16 Ideas for the Planet

Excessive temperatures have a greater impact on the poor who have less access to air conditioning and proper heating. Poor people have less access to health care to deal with climate-related medical problems. Water is a major problem worldwide, either because there's too much of it—the poor tend to live in flood zones—or not enough that's safe to drink.

The most powerful mechanism of change is our right to vote. We have the ability to elect officials who are going to focus on and be champions for a clean environment for clean energy. We must encourage elected officials to make energy more affordable for the poor. Oil companies need to reinvest in America and fund the research and development of new alternative fuels.

The Apollo alliance is focused on building clean energy as a solution. We've received commitments from the states of Pennsylvania, Washington and California to request that a certain percentage of the energy produced there will come from alternative sources. Those alternatives will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and on fossil fuels and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. There's as much energy on top of the ground as in it. We've been too dependent on drilling for energy.

We have a very narrow window to fix the problem. Our earth is in critical condition and we are the life support. It's going to require a diverse coalition of people and businesses and organizations to come together with one goal: to save the earth, and to save humanity.

MARY T'KACH
Executive director, Environmental Sustainability for Aveda

Since our inception in 1978, our focus has been on producing plant-based personal-care products. Currently, 90 percent of the essential oils that go into our products are certified organic, and, as we continue to learn about the functionality of plants, we are able to use even more. That's been a lot of work for our suppliers. In terms of the industry, we're certainly a leader, as a lot of companies have come into organics. In the scope of personal- care products, we're small but we've been a catalyst for so much change. The packaging of products, to how stores get designed, we're always getting chased. So it's good to see the big players step in and say there's some action there. It's competition for us. It keeps us on our toes and forces us to get better.

We're thrilled that more people are becoming aware of the social and environmental impacts of these things. In general, I think consumers are oblivious to what is in their product. We look at the entire lifecycle of the product and the package, from the ground to the bottle. We believe that sustainable agriculture is a better method of sourcing raw materials, certainly better than something coming out of a nonrenewable barrel of oil. One hundred percent of the energy used at our distribution center and manufacturing facility in Blaine, Minn., is from wind energy. Aveda is the largest private purchaser of wind energy in the state of Minnesota.