Standards, Certification And Sustainability

A panel of growers and retailers discusses the ins and outs of making sustainability a part of doing business in 2008.

Standards and certification are two of the more controversial topics surrounding the sustainability movement in 2008. So, it wasn’t surprising that they were a significant part of the discussion for the State of Sustainability panel at this year’s ANLA Management Clinic.

Panelists Evan Elenbaas, president of Walters Gardens, Zeeland, Mich.; John Bonner, general manager of Eagle Creek Wholesale, Mantua, Ohio; and Charlie Cole, general manager of Cole Gardens, Concord, N.H., fielded questions on the subject from audience members and from panel moderator Richard Jones, group editor of Greenhouse Grower and Today’s Garden Center.

Jones: I want to go back to the social aspect of sustainability. That is a big piece of some of the certification programs that are out there, like Veriflora and Charlie [Cole] mentioned MPS. Initially you think just about all the business aspects of certification, but they do also have requirements on how you treat your employees.
What has your experience been with this?

Cole: Right now in the U.S., Veriflora is a big player in certification. A lot of big companies are pushing Veriflora at the moment to be the certification process here in the states. Veriflora is putting in a system for the big box stores, for example Wal-Mart, The Home Depot, and I believe Ball is also looking into it. The way the certification process would work is, for example, if you want to sell to Wal-Mart, you’ll need to be certified by Veriflora.

But what they’re doing, they’re really pushing an organic trend and in our company we weren’t sure how comfortable we were with that. So we looked at MPS out of Holland. It’s a grower-operated non-profit company so they’re out there for the grower. They’re in many countries around the world. They’ve been doing this for years, so we contacted them and said, “What can you do for us?”

They have a certification process. They rank you as A, B, and C as to how sustainable your business is. But what we really like about MPS is it’s a quantified system. You actually get rated every couple of years when you get reviewed. My understanding is that Veriflora is more qualitative, there’s no definitions of when you’re sustainable for example.

So we’re really focusing on where we can go with MPS. It’s a big process because they don’t have a U.S. presence at the moment. One example of what we’re doing as a grower that gets us kind of excited, MPS rates all the chemicals you use. So the higher the active ingredient in the bottle, the less sustainable, or the less points you get. They look at everything from chemical usage to heat and energy usage to recycling and also social issues. The reason we’re going toward MPS and are going through the process is we can look at our company every year and try to do better as a quantitative process. And actually look at our numbers and do better than the year before.

Elenbaas: We’re not in a big rush to be certified. We’ll let the dust settle and see where things end up. But just from a more human, social aspect, we have to make sure that our employees are sustainable, that we’re sustainable. We have, I think, a pretty generous health care program for our employees, but we need to do more. We’re looking at ways to encourage our employees to stay healthy. Health care costs, as you all know, have gone up significantly, and we have a new program we’ll be rolling out first of next year. I’m really kind of humbled by some of the things I’ve listened to that kind of shows me how far we have to go yet to be really doing the best we can for our employees. So I kind of like to keep in mind the human part of things too. We really need to do the best for our employees. We have a tremendously loyal staff. Part of our problem is that many of our employees have been there for so long. I guess that’s a good problem, but as you get older, your health care issues tend to increase. But yes we need to keep the human aspect in mind at all times.

Bonner: I think we’ll wait until the dust settles too. I contacted Veriflora and went through the initial process and basically put it back in my filing cabinet because it doesn’t do anything for us today. I’m glad that they’re setting standards. Standards are important. But I don’t see where it’s going to affect us right now though. I think we need to concentrate our efforts on what we’re doing at our place to maybe hit these different standards. But as far as going through a certification process and getting a stamp on our product saying it’s Veriflora certified, it’s not a value-added thing for us. We don’t sell to any big box stores, we don’t grow young plants like Charlie does or like Evan does. We grow our plants and sell them to independents, farm markets, place like that. You could ask 100 people and nobody knows what MPS or Veriflora is. So until the customer knows what it is it’s not going to make a lot of sense for us. But we can still concentrate on the practices that are involved with it.

Cole: One thing good about Veriflora and MPS – and I know people are tired of hearing about it – is they’re stepping in and doing something that the government could be doing and doing a lot stronger. MPS was formed in Holland because the media started to look into the greenhouse industry and horticulture in general and realized what a negative impact they were having on the environment. Before the government could really get involved, growers formed MPS to start the certification process so they can now be looked at by consumers as doing the right thing for the environment without the government coming down and putting all these regulations on them that don’t make any sense. So Veriflora and MPS are good things I think and I’m glad they’re doing what they’re doing. I’d rather have growers putting regulations and standards together than the government.

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