to mask illegal or even legal-but-unethical logging practices? Which is where it suddenly gets even more sticky. No buyer, myself enthusiastically included, wants to be involved in supporting clear cutting and mass deforestation. And no corporation wants to be implicated in the kind of scandal that recently plagued America's Favorite Bra Company when it was discovered that their seminal junk-mail catalog was printed on paper made from clear cut logging. Still, I'm trying to be as cautious with my questioning as I can, trying to avoid the implication of mistrust or wrong-doing. This is less about not upsetting the paper mills as it is about keeping them from going into a defensive PR mode and clamming up to my increasing questions. The paper people like to come in to our offices and talk about "managed forests" as if they have a great big lot full of trees out back behind the mill, with big trees planted in neat rows with drip irrigation lines strung between them. Clearly, not so. The general way this works is that the logging companies (owned by or on contract to the pulp mills, I'm still trying to figure out) go into regular forests, even leased Federal land like parks and such, and cut down trees according to some kind of regulated quota. Like, you can take X tons of wood from this area and Y tons from this area, and only cut ever third tree or ever 20th of something. I honestly have no idea. And I have no idea where these forests are. And I have no idea how to find out. To the best of my knowledge, there's no great resource for this stuff. I'm sure there are non-profits out there who track these industries and probably know a lot of this stuff. I'd like to know who they are. But I'm in no position within my company to start talking to organizations like that when I have no authority to influence adoption. I'm doing this to educate myself and my fellow buyers. If I find out that we've been using some not-good (for the sake of argument, let's not assume they're not terrible-awful, just not-good) supplier, then I will stop using them. Likely, my coworkers will as well. But we're part of a big company. If the company fails to adopt a corporate mandate to stop using said supplier (say they're dollars to the ton cheaper than alternates) and I've involved an environmental activism group, we're likely to become a target instead of a partner. So, do I stop what I'm doing and go to the highest level and ask for authority to do this, or do I keep plugging away in the hopes of having some inside-out, bottom-up influence on our practices? Or is that just the sound of corporate complacency and the pain-killing effects of a big paycheck washing out my own better judgement? Am I just in the wrong business? # 01.12.08 I'm just going to go on record now and say that I don't think there's going to be anything super amazing announced at Tuesday's Macworld keynote. I mean, come on, releasing the iPhone had to have been like birthing a baby, and Leopard came out right on it's heels. What more do you people want from them? # « December 2007 | archive index | February 2008 » built with movabletype |
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