Sunday marked a real milestone for sustainable business: California Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 361, making benefit corporations a legal form in the nation’s largest economy.

Rather than repeating my previous post, I’ll give the bill’s author, Assemblymember Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), the floor.

Under AB 361, he noted in announcing the signing, “businesses can choose to incorporate as benefit corporations and enjoy these significant advantages:

• Greater access to social impact and venture capital investments;
• Legal protection for directors and officers in their more broadly defined fiduciary roles of maximizing profits as well as ensuring social and environmental considerations; and
• Marketing opportunities that will allow consumers to distinguish, in a very real and ascertainable fashion, between a business that claims to be socially responsible, and one that is responsible.”

What’s not to like? And there’s another aspect of this that doesn’t get enough attention: As B Lab co-founder Jay Coen Gilbert told the Los Angeles Times, traditional corporations “have one fiduciary duty: to maximize value to shareholders even if that comes at the expense of workers or the community or the environment. It’s a system that’s set up to externalize costs to society.” In other words, when corporate decisions cause environmental and social harms, the rest of us are on the hook to clean up the mess. Benefit corporations, though voluntary, are one important step toward changing all that.

Thinkshift was thrilled to support this bill, in our own name and through our work with the Green Chamber of Commerce.

As marketers, we’re acutely aware of paper use—we handle all kinds of print projects for clients, and paper appears in nearly every aspect of modern life, in packaging, personal and home products, and so on. I even own a hat made of paper (recycled).

The bad news is, paper use is on the rise globally, and North Americans use more of it per person than anybody else. The good news is, per capita use in North America is on the decline, and we’re seeing more use of recycled content and production methods that don’t use harmful chemicals.

The Environmental Paper Network (EPN) chronicles every aspect of paper production and use in its new report, State of the Paper Industry 2011. The report, aimed at policy makers, the paper and forestry industries, and large paper users, shows why changing the ways we produce and use paper is one of the best opportunities we have to reduce environmental damage.

Much of the progress is due to concerted action by the paper industry itself and watchdog and certification groups, along with demand by users such as designers (who were on board early), the packaging industry (which came later to the party, but recently has started to make a big impact), and big companies’ environmental procurement policies. Pressure on our forests is growing, despite the prevalence of digital media, but more forests are being managed sustainably or even designated off-limits.

The EPN set the baseline for statistics with it’s first report in 2007. Here are a few quick stats from this year’s report:

• Paper accounted for 16% of waste in North American landfills in 2009, down from 26 percent in 2005.
• The United States recycled or reused 63 percent of paper in 2009, compared with 46 percent in 2000.
• The average North American consumed more than 500 pounds of paper per person, per year in 2010; the average European consumed just under 400 pounds a year. World average is 120 pounds per person.
• From 2005 to 2009, the volume of paper in U.S. landfills shrank by 16 million tons to 26 million tons. That’s the equivalent of a line of trash barges almost 400 miles long.
• In 2009, China surpassed North America in overall paper use.
• As of July 2011, there were 791 available papers certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (the FSC provides the only certification that the EPN and environmentalists recognize as legitimate). The EPN designated only 121 papers as environmentally superior in 2010, as evaluated by its Paper Steps project.

The EPN makes a number of recommendations for making more progress, which boil down to: use less paper, and when you must, use recycled paper made with low-impact processes. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to find papers with 100 percent recycled content; many are just as handsome as their environmentally unfriendly counterparts. Good recycled papers are available through most printers and at big box stores (I’ve found Staples has the best options for everyday office use).

Spending three weeks on vacation in northern Europe—mostly Amsterdam and Berlin—made me think about the ways we can pretty easily live a little “smaller.” Europeans live in smaller spaces, use less stuff, and reuse much more. They don’t seem as obsessed with green and sustainable as I thought they might be, but it could just be they don’t shout about it as much. They just do it, as they have been for years. For instance:

Bikes are a main form of transportation. Everybody has one, sturdy and utilitarian. In the city, bike paths are ubiquitous. And they aren’t in the road—they typically run between the sidewalk and parked cars. Makes it safer (for cyclists, anyway; I found it a bit perilous as a pedestrian).

Lights for public areas are on timers that switch off after 10 minutes. I’ve wondered for years why we don’t use these in our own apartment and office buildings.

Smaller appliances are the norm, like fridges that hold a week’s worth of groceries (or less) and washing machines that are smaller and front-loading. Air-drying clothes is common, and even families with children don’t always have a clothes dryer. (This is based on very limited observation.)

None of this is news to anyone who’s been abroad, but the climate change imperative threw it into sharp relief for me. In the bigger scheme of things, I also noticed that wind power is taking hold. Old windmills are an icon of the Netherlands, but new wind turbines are also becoming a part of the landscape. I saw some wind farms but was most impressed by the fact that many farms have their own wind turbines. In the northern part of the country it was amazing to see ancient farmhouses coupled with new turbines.

On the transportation front, cars are much smaller overall than on this side of the pond, but I still saw a lot of big SUV-type vehicles, and diesel is in wide general use. On the upside, most filling stations I saw sold biodiesel, and I saw not a few natural gas vehicles and fueling stations.

Finally, I spent my time away without my own computer or cell phone. And since the Iceland volcano kept me in Berlin an extra six days, I was almost unconnected for over three weeks. It was a little freaky, especially toward the end. But ultimately it felt great. Without electronic ties to where I came from, I felt more a part of where I was.