The white box from Salesforce.com (CRM) lands with a thud on my desk. More swag – corporate tchotchkes packaged in big dead-tree boxes and cushioned
with piles of non-biodegradable
styrofoam pellets. Usually Green Wombat swears an oath to Rachel Carson and recycles
what’s recyclable. But Salesforce.com – like a growing number of companies proclaiming their green cred – has just announced it’s going completely carbon neutral by financing renewable energy projects to offset greenhouse gas emissions from its corporate operations. So I do a
double-take when I spy the FedEx
(FDX) label on the box:
Salesforce’s San Francisco headquarters is located one block – about 300 feet – from Green Wombat’s abode at Business 2.0 magazine. (I can practically see Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff from my 29th floor perch. Google map 
above.) The FedEx tracker, however, shows the box has traveled more than 40 carbon-belching miles to reach Green Wombat.
Let’s follow the swag’s sojourn: Last Friday – three days after the Web-based software company unveils its Earthforce carbon neutral initiative – a FedEx truck arrives at Salesforce’s Market Street office to pick up the package – and half a dozen others sent to B2 writers and editors – and drive it over the Bay Bridge to FedEx’s hub in Oakland.
On Monday, the swag gets trucked back to San Francisco to a FedEx facility. From there, it’s driven to the Business 2.0 tower and delivered to Green Wombat. 
And what’s inside the box, you may be wondering?
The contents: a Salesforce-embossed coffee mug, some Salesforce branded chocolates and a folder – with a photo of a polar bear, whose habitat is threatened by global warming, on the cover. The folder contains press releases, including one on the company’s Earthforce program – irony noted – all sitting in a nest of styrofoam.
The point here is not to bash Salesforce – its commitment to being carbon neutral is ahead of the curve – but to note that if companies hope to reap the public relations, environmental and economic benefits of going green, it takes more than whipping out the checkbook and buying carbon credits. Increasingly, consumers and public watchdogs will want to know what companies are doing to directly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. A good place to start is corporate marketing departments. Think of the greenhouse gases that could cut and landfill space preserved by just saying no to tchotchkes – or at least packaging them in appropriate sized boxes stuffed with old newspapers rather than styrofoam. So, if your company is in downtown San Francisco and insists on sending Green Wombat branded bric-a-brac, just drop me a line and I’ll take a carbon-free stroll and pick it up.
Green Wombat 
Todd, I got such a kick out of reading this post. Thank you for plotting it out. Sounds like the Carbon-Neutral initiatives haven’t yet trickled down to the marketing department! I wonder how long that’ll take…
You can not place the blame for the ecological impact of the 40 miles that the FedEx truck drove to deliver your package entirely onto your package alone. I have to imagine that there were many other pickups and deliveries along the truck’s route. Would it really have been worth the hassle to save this (much smaller than you purported) ecological cost, or are you just taking hyperbolic potshots for the self-satisfying sanctimony of it?
While I applaud Mr (or Ms?) Realname’s bravado in actually signing their post, I have to wonder how they could possibly believe in what they’re saying. The point isn’t whether FedEx makes multiple pickups, but rather that the recipient is RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE SOURCE. What the heck am I doing, I don’t have time for this…what kind of name is Realname anyway? sounds French…
i like your concentration on directly offsetting your footprint instead of indirectly. although, i do think this carbon-neutral initiative is a great first step for companies like salesforce – they educate themselves through this kind of initiative, and then after some time they find themselves thinking about what more they can do to directly offset their footprint (prob becuase they save even more money – not just on the electricity savings, but on the added cost of offsetting the electricity….did that make sense?)
anyway, its a great start!
For the record, UPS is a much more eco-friendly company, pioneering the use of electric hybrids and ethanol technology for package delivery cars.
But I digress.
Isn’t this called lying? Salesforce.com is allowed to make a public statement saying its committed to environmentalism, then uses a strategy to distribute its crap that’s so inefficient, so wasteful. Why do we let corporate america lie to us in their advertising? Why is every product, important and/or worthless, sold using a snakeoil sales technique? A pciture of a polar bear on a box rife with waste. Smoke and mirrors, all of it. Enough please. Its so blatant that the only people I know who buy into this consumer society explosion of image before everything else are strange and shallow citizens. We wonder why depression is so common amongst age groups 0-80.
Todd – Great article. A real wake-up to those companies who will claim eco-friendly status. They must walk the walk, or they will be called out on it. Amen.
JohnJohn – I worked for UPS not so many years ago in Portland, Oregon. Eco-friendly? Not where I was at. Every single night the trucks would come in to be HAND-WASHED by a guy with a hose – wasting thousands upons thousands of gallons. Mind you, these trucks were clean to begin with. . yet they received a nightly washing. UPS can afford washing stalls that use reclaimed ‘dirty’ water, no? A small point, but I may as well share the recollection.
You just made a PR guy laugh pretty hard. I think the industry is learning as it goes. Old school tech and green haven’t always gone hand-in-hand. I’m sure there will be plenty of fumbles along the way.
No accounting for commom sense. One might ask salesforce what the dalai lama would do :o) Mr. Swain, I love your referal to salesforce as ‘old school’!
Davie G,
For the record, you might want to research your comments a little bit more. FedEx has always been eco-friendly. Discovery Channel did a program on their use of solar energy at their Oakland hub, which produces enough power for their entire hub operations, that they pump the extra power into the California electrical grid, thus reducing the amount of fuel the utility company needs to produce electricity. Not to mention I believe they have more hybrid delivery trucks then any firm in the market today.
I think the whole idea of “carbon credits” is looney. Salesforce must be pretty smart to pimp this green BS cuz there’s so many suckers out there who buy global warming hook line + sinker. Duh. it’s 10 degrees and falling in downtown Boston today.
Maybe the cover of Business 2.0 would be more accurate by saying:
Market Green
Get Rich
🙂
Thanks for being conscious and bringing this to our attention.
Unfortunately this is just one example of questionable/inefficient/un-eco delivery methods. They probably send out swag all over the city and country. Imagine the business resources that would be wasted trying to develop the most eco friendly method to deliver every package? In this case, salesforce has chosen a more efficient method for mass delivery to cut costs. As you can see, they are using the extra costs that were cut to give back to Mama Earth (to the tune of 1% of revenue). This same idea applies to tchotchkes, the company needs to promote its product to create revenue and be able to give back. This makes the customers, employees and stockholders happy and attempts to appease the enviro crowd.
While simple throwing $$ at a cause isnt the solution, how many companies are actually making any effort to be ‘carbon neutral’ or give anything back? Also, giving out coffee mugs is actually saving the environment by eliminating paper cups 😛
Great Post, thank you.
“Hippie truth”, you are clueless. Weather does not equal climate. 10 degrees in Boston on one day does not disprove global warming. Duh.
salesforce.com is yet another example of a company built on hype. Since its founding, it has been just one big PR machine, and its new green initiatives are just hype and BS. Even back in 2003, according to Fortune Magazine, Benioff spent $20million in marketing, mostly on promotional trinkets, undoubtly sourced from exploited third world workers, using depleting natural resources and shipped across the world.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2003/03/01/338759/index.htm.
In fiscal 2007, salesforec.com spent $252 million on marketing and sales vs. only $44 million on R&D. Their product needs improvement, not marketing hype. The latest – salesforce.com is suffering from outages once again – http://www.salesforcewatch.com/
Or what about benioff’s huge compound in Hawaii,
now estimated at nearly 10,000 sq ft. Flight time to Hawaii is 5 hours – back and forth for Mr. Benioff. Added to this the fuel required to ship all the building components to Hawaii. His San Francisco home is estimated to be 15,000 sq. ft. Think about the resources to heat and cool that place.
Hot air extends to Benioff’s new foundation. What if his Buddah benelvelance started with treating his own customers fairly and ethically – instead of nickle and diming them for features that should have been built into the product in the first place, trapping small business owners with automatic renewal deception, making it difficult to retrieve your own data should you wish to migrate to another service or locking in their partners with the proprietary apex system.
This attempt at green cred by salesforce.com is just another fake puffed up full of S__T positioning exercise by salesforce.com
when are we going to start doing business differently? maybe all marketing departments should be fired. or maybe they could just THINK. do we really need more plastic crap that ends up in a landfill in asia? not to mention the paper it was sent in was most likely someone else’s habitat? would someone in SF organize a grass roots effort to collect all this crap and deliver it (by hand, of course) back to them?