Timberland

“The vast majority of the environmental consequences—including energy, chemicals, and resources—are embedded in the choice of materials.”

“The amount of information that’s required for the consumer to make a thoughtful choice can be overwhelming. That’s a huge driver behind our CEO’s interest in a labeling scheme that would make real lifecycle data available along the lines of a nutritional ingredients list.”

Timberland

Moving the Needle

Timberland is a diverse global giant, the second largest company in the outdoor industry. Although Timberland is publicly traded, they remain majority family owned. Current CEO Jeff Schwartz, age 43, is the grandson of company founder Nathan Schwartz. In the late ’80s, the younger Schwartz cut his teeth with the company by spearheading Timberland’s community service program, at the time the focal point of the companies “doing well by doing good” agenda. As CEO, Schwartz aims to go further, making the ideal of minimizing the company’s overall footprint a top priority.

This warm and fuzzy sentiment runs headlong into the shear magnitude and complexity of Timberland’s global operations. In addition to the company’s headquarters in Stratham, New Hampshire, Timberland operates three major distribution centers and 200 retail stores (125 in Europe and Japan, helping account for the between 35 and 40 percent of Timberland’s overall sales that come from overseas). Twenty factories (all overseas) are engaged in making Timberland footwear, and twenty tanneries (also overseas) supply the leather. Another few dozen factories pump out a full line of outerwear, clothing, and accessories. These better than a hundred facilities (only one building, a distribution center, actually owned by Timberland) employ tens-of-thousands of people (5,500 of whom work directly for Timberland) worked with an estimated one million material and chemical inputs to bring some $1.4 billion worth of Timberland product to market last year. For the past five years, 32 year old Terry Kellogg has been charged with the daunting task of working to minimize the company’s overall environmental footprint.

“The facilities we’re using, and that pretty much everyone is using, obviously haven’t been designed on the principles of sustainability,” says Kellogg, who has a masters in environmental management from Yale. “Modifications and modernization can be a significant investment, the payback is long term, and it’s not your money. But we can do a lot to affect how those facilities are run. If Timberland is able to leverage a change to a factory’s waste water treatment system, you know that change is in place for all manufacturing done at that factory, not just for Timberland product.”

Kellogg is one of three Timberland employees devoted full time to environmental affairs, and several others have related responsibilities embedded in their job descriptions.

“I report directly to the head of our supply chain, and environment has become a key performance metric for measuring and managing that supply chain. We’re treating environment like any other issue of concern in our supply chain and we’ve put it on equal footing with those issues.

“We have made some progress toward the overall objective by substituting out some of the ‘worst’ performing material, like PVC, from some of our products. But the larger challenge is becoming systematic in our approach, addressing all materials and processes so that incremental improvements can be seen in the larger context of overall impact. So we essentially have gone back to the beginning and have begun to assess all significant chemical, material, and energy inputs and outputs for each of the factories and tanneries we work with, along with our retail stores, distribution centers, and our company headquarters. We’re then developing specific objectives, and metrics to help us measure our progress.

“We started by taking a holistic view of our impacts throughout our value chain—not just those that we control but those of our suppliers, and in some cases their suppliers and even their suppliers. We cross referenced those impacts against what stakeholders told us are the big issues of the day to develop priorities in the areas of energy, chemicals and resources. Each of these program areas has a high priority element. For energy, it's efficiency. For chemicals, it's use of water based adhesives in our footwear manufacturing. For resources, it's organic cotton.” (See “Moving the Needle” for Timberland’s progress in the areas of organic cotton and adhesives.)

“Taking an in depth view in one of these arenas, the energy program, to show how we reduced our carbon emissions by nearly ten percent in three years; we started by harvesting some low hanging fruit. Lighting retrofits at our company headquarters resulted in significant use reductions and had a simple payback of about one year. Early on we became one of the first in Holland to purchase ‘grid served’ renewable energy for our distribution center there. We helped support the nascent market for ‘green tags’ by partnering with Clean Air Cool Planet and Native Energy to retire emissions offsets. We also joined a BSR working group to help set standards for ‘green freight’. The next steps required a more thoughtful review of our impacts and the opportunities before us. We hired an auditor to look at efficiency opportunities at our major facilities. This work resulted in two large scale efficiency improvements that reduced energy consumption by more than 30 percent at our two North American distribution centers. We also installed a small scale solar array at our headquarters building primarily as a means of raising awareness and supporting the market for solar installations in New Hampshire.

“We have been diligent in trying to tie clear metrics to environmental performance so that environmental initiatives can be measured and monitored alongside other indicators of our performance as a company. This is true inside the company, where key employees are measured on such things as organic cotton use, energy savings and water based adhesives. Environmental metrics also apply in the supply chain to the partners that supply us with finished product and raw materials.

“The leather tanneries are our single biggest impact on the environment, so last year we developed a tool to assess the overall environmental performance of the tanneries that supply Timberland. This tool factors ten indicators into an overall score, focusing on environmental management, air emissions, the water supply, waste water, and waste management. (The official “Explanation of Timberland’s Environmental Performance Measures for the Leather Tanneries can be found with the online version of this article on the Green Steps Journal website, www.greensteps.org.)

We used third party auditors to establish a performance baseline and we followed up ourselves to develop action plans and set clear expectations for improved performance. We found that numerical ratings and targets were very easy for business partners to understand and respond to and we were thrilled with the performance improvements that resulted. Based on our scoring system, the entire tannery base has improved by 31 percent since the time we implemented the system. I’m not sure this is necessarily meaningful to the consumer, but it’s an invaluable internal tool for measuring progress. It’s part of the next frontier for Timberland: quantifying the environmental performance of our finished products and developing a system to drive improvements over time.”

“Our Commerce and Justice agenda is driven ultimately by our purpose as an entity—to equip people to make their difference in the world. And this purpose is driven by some lofty bold goals, among them to be a reference for socially accountable institutions. But our philosophy—how we go about this work—can be characterized by a pretty simple phrase: we try to make it better by making a difference one step at a time. We may not embody all the lofty principles of sustainability in any one of our initiatives, but each of them have sought to move the needle and make it better.”

(After having done much to help Timberland “make it better”, Terry Kellogg is moving on to become the CEO at the organization One Percent for the Planet. He can be reached via e-mail at terry@onepercentfortheplanet.org.)

(For more on Timberland, www.timberland.com. For sales, Lisa Smith can be reached at 603/772-9500, or via e-mail at lsmith@timberland.com.)

The Earthwatch Boot

Timberland debuted its waterproof “Earthwatch Boot” in the spring of this year, the development of which was driven by the enviro department. The leather is dyed naturally using dyes harvested as a byproduct of peat extraction. The midsole contains post industrial medical scrap, while the outsole utilizes the post industrial scrap from its own production process. A 50 percent energy savings and 40 percent reduction in water used in the leather finishing process was achieved by using a proprietary “compact formulation process” developed by Prime USA. The Earthwatch Boot adds recycled laces for 2006.

Timberland Retail

For Timberland’s 200 retail store, there are two primary areas of focus—new store build out and electricity consumption.

“We’ve launched a new template for the look and feel of the stores as well as material selection,” Kellogg explains. “Wherever we can, we’re using materials with recycled content and rapidly renewable materials, like bamboo floors, glass, and recycled or reclaimed wood.

“On the energy side, for Timberland as a whole, we’ve been able to reduce our direct and indirect emissions over the past three years by a total by about ten percent. The retail stores are a real challenge, they don’t account for a huge part of the overall total. It’s primarily driven by lighting, and retail lighting for our product can be a tricky area to influence. We’re using renewable energy where available.

“On the packaging front, Timberland’s footwear boxes are made from 100 percent post consumer recycled content that is unbleached.”

On Shipping Long Distances

We conducted a detailed lifecycle assessment of our hiking boots, and the transportation (shipping) component accounted for less than one percent of the energy embodied in that boot. Transportation infrastructure is increasingly efficient. The vast majority of the environmental consequences—including energy, chemicals, and resources—are embedded in the choice of materials.

Leather Tanning Life Cycle Assessment

According to the summary report of the Full Life Cycle Assessment prepared by Ecobilan in collaboration with a working group led by the British Leather Confederation released in December of 2003, the three primary tanning agents—chromium, aldehyde, and vegetable—each have strengths and weaknesses, and are essentially comparable in terms of their overall environmental impact. The findings of this assessment were considered by Timberland in the development of their “Environmental Performance Measures for the Leather Tanneries.” (Interestingly, the report concludes that from an environmental perspective, all three tanning methods are preferable to not tanning the leather at all and simply discarding it in a landfill.

Below are three of the key findings of the study.

—Post Tanning operations have the major influence on the overall impacts and they are not linked to the choice of the main tanning agent.

—Aldehyde and chromium tanning technologies are very similar in terms of environmental impact, whilst the vegetable tanning technology shows strengths and weaknesses compared to them both.

—The end of life of the leather products is of some relevance in terms of toxicity impact, mainly due to the fate of leather in landfill. The end of life impact is essentially the same for all three tanning technologies.

Moving the Needle

Timberland set a goal of making five percent of the company’s total cotton usage organic by 2005, and according to Kellogg, they will fall just short of that goal. Last year, Timberland employed water-based adhesives on approximately 12 million pairs of boots, roughly 30 percent of their total footwear production. This year, that number is expected to rise to 50 percent. Footwear sales account for approximately 70 percent of Timberland’s total sales.