Still Trucking for Sustainability: Clif Bar Expands Biofuel Program
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA on 05. 3.07
Type ‘Clif Bar’ into the TreeHugger search engine, and you’ll be spoiled for choice. You can read our interview with freestyle skier Alison Gannett about the ‘Clif Bar Save Our Snow’ campaign, you can check out their Green Notes collaboration with Gomez, or find out about the company’s ‘shot bloc’ organic energy chews. If that doesn’t satisfy your hunger, you can proceed to our interview with CEO Sheryl O'Loughlin, or travel back in time to 2004 and see our enthusiasm as we first discovered them.
We were delighted, then, to read over at GreenBiz.com that Clif Bar are still pushing the envelope in terms of sustainability:
“By converting its field marketing vehicles to biodiesel and eliminating the need for 8,000 gallons of gasoline each year, Clif Bar expects to reduce the fleet's CO2 emissions -- the major cause of global warming -- by about 40 percent, or 60,000 pounds of CO2.”
This is clearly part of a wider effort on alternative fuels, which has seen other fleet vehicles running on straight veggie oil, and the company funding a ‘Cool Commute’ program to fund biodiesel and hybrid vehicle purchases for employees. We haven't yet found information on what kind of bio-diesel is being promoted (remember, as always, the palm oil debate!) but encouragingly, the company clearly recognizes that alternative fuels are only part of the equation. Clif Bar has also been following a far-reaching and comprehensive sustainability program, including promoting renewable energy ‘green tags‘ over at its site, supporting organic growers, and using recycled packaging. In fact, the company is so serious about it’s sustainability initiatives that it has appointed a ‘company ecologist’, whose job it is to see the company ‘less like a business and more like an ecosystem’, according to a recent interview in Good Magazine. We trust, then, that Clif Bar will have been pretty careful about what sourcing their biodiesel - as and when we find more information, we'll let you know.
