Companies Sensitive to Environment Are Changing Workplace : 3M in Camarillo is an example of how a company thrives by being an innovator in pollution control.
You might not think that you can help the environment by working at a shoe store or a carpet-cleaning service, much less by showing up at 3M in Camarillo five days a week to make magnetic tape. But lately, these have become quite respectable ways to help with recycling, detoxifying and waste reduction. And, if you’re just plain looking for work, they’re good situations to check out.
Being as Sunday is May Day, a spring holiday for blue-collar folks around the world, I got to thinking about the connection between the world and work. Or, to be quite specific, jobs and the environment.
Just as it has become anachronistic to connect this particular spring festival with radicalism in an age when mechanics sit on the board of Mercedes-Benz as stockholders, so it is becoming anachronistic to think that when environmentalism comes in, the jobs go out.
You can have both if you do it right. Just as we’re seeing more cases where folks are simultaneously union members and stockholders at their place of work, we’re seeing more cases where the work rolls are expanding at businesses that make planet-friendly goods in a planet-friendly way. There is something new under the sun.
A local case in point is 3M Camarillo. The Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co. should add the word California to its name because we have the most workers except for the Land o’ Lakes. And 3M continues to hire locally. This is in spite of the reputation of our state for being the most environmentally restrictive in the nation.
But 3M is unfazed. It has, on the contrary, made it its business to stay ahead of the regulators, developing the best record of environmental improvement of any firm in the United States, according to Fortune Magazine. It’s the “grandfather of all industrial pollution programs,” says the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington.
As a result, 3M has survived as the only company making magnetic tape in America. Every other company exported those jobs for various reasons. But 3M kept the work here. It discovered that chemical pollution comes from leaks--and leaks equal lots of lost money. Everybody who goes to work for the company has to have an environmental attitude and demonstrate it repeatedly because it’s part of the regular performance review.
Kevin Rubee, general manager in Camarillo, is quite proud of getting his firm to spend millions retrofitting the magnetic data-cartridge operation to avoid leaking toxics into the neighborhood. Now 3M recycles and reuses every drop. Which is not so good for the solvent vendor, but good for our health and 3M’s bottom line.
It’s not just the big guys who can do this sort of thing. “Chemical is a bad word now,” said Edgar Lawson, proprietor of Service Master by Lawson, a carpet-cleaning franchise in Moorpark. His business is thriving by featuring a process that removes the very chemicals other cleaning processes put into the rug--and leave there--during cleaning.
I heard that same sentiment expressed by Bill Krenn, spokesman for a nearby firm. K-Swiss is adding design and sales staff at its Chatsworth headquarters to handle increased business since it began marketing shoes with parts made from melted pop bottles. Sold throughout the country at such stores as Foot Locker, the shoe is marketed under the trade name “The S.H.O.E.,” which stands for Start Healing Our Earth.
The manufacturer, Starensier Inc., “only recently chose to publicize how it made the stuff,” Krenn said. “They decided to say they were recyclers--which they had been for years--because as a ‘chemical company,’ they had begun to experience an image problem.”
As an out-in-the-open “recycling” firm, Starensier trebled its payroll to almost 900. Alas, its factory is in South Carolina. We should send a county delegation to lure the firm, and maybe K-Swiss itself, to our side of the border.
These firms have a future in the new world of work, combining as they do job creation with planet friendliness. And the whole package gives new meaning to the old phrase “workers of the world.”
