Surfrider CEO Jim Moriarty explains the green business revolution.

Question: Why have businesses started going green?

Jim Moriarty: I think businesses understood what they needed to understand and that is that their business models over a ten-- So businesses are responsible to their stake holders. They don’t answer to the CEO or just the board. That’s kind of a mythical, simplistic view, oh, everyone answers to the CEO. No. They actually answer to the stake holders, the stake holders or the stockholders and the stock goes up and down based on their confidence in a business’s understanding of the future and how to capitalize on the future. So all of a sudden people look at Wal-Mart, hey, it’s growing great, oh, it’s doubling, it’s tripling, it’s buying this nation and everything else, and Wal-Mart’s growing, great growth story. Okay, but at what cost? Oh, there’s this issue of labor here, there’s this issue, the stock goes down. All of a sudden Wal-Mart’s understanding oh, we can actually decrease our costs by having Rice-A-Roni or maybe it’s Hamburger Helper noodles flat-packed like they do in Ikea to have the packaging be smaller, save on shipping costs, save on all these things, so they’re going all the way to the bank. So Wal-Mart, big, huge monolith making great business decisions, saving money, good environmental decisions using less paper, less packing, less fuel, everything, that’s a shift in business thinking. All of a sudden Wal-Mart’s making these kind of decisions. Wal-Mart’s a leader so when Wal-Mart says something to their supply chain in a sense they’ve said it to the entire retail supply chain, clothing, food, everything, huge, huge statement. That’s the last 18-month kind of thing.

Recorded on: 9/27/07