It's interesting to me that BP won the Outstanding Sustainable Style Achievement Award for "Communication and Communication Design" when just last week this site announced that BP was also listed as America's 2nd worst greenwasher in 2005.

Are these contradictory? Not necessarily. What is greenwashing but doing an outstanding job at communicating a green theme? Perhaps both awards are saying the same thing - that BP's marketing efforts are outstanding because they make the company look truly interested in environmental causes.

See:

http://www.sustainablestyle.org/sass/06/ossaawards/communicationdesign.html

http://www.thegreenlife.org/dontbefooled.html

Todd,

I did notice that myself, and thought BP was a strange choice for an OSSA. Perhaps Treehugger should have won that award!

I cover the environment for The Surfer's Path, so I'm aware of thier committment to the issue. However, I'm really surprised they were even nominated, since they are a small magazine with a limited circulation in the US. Their decision to rely on soy- based inks and recycled paper is a bold one, and would have a tremendous impact if the rest of the publishing industry followed suite.

I read somewhere (was it here?) that the City of Chicago just passed some type of legislation, that all printers must now use vegetable inks and recycled/and/or tree free paper? The big mag houses like Hachette, Conde Nast, Hearst, etc... get the majority, something like 60% I think, of their ad revenue from the automobile industry or related products. It's made it impossible for them to change gears. Even Organic Style, since it made a deal with the devil, sports SUV ads all over its pages... Sierra magazine used to have them, not as much now. It's a huge union machine, doing business a certain way for years. Conde Nast has their editorial office in a building heralded for its breakthrough green systems. Vanity Fair hosts the Green Media Awards party every year. So what's the problem? Why can't they at least carve out a prototype magazine, like the automobile industry does, to test bed all the new and improved printing techniques? I know in Canada, where they started running as soon as their heard the starting gun, you can find totally green printers who will do a 100% green magazine printing job for nearly half the money any printer in the NYC area. When there's a will, there's a way, and if PETA can protest fur outside Chanel, which can't concerned fashion media insiders protest outside Hachette and Conde Nast to get them to finally walk the talk? Why is Lu Magazine a voice in the wilderness about this? It's a no brainer!

Hey All,

Thanks for the comments on BP. Yeah, a little surprising that BP won the award. Same with Frito Lay. But here are a couple things to think about...

1. SSF is all about recognizing companies, of any shape and size, for the positive things they are doing. There are plenty of organizations and watch groups looking after the bad things going on - and these need to continue! - but we want to put some positive energy out there.

2. Keep in mind the criteria for for the awards.

Effective use of popular culture.
Future innovation.
Depth of achievement.
Overall impact.

There's gotta be a sustainablity story involved in the nomination, but once nominated it's the criteria above that the jury uses to select the final winner.

Also, we had a stellar jury this year:

Lynn Barker | Sustainable Building Specialist, city of Seattle, LEED accredited professional

Larry Dohrs | VP of Newground Social Investment, Amnesty International Just Earth! Program Steering Committee member

Bruce Herbert | President of Newground Social Investment, Sierra Club Shareholder Action Task Force

Lisa Hymas | Senior Editor at Grist.org, the go-to source for environmental news and commentary

Barbara Johnson | co-founder of the Design Resource Institute, GreenMap Seattle Steering Group member

Amanda Wong | student at Seattle’s Garfield High School & YMCA Earth Service Corps club member (SSF is committed to including youth in all our activities)

The sitation with BP is that there are some great people at BP doing sustainability work including work on Solar power and other alternative fuels. Yeah, to some BP may be doing more greenwashing than actual work in products and services. But the OSSA awarded them for their ad campaign that essentially got 100s of thousands of travelers going thorugh Seatac Airport to think about alternative energy. It created quite the buzz. And what we're trying to do with the OSSAs is get positive buzz and other popular culture forces to work to the benefit of sustainability.

Finally, our nominations come from our members so if anyone has some great nominees for 2006...please send them our way.

Cheers!