On Monday, a new sustainability standard for companies was released for public comment: ULE 880 – Sustainability for Manufacturing Organizations, a partnership between UL Environment, a division of Underwriters Laboratories, and my colleagues at GreenBiz.com.

It was a day that I’d been awaiting for the better part of a decade.

During the 45-day comment period we’re hoping you will review the draft standard and provide detailed feedback. (More about that in a minute, but if you’re in a rush to get there, click here.)

ULE 880 is the first in a series of company-level standards and certifications that are being produced by this ULE-GreenBiz partnership. It results from about eight years of work — initially by a small team of us in Alameda County, California, and starting last year, between ULE and GreenBiz. (I previously provided the back story to this project here.)

The first draft of the standard is now complete, the product of a Herculean effort spearheaded by my friend and colleague Rory Bakke, director of sustainability at GreenBiz. Rory was lead author of the ULE 880, with assistance from me, a terrific team from UL Environment, and a small group of advisers.

ULE 880 covers five domains of sustainability:

• Sustainability Governance: how an organization leads and manages itself in relation to its stakeholders, including its employees, investors, regulatory authorities, customers, and the communities in which it operates
  
• Environment: an organization’s environmental footprint across its policies, operations, products and services, including its resource use and emissions
  
• Workplace: issues related to employee working conditions, organization culture, and effectiveness
  
• Customers and Suppliers: issues related to an organization’s policies and practices on product safety, quality, pricing, and marketing as well as its supply chain policies and practices
  
• Social and Community Engagement: an organization’s impacts on its community in the areas of social equity, ethical conduct, and human rights

All told, there are 102 questions (or “indicators”) in ULE 880, including 18 in Governance, 45 in Environment, 15 in Workforce, 15 in Customers and Suppliers, and 9 in Social and Community Engagement. The number of indicators doesn’t reflect the weight each of these categories holds in the overall standard, however. Environment covers 80 points, Governance and Customers/Suppliers 40 each, and Workplace and Social/Community 20 each. There are also 18 “Innovation Points” — 3 points each for 6 different indicators — that reward companies for going above and beyond the standard.

But that doesn’t mean the core standard is a low bar. It was designed to be comprehensive — that is, to the extent that indicators are measurable and verifiable. Among the core principles of ULE 880 is that it be both reasonably attainable (at the lowest level of certification) and a high bar of excellence (and the highest level of certification). This and other core principles behind the standard are spelled out in the document’s introduction.

Why does Environment carry a disproportionate weight — 40 percent of the total? Therein lies one of many challenges the GreenBiz-ULE team faced. We set out to create a standard that is comprehensible, consistently applied, credible, measurable, relevant, and for which data is obtainable. As a rule, company environmental data is more widely tracked, analyzed, quantified, and defined consistently than social and governance data. For that reason, this version of ULE 880 is more heavily weighted toward environmental indicators. Over time, as companies seek certification under ULE 880 and the sustainability field continues to mature, we expect to refine the standard and potentially adjust its weighting of specific indicators and across issue areas.

Of course, all of this is subject to feedback, and that’s where you come in. The stakeholder feedback period launched on Monday — ending September 14 — is free and open to all. To participate, you must register, after which you’ll receive a link to ULE’s Collaborative Standards Development System, or CSDS, an online tool Underwrites Laboratories uses to develop its standards. Already, more than 100 companies and thought leaders have registered to review and comment.

In the CSDS, you’ll be able to download ULE 880 or read an online version, the latter of which enables you to enter comments. You’ll be able to read others’ comments, and others will be able to read yours — an open and transparent process. Comments can be as broad or as specific as you wish.

“There’s really no comment of a constructive nature that isn’t potentially valuable,” Daniel P. Ryan, Standards Technical Panel Chair at UL Environment, told me recently. Ryan — who’s been with UL for 27 years, most of it in the standard-development process — continued:

“We want the standard to be clear and concise in language so that manufacturers can read a clause and understand what it means, clearly and without ambiguity. Similarly, we want auditors who might be assessing manufacturers to that standard to have the same understanding. So, even if we get comments from someone who is confused, that’s really valuable input because it points us to something we thought was clear but obviously needs work.”

This is just the beginning of the review process. “After the comment period closes, we’ll sort through all of the input, break it down by topic and try to see the different facets of an issue various stakeholders are arguing,” explains Ryan. “And then engage a smaller team of sustainability experts of diverse interests that will help guide the standard forward — how we should address the input we received.”

The plan is to announce the first pilot companies for ULE 880 later this fall.

During the next 45 days, we’re hoping to hear from a broad cross-section of those affected by or interested in ULE 880: manufacturers, assessment and standards groups, regulators, policy makers, procurement officers, sustainability professionals, the socially responsible investing community, and nonprofit sustainability interest groups.

I sincerely hope you will weigh in — and encourage your colleagues and stakeholders to do so, too.

An earlier version of this post appeared on GreenBiz.

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(Posted by Joel Makower in Transforming Business at 3:45 PM)

I’m writing this en route home from Shanghai, where I’ve spent most of the past week touring, visiting, meeting, and experiencing this Asian megacity for the first time. The occasion was Expo 2010, the world’s fair situated on both sides of the Huangpu River, which runs through the center of China’s largest city.

I came to Shanghai primarily for the opening of an art installation, “The Nature of Cities,” on cities and biodiversity, at the Expo’s United Nations pavilion. The theme of the exhibition — created and produced by Art Works for Change, the nonprofit group founded and headed by my wife, Randy Rosenberg — reflected the theme of the Expo itself: “Better City — Better Life.”

That “better cities” theme pervaded the pavilions representing nearly 200 countries, plus dozens more organizations and corporations that are exhibiting here. And it aimed to signify Shanghai’s emerging status in the 21st century as the “next great world city” — at least by Shanghai’s own reckoning. Shanghai, like most big cities in both developed and developing economies, is a study in contrasts: on the one hand, world-class shopping, fine dining, and some of the planet’s most impressive buildings; on the other, choking pollution, gridlocked traffic, and a struggling underclass. A rich and tortured history; a promising but uncertain future.

For two days, amid some of the hottest temperatures Shanghai had seen in 50 years, we toured the Expo, at times standing in long lines. The story each national pavilion told was predictable: “We’re a proud people with deep traditions and care for the land that is our home. We support progress and a clean environment. We have great hope for our children. Here are a few of the things we’re good at. Come visit us! Come buy our stuff!”

But not the USA pavilion, which stood out among the others, less for its design than its content: Its primary purpose was to showcase the companies that sponsored the building, a roll call of American capitalism: Alcoa, Boeing, Caterpillar, Chevron, Citi, Corning, Dell, Dow, Dupont, Fedex, GE, Goodyear, Honeywell, Intel, KFC, Marriott, Microsoft, Pepsi, Pfizer, Pizza Hut, Procter & Gamble, Visa, Walmart, and more than a dozen others.

The message, as best I heard it: “We innovate to bring great ideas to the world! We build brands that the world wants! We create opportunity! Come visit us! Come buy our stuff!”

But it wasn’t the country pavilions that most interested me. On my second day at the Expo, I made a beeline for the corporate pavilions, a smaller group of grandiose buildings across the river from the Expo’s main crowds. It was here I found two competing tales of our energy and transportation future.

Up first: the General Motors Pavilion — actually the SAIC-GM Pavilion, reflecting GM’s partnership with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation. The pavilion’s theme: “Drive to 2030,” an engaging and highly optimistic tale of where transportation can take us within the next two decades, with an emphasis on China’s vehicular future. That future, says GM, is one

in which driving will be free from emissions, accidents, petroleum, and congestion. It is a future in which driving will also be more enjoyable and fashionable than ever before.

The keys to this Utopian vision are electrification and connectivity — a technological mash-up of vehicles, energy, and information, where vehicles — from traditional cars, buses, and trucks to a new generation of cool “personal urban mobility” vehicles called the EN-V (pronounced “envy”) — zip along at a decent clip, kept collision-free thanks to next-gen technologies GM is developing or integrating into vehicles — or at least plans to. Oh, and the sky is always blue.

I found the vision compelling and hopeful: a car maker that gets that the future is not just about cars and trucks, or even buses and trains — but about mobility: getting where you need to go, when you need to do it, in the least taxing (personally, economically, societally, environmentally) way possible. And maybe even tap into some cool, fashionable technology along the way.

(I’ll admit to a little bias: GM is a client of GreenOrder, the strategy and management consultancy with which I am affiliated. But I would have been equally laudatory of any car company that promoted such a sustainable mobility vision. GM, as it turns out, was the only car company hosting a pavilion in Shanghai.)

You might respond, “Great. Nice vision. But when will we actually see it?” After all, we’ve been tantalized before at world’s fairs with cool tech that never came to pass. (Picturephones, anyone?) And GM’s track record for delivering on change isn’t that great.

“This has become very strategic to GM,” David Tulauskas, GM’s head of public policy in China, told me over lunch at the pavilion. He cited the growing number of places like London and Singapore that are using congestion pricing; additional cities are creating “back office” traffic management technology platforms to manage vehicle congestion. He described the emergence of Dedicated Short Range Communications standards that can keep adjacent vehicles from colliding in order to utilize roadways more efficiently (“kind of like schools of fish that never run into each other,” he explains). He explained how the expansion of GM’s OnStar telematics technology could provide a range of consumer-friendly services. Tulauskas also pointed out that the “new” GM has taken a more aggressive stance on innovation, such as the venture fund it recently launched to develop and invest in advanced technologies, and a more robust long-range planning process being undertaken by GM that is approaching business development from a mobility perspective, and looking more frequently outside the company for technology solutions, a far cry from the inward-looking pre-bankruptcy GM.

Of course, it’s all just talk and cool prototypes. But I walked away with the sense that this old-line company has a bead on where the future is headed, and wants to be in the driver’s seat, so to speak, as that future comes into view.

That was not the case at the second corporate pavilion I visited, the Oil Pavilion, presented by three of China’s largest petroleum companies, though it might as well have been sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute.

There was a decidedly old-world vision offered here — a propaganda machine spewing bromides about the wonders of petroleum in our world and how much we rely on it daily. Fortune-cookie-like reminders were everywhere you looked: “Convenient traffic conditions/70% are contributed by oil,” read one. “One needs 551 kg of oil for food in lifetime,” read another. (I’m guessing they weren’t referring to this line of petrochemicals.)

The heart of the Oil Pavilion was an impressive 4-D movie (the fourth dimension is sensation: you “experience” snakes, flies, wind, ocean spray, and more). But its central message was decidedly one-dimensional: Oil is a critical part of everything we do, and it isn’t going away, so learn to love it. Even when there is mention of the need for a “low-carbon economy,” it quickly and curiously follows that “oil and gas will remain predominantly.” Unlike GM’s forward-looking message, this industry’s viewed tomorrow as a carbon-copy of today — stay the course! — hardly a hopeful vision. Suffice to say that amid the petro-carnage in the Gulf of Mexico, not to mention the Persian Gulf, the core message of the Oil Pavilion seemed to have run out of gas.

And so went the Expo’s two tales. Both anticipate a growing global population of urban dwellers seeking the good life, a life that demands mobility, not to mention food and shelter and fun. Both anticipate the challenges ahead of making cities that work, ensuring they aren’t paralyzed by polluted air and congested roads, but which offer ways to get where people want to go.

But only one of those is a city I hope to see. The other is a city to dread.

This piece originally appeared on Joel’s blog.

Top Image: Vincent Callebaut, Dragonfly, A Metabolic Farm for Urban Architecture
Courtesy of Vincent Callebaut Architectures, Paris; via Artworks for Change: The Nature of Cities.

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(Posted by Joel Makower in Megacities at 1:00 PM)