Link to Footprint Chronicles is in the posting

One of the things one starts to see when we use an “environmental lens” is the full lifecycle of a product.

One company that’s always been considered a leader in environmental responsibility is Patagonia.  Patagonia was founded by environmentalist Yvon Chouinard in 1973.  An excellent story about the company can be found on Fast Company’s web page.  Here is a deep link to that story.  The applicable piece for this blog posting is below:

In May 2007, Chouinard challenged a group of 10 employees to track five products from the design studio to the raw-materials stage to Patagonia’s Nevada distribution center. His gumshoes canvassed the globe, observing yarn spinners in Thailand, visiting a 50,000-employee footwear factory in China, touring a fiber-manufacturing facility in North Carolina. A microsite at patagonia.com, featuring short videos (also available on YouTube) and detailed information, quietly went live last fall. The paths of 10 more products, including the Nature USA organic-cotton T-shirt, will go up this year.

Patagonia has put together a very engaging, interactive site loaded with videos and slideshows that track a product from its sources all of the way through distribution.

Here is a link to the Footprint Chronicles.  For Project Managers, we recommend that you watch the  video “Digging Deeper – Episode 2, What comes next?”.  Notice the number of times you hear the word project in the interviews.  As another plus for EarthPM fans, you’ll also hear from Andrew Winston, one of the authors of Green to Gold, a key and inspiring book for us here at EarthPM.

For those of you who want to go right to the Footprint Chronicle videos, we provide links directly to a selection of those YouTube videos below.

Nano puff pullover

Unifi – soda bottles into yarn

Polartec of Lawrence, MA

Enjoy these, and if you like the idea of featured companies who are doing the right things – which helps them do things right, you can look forward to a special chapter of our upcoming book devoted to this theme!