Yesterday we kicked off Bethesda Green – a private-public initiative to help create a model of sustainable urban living in the Bethesda business district. When we sent out the invitations we had hoped for 50-75 people to attend, but to our surprise and delight more than 250 people showed up at the Bethesda Theatre yesterday. Here is a recap of my remarks, with accompanying images.

Welcome everyone. This is a wonderfully exciting turnout. You may have noticed that one of the songs playing earlier was John Mayer’s “Waiting for the World to Change.” It’s a nice melody but absolutely the wrong message for this audience. By coming here today, you are affirming that you’re not willing to wait for the world to change – you’re committed to changing it yourself. We know that the environmental challenges we face will not solve themselves on their own, and today is an important step for this community to take action. I want to start with two stories.

Ten years ago when we started Honest Tea I met with some fancy venture capital investors who looked at our business and gave me a lot of bad advice, most of which I didn’t follow. But two points in particular still stand out. They looked at our commitment to buying organic ingredients and they said, “To succeed in the beverage business you need to buy cheap and sell lots of volume, and you can’t do that with organics.” Obviously, we didn’t follow that advice. But there was an even worse piece of advice they gave us. They said, “You’ve got this crunchy organic tea company, you really should set up a P.O. box in Vermont or New Hampshire, instead of having a Bethesda mailing address on your label.” Well, aside from the fact that wouldn’t be “Honest,” I remember saying to myself, “Why can’t Bethesda be recognized as a green community?” And so ten years later, here we are taking steps to make Bethesda a model.

The second story relates to something I learned about sustainability and livability. My wife, who is notoriously hard to shop for, had her birthday this past August and as it approached I was relieved when she said “All I really want is a composter.” So I immediately got in touch with my friend who runs Terracycle, a company that makes things out of trash, and sure enough, he’s found a way to convert old wooden wine barrels into composters… but of course the wine barrels are all in California, and it’s hardly sustainable to bring a heavy wine barrel from California… so we worked to find a way for this empty wine barrel to piggyback on a delivery truck from California… and I’m feeling triumphant because I’ve found a sustainably-built composter that brings my wife closer to living in harmony with nature — …. .so on Julie’s birthday, I give her breakfast in bed, and show her a picture of this beautiful composter that’s somewhere in Iowa on its way here…. And around noon Julie comes downstairs, smiles and looks at me and says, “So I guess you really didn’t get me anything else?” And that incident helped illustrate for me that while we as a community need to focus on sustainability, we also have to think about livability too. And while sacrifice and changing behavior is an important part of creating a green community, we also have to remember that Bethesda is a wonderful place to live and work, and we need to keep it that way.

At Honest Tea we take bits of wisdom and put them underneath our bottlecaps. And I want to share a few with you today. The first is a Chinese proverb, “If we don’t change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.” It’s important to recognize that as much as we might like living here, the trends are not encouraging. We don’t have to debate global warming to understand that we are spending more time in traffic, we are creating more waste than ever before, and as you will hear from the other speakers, with the continued growth coming to this area, those problems will only get worse. Bethesda could easily become a victim of its own success.

Here’s a picture of the Beltway not long after it was built in 1964. At the time it was built, people asked, “Why did they make it so big? They’ll never use all those lanes.” Back then there was an average of 74,000 riders per day. Here’s what it looks like today, with 240,000 riders per day. We hope that we’ll be able to take steps with Bethesda Green that have the same success… for example, we want to install enough bike racks that people at first scratch their heads and say, “Why did they put in so many bike racks?” and then later worry about needing to install more.

A fair question to ask is “Why Bethesda?” And our response is, “Why not?” Many of the worldwide environmental issues we face need to be addressed on a local basis, and this is where most of us live and work. In addition, Bethesda has some wonderful assets – a dense, growing population, high volume shops and restaurants, leading progressive companies like Calvert, the national leader in social and environmentally responsible mutual funds, Chevy Chase Bank, and a responsive chamber of commerce. Plus we are right on the Metro and Capital Crescent Trail bike path.There are four goals of Bethesda Green:

• Establish Bethesda as a model of an environmentally-friendly urban center
• Reduce environmental footprint of a heavily-trafficked area
• Attract environmentally-aware consumers to the area
• Showcase/share best sustainable practices

Let’s be clear about the model for our approach. This is a private-public partnership, so we’re not going to be proposing mandates or environmental taxes. Instead we are going to be working to identify and create positive models. This approach has been tremendously important to the success for Honest Tea, where all of our products qualify for the USDA Organic seal. This graph tells a great deal of the story. When we started the company our growth was progressing nicely, but look what happened in 2004 when we were able to start using a nationally-recognized symbol to brand our commitment to organics.
Consumers seek out and reward companies that make a commitment to the environment, and we believe that going green can help make the same kind of growth happen in Bethesda.

One of the reasons we’re here today is to get your ideas and start identifying what we can do I want to talk briefly about some of the early ideas we’ve identified for the initiative. Here is what the bike racks of Bethesda look like today – here are some bike racks from a city in Europe. Montgomery County has a strong residential recycling program, but there is no way for consumers to recycle as they walk up and down the street. We’d like to change that.

I’m particularly excited about this next initiative because it’s one where progress has already been made. When I started discussing the ideas for Bethesda Green back in July with our landlord, Federal Realty, we talked about finding a way for the restaurants of Bethesda to do something more productive with all the grease they were generating. Federal Realty stepped up and made some changes. Now instead of directing the grease to a company that converts it into dogfood, the grease is converted into biodiesel. And I was impressed to learn that every month the restaurants of Bethesda Row generate 2,500 gallons of biodiesel – enough to fuel the average car for eight years!


This initiative is just getting started and it’s wonderful to see so much enthusiasm and energy. But I also want people to appreciate that we’re still in what I call “the thermos stage.”When I started Honest Tea ten years ago, my only assets were an empty Snapple bottle and five thermoses, and the thermoses were actually loaned to me, so I guess all I had was that bottle. This phase is exciting, things are a bit disorganized and of course like any good entrepreneurs, we’re under-funded. So we need your help, we need a bit of your patience (but not too much), and most of all we need your ideas and energy to make this happen.

I started with a bottle cap quote, let me close with two. But first let me thank our partners, Austin Grill, Honest Tea and Snikiddy who have donated free food and Pepco who is giving away compact fluorescent light bulbs. The first quote is “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” And sure it would have been nice if we had started this effort 20 years ago, but it’s great that we’re starting it today, and the second is another Chinese proverb, “Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the people doing it.” Of course there are going to be challenges with this effort, and infinite reasons why it can’t be done, but we’re delighted you’ve joined us here today to make it happen. Let’s get started.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Blog from Seth & Barry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.