SC Johnson honored in Washington -- Presidential award recognizes company's environmental leadership

By Mick Burke

Friday, January 6, 2006 2:05 AM CST

WASHINGTON - SC Johnson Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Fisk Johnson knows better than anyone else what it's like to succeed the late Sam Johnson, who was renowned both as a shrewd businessman and groundbreaking environmentalist.

But Thursday, as Sam's son Fisk accepted a national award at the White House's Eisenhower Executive Office Building, he clearly had taken the family's environmental ethic one step further. On behalf of the company, Johnson accepted one of three Ron Brown Awards for Corporate Leadership from U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. The award was bestowed for SC Johnson's Greenlist, a method of rating product components on their environmental impact, with the goal of lessening that impact.

"Dad was such an incredible environmental pioneer," Fisk Johnson said later. "It's hard to live up to someone who did such an incredible job on that front.

"I believe in being an environmental steward very strongly; I have a lot of passion around that. We are carrying on that tradition."

Greenlist, several years in the making, started during Fisk's tenure as SC Johnson chairman. Using a computer model, it rates all raw materials - tens of thousands of them - on their potential environmental harm. The company then tries to incorporate better materials into its products.

According to leaders of some key environmental organizations, the Greenlist approach may spread to other companies.

Moreover, that approach can increase profitability. With Windex, SC Johnson replaced a solvent that earned the lowest Greenlist rating with one that scores the highest. In the process, the volatile organic compounds in the window cleaner dropped to 4 percent and its cleaning power rose by 30 percent.

"I think it's a positive message to send that environmental innovation works for a company economically and also works for the planet, from a sustainability standpoint," said Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke, who attended the ceremony.

As another example, she cited SC Johnson's use of methane gas from the Kestrel Hawk Landfill to produce energy to help run manufacturing operations at Waxdale.

"It's a very important message they're sending, that there are alternatives to what is probably the biggest issue on the planet, which is global warming," she said.

Another environmental leader at the ceremony was Glenn Prickett of Conservation International's Center For Environmental Leadership in Business. Johnson sits on the board of directors.

"He's in the top rank of CEOs that are leading the way on the environment in the private sector," Prickett said of Johnson. He said the Greenlist approach is "urgently needed and remains unique, because it's quite complicated to pull off. They have definitely done the best job."

But others are beginning to walk down a similar path, Prickett said. He cited Wal-Mart, which has concluded that its greatest environmental impact comes with product purchasing. Because of its enormous size, Wal-Mart could have a dramatic impact by buying environmentally safer products, he said.

The Ron Brown Award for Corporate Leadership, created by former President Clinton, was established in the name of the late commerce secretary. In its eighth year of existence, it is the only presidential award for corporate leadership and responsibility.

Scott Johnson (no relation to Fisk), SC Johnson's vice president for global environment and safety, said the honor was "recognition for our leadership, with Greenlist being the signature project."

He said an SC Johnson team began working on Greenlist in 2001 with its five largest categories of raw materials: surfactants, solvents, propellants, insecticides and resins. As one result, it dropped an organophosphate insecticide and replaced it with a more naturally occurring one, he said.

Greenlist is now in constant use, Scott Johnson said, "because it's literally embedded into product development." It is now part of how the company develops new products and reformulates old ones, he said.

It also comes into play in determining packaging materials. Early on, SC Johnson decided it would get out of chlorine-based packaging. Sometimes a move like that is simply done as of a certain date, said John Weeks, an environmental researcher at SC Johnson who was part of the Greenlist team. Chlorine-based paperboard was dropped that way.

The company also dropped PVC plastic packaging because of its potential for creating the highly toxic dioxin if incinerated, Weeks said.

"We want to steer people upfront, before there's even a product," he said.

Scott Johnson said Greenlist, which SC Johnson recently patented, has attracted attention from some interesting quarters. The Chinese environmental protection agency asked for and received a presentation on it, for example. Harley-Davidson and Nike have been studying the idea, as have the Canadian government and the World Bank.

Other SC Johnson guests at the award presentation included top officials of the Consumer Products Safety Commission, Council on Environmental Quality and The Nature Conservancy.

Two other Ron Brown awards were given Thursday. Bayer Corp. was honored Thursday for its program, Making Science Make Sense, an effort to boost science literacy in schools. Johnson & Johnson was recognized for its Campaign For Nursing's Future.

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