[Editor's Note: Article amended February 17, 2011.]

Honest Tea, the fast-growing 13-year-old vendor of organic teas, first attracted the attention of Coca-Cola back in 2008, when the fizzy drinks giant took a 40 percent stake in the green-minded startup. Today, CEO Seth Goldman announced that Honest Tea had notified its shareholders of Coke's decision to exercise its option to buy the balance of those shares, almost three years to the day after their original agreement. The deal is on track to close within the next few weeks.

The deal would cap a period of accelerating growth for the Bethesda, Md.-based tea brand. Sales peaked at some 100 million units of bottles and bags last year, bringing sales close to $100 million, Goldman explained, thanks in part to a boost in distribution that came from the original deal with Coke.

"We've seen growth three-fold," said Goldman, thanks in part to current or pending distribution deals with major national chains including CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid. The high point of Honest Tea's arrival to the mainstream, Goldman joked, may have been marked when the company appeared as a clue in a New York Times Friday crossword puzzle. The clue, "Honest ______ (drink brand)." The answer: Honest Ade, not Tea -- one for the experts.

In a nod to Goldman’s central role as founder and CEO -- or TeaEO -- Coke has ensured that he maintains an equity stake in the operation and will continue to run the brand. The move is unprecedented, Goldman told attendees at the State of Green Business Forum today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Coke has a well-evolved business process for buying up small-brands, transitioning out the founder and folding the products into the parent's larger manufacturing, distribution and marketing operations. "A veteran of the beverage business told me that after a takeover, for the first few weeks, they want to know your opinion, for the next few weeks, they want to know your telephone number, and after that they don't want to know you," said Goldman. "This was unusual for Coke, but came from the chairman."

Speaking with GreenBiz.com's senior writer, Marc Gunther, Goldman acknowledged the decision stirs charges that the organic tea brand is compromising its green integrity. Honest Tea has cultivated sustainable practices among its tea suppliers to achieve USDA certified organic status. It has also ruled out using high fructose corn syrup, and has certified its products as Fair Trade.

Goldman dismisses the charge, arguing that scaling up his business is the path to delivering the greatest benefits most broadly. "It's easy to fall into a 'big is bad, small is good' trap," said Goldman. "To those critics, I ask, 'What's your strategy to change corporate America?'"

Coke has proven loath to tinker with Honest Tea's green appeal -- even in the face of tension with the newcomer. The companies attracted national attention in 2010 when The New York Times detailed a conflict over Honest Tea's decision to brand its kids' beverage line as free of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), despite pressure from Coke. The big drink brand was facing charges over the synthetic nature of the corn-derived sweetener along with the high calorie count of its fizzy drinks.

[Editor's note: This article was authored by BSR, a global business network and consultancy focused on sustainability.]

As climate change sets in, its impacts -- increasing severity of storms and weather disasters, receding snow and rivers, advancing deserts, and more frequent landslides and floods -- will test companies' ability to effectively deliver high-quality products and services.

In response, BSR is launching a series of briefs to illustrate how these changes will affect each industry and what current adaptation practices look like, beginning with an examination of the food, beverage, and agriculture sector (PDF).

Some effects of climate change will be familiar, such as crop failures and ensuing price shocks, but over the next several years, they will happen with more frequency and with even higher insurance costs. Beyond direct business impacts, companies will also need to understand how climate change will affect their most vulnerable stakeholders -- the poor, citizens of developing countries, and women -- who will face increasing risks due to drought, disease vectors, and the perils of migration.

The good news is that many resources on business adaptation to climate change are already available (see end of article). McKinsey & Company developed a cost curve for adaptation (PDF), for example, which highlights different adaptation options and shows that investment paybacks can be short. Also, companies do not need to choose between adapting to climate change and helping to mitigate it; the distinction between these two is rarely clear and we should do both together.

There are also tools that translate state-of-the-art climate monitoring, prediction, and imagery into practical information to help companies improve their relevant governance and decision-making processes. These tools include: the Climate Administration Knowledge Exchange (CAKE), Google Earth Engine, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center, and weADAPT. Companies can also take advantage of new market opportunities by providing solutions to enable effective adaptation.

There are several obstacles to climate adaptation, even for those most committed to proactive and responsible responses. First, the language of adaptation does not resonate well beyond specialists, so communicating on the topic is difficult. As Carmel McQuaid, Climate Change Manager at Marks & Spencer, recently told us, it's usually more effective to engage stakeholders by communicating on the topics that matter most to them. For example, retailers would be most concerned with their ability to continue to sell high-quality products, such as coffee. For companies that thrive on innovation, positioning adaptation as part of the portfolio of trends affecting the industry is usually more effective than treating it as a standalone topic.

Another obstacle is the complexity and uncertainty of the climate. This goes for today's weather, let alone the future of the climate more broadly, as evidenced by the fact that we are not well-equipped to handle disasters such as the recent floods in Pakistan and Australia. The fact is that we do not know how to properly prepare for disasters even when they are expected. This is partially due to the cognitive difficulty of coping with low-probability, high-impact consequences, and it is also a result of markets and organizations that don't encourage or reward proactive preparation.

Third, our first reactions may not serve us well. Companies are at risk of taking seemingly sensible actions that may lead to adverse effects elsewhere or on others. Such "maladaptation" (PDF) can take many forms, such as combating heat by turning up the air conditioning (which would produce more greenhouse gas emissions), using desalinization technologies that pollute marine environments, raising prices or otherwise excluding vulnerable customers that depend on insurance or other essential services, or giving customers more resources without the incentives to conserve.

This is partly a result of focusing on the specific, current problem at hand while not taking into account the broader repercussions. It is also a result of failing to identify where weather risk and other familiar issues have climate change dimensions.

Imagine keeping your car at full throttle in your driveway to shave a few minutes off your commute. Imagine leaving your auto at full throttle in your employer's parking lot so you could make a quick dash out to run errands at lunch. Or installing a V-8 engine in your small commuter car, even though you rarely travel at speeds greater than 55 mph.

Although we would balk at anything as wasteful as running our car when parked or supping up our small commuter car, many of us without realizing it do something similar at work with our PCs.

Under-utilization of PCs is common in most organizations. Research by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found three primary causes:

1. Most people do not turn-off their computers before leaving on evenings or weekends.
2. Even when in the office, most roles include a significant amount of time attending meetings or other non-computer work.
3. High performance PCs are overkill for most office applications. Checking email and preparing simple office documents barely uses the PC computing capabilities. In general, the more computing power, the more energy the PC will consume.

Different than cars that are equipped with a quick start ignition and a throttle to provide power as needed, PCs are relatively undeveloped. There are, however, PC energy management tools that provide a 40 to 60 percent reduction of energy costs coupled with a 12 month pay-back on the initial investment.

That's what Philippe Charpentier, former Director of Strategy and Innovation for La Poste, found when he started researching potential green projects in late 2009. La Poste is France's deregulated postal service. In addition, La Poste has diversified to become Europe's second largest package delivery service and provider of banking and insurance services to nearly 30 million consumers.

After reviewing IT best practices at over 50 global firms, Charpentier reported, "One of the most attractive projects for La Poste's green portfolio was PC energy management." La Poste manages 180,000 PCs that sat mostly idle, yet still used as much electricity as if they were fully engaged in a difficult computing problem.

After settling on PC energy management as a priority, Charpentier and his team uncovered more than 30 suppliers. His team selected a new player, AVOB (Alternative Vision of Business), with a unique approach to the problem.

"The AVOB solution does what other solutions do by automatically putting the PC into low energy mode when inactive after a specified amount of time," Charpentier explained. "That saved La Poste 50 percent on average. What AVOB does differently is to also automatically adapt power consumption of the PC depending on the task to save an additional 10 to 20 percent on the energy consumed."

Next page: Five tips for successful PC power management

[Editor's Note: This is part of a series of articles excerpted from our annual State of Green Business Report. The report takes a close look at the data behind the green business movement to track whether we're moving the needle on corporate sustainability. Download the free report here.]

The promise of a closed-loop society -- where everything is recycled endlessly into new products and packaging -- remains a distant dream, though it creeps ever closer. Companies are finding new and innovative ways to turn old things into new things. It's far from the Holy Grail of Cradle to Cradle -- in which every material is recycled back to a raw material or into a benign or beneficial soil amendment -- but it's a start.

Sometimes, a little recycling becomes a stepping-stone to a bigger achievement. For example, Starbucks announced it had completed a test toward a longstanding goal: turning used coffee cups into new cups. The coffee giant said it wants to provide only recyclable or reusable cups by 2015, and has run various recycling projects to see what its cups can be turned into. Its pilot project sent about 8,000 pounds of cups to a company that provides the post-consumer content that's been in Starbucks' cups since 2006. The pulp processor sends the pulp to various companies that make Starbucks' cups. All of the companies' cups, including the newest ones, have 10 percent recycled content.

Starbucks has put plenty of time and effort into promoting recycling of its cups. It hosted two "cup summits" to bring together all of the relevant paper and recycling players. It also sponsored a contest seeking ways to reduce the number of non-recyclable cups leaving its stores, which resulted in several submissions for how to encourage customers to opt for reusable cups. For all this, Starbucks still has a ways to go: Only a small fraction of the four billion cups it produces a year are kept out of landfills.

Walmart threw its hat into the loop, too, in the form of a pilot project with TerraCycle, the maverick manufacturer of consumer products made from branded waste packaging. TerraCycle converts waste like candy wrappers, yogurt tubs, pens, and coffee bags into products such as tote bags, plant pots, backpacks, pencil cases and portable speakers. Five U.S. Walmart stores began testing a collection system for 28 types of trash to send to TerraCycle. Walmart also launched a partnership with a firm called Worldwise, in which the retailer will sell pet products made from recycled materials -- dog beds made from used plastic soda bottles, cat scratchers made from recycled hangers, litter liners made from old paper bags, and the like.

There are others. Hasbro, maker of G.I. Joe, Transformers, and other iconic toys and games, said it would increase the recycled content of its packaging and paper materials to 75 percent in 2011. Massachusetts-based Recycline said it collected 50 tons of used polypropylene plastic in 2010 though its Gimme 5 recycling program (polypropylene is marked as No. 5 in the plastics coding system), turning it into toothbrushes and other goods. The company makes razors, plates, mixing bowls, and more out of 100 percent recycled polypropylene, which is rarely accepted in recycling programs. Pepsi-owned Naked Juice said it is making good on its plan to convert all of its bottles to recycled content. Last year, it began transitioning its juices and smoothie bottles to 100 percent post-consumer recycled content.

True, some of these efforts may seem underwhelming, given the 300 million or so tons of trash that comprise the municipal solid waste stream in the U.S. each year. But each must break through barriers to succeed, not the least of which is the lack of an infrastructure to recycle many types of packaging and product waste.

In truth, many of these efforts aren't really closed-loop. They involve increasing recycled content in products or "upcycling" waste into new products or packaging. Such cycles are finite -- perhaps amounting to just one additional use for a given item -- and eventually, most will end up in landfills. That they get a second life is laudable -- though it only delays the inevitable.

The first Urbee -- a next-generation urban electric car -- will be completed in April, according to Urbee designer Jim Kor, founder of Kor Product Design, based in Winnipeg, Canada, who spoke at last Thursday's State of Green Business Forum in Chicago.

Kor said 86 percent of designed cars are unsustainable because they use fossil fuels, and today there are almost a billion cars in the world emitting harmful carbon dioxide gases

"The problem with the cars is that it just doesn't address the environment," Kor said. "So this could mean a global ecological catastrophe."

According to Kor, the solution resides in sustainable design, which is why he designed Urbee in 1996. Cars nowadays have big grills and exhaust pipes, Kor said.

"Think the total opposite of a typical car and you're getting close to what we are talking about here, which is a low energy car," Kor said.

The Urbee car was designed using existing technologies and with the idea that cars should be easy to understand, maintain, repair and rebuild after a long life, he noted. Kor likened the Urbee to a Model T of the 21st century, or "the Volkswagen Beatle with emission and safety improvements," he said.

Urbee runs on energy from sunlight that hits solar panels on land or on a garage, as well as ethanol. The car would need to be plugged in to tap into the sun's energy source.

"It would be like winning fuel for life," he said.

According to Kor, there is a lot of energy available in sunlight, but the problem is only a small portion of that energy can be utilized. The Urbee uses less energy and more efficient horsepower than most other cars, he said.

If a Toyota Prius made the same trips as an Urbee, and both were operating on a renewable energy source, the Prius would need 12 times more energy to do the same trips, Kor asserted.

"So that's the big deal," he concluded.

Sustainable design is all about innovation. That was the message from Adam Lowry, co-founder and Chief Greenskeeper of Method Products, Inc., at last Thursday's State of Green Business Forum in Chicago. He was one of the presenters of the One Great Idea series at the two-day forum.

Prior to launching Method, headquartered in San Francisco, Lowry worked as a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution, developing software products for the modeling of climate change. Lowry was passionate about environmental issues, but wanted to do more than just work on computer software models, he said.

So he took his ideas for sustainable design and focused then on the home. He helped Method Products develop a number of successful laundry detergent products using new innovative approaches to old ways of thinking. "People often forget about innovation," said Lowry. "Innovation is not a process that happens in the absence of human beings. It's created by human beings, and more importantly for human beings."

According to Lowry, people should design with adoption in mind. Lowry said people have step-by-step directions on how to do laundry. In order to adopt a new product, people must acknowledge change.

Method Products came up with a new concept in laundry detergent by designing a super-concentrated version that's sold in many retail stores, including Walmart and Target.

Concentrated products are more consumer-friendly than the original big detergent jug consumers have to carry, he said. According to Lowry, Method products are so small, they're able to fit in your back pocket and super easy to use.

"We need to save the world through laundry detergent," Lowry said.

According to Lowry, the best innovations are self-taught. Method products reduced its packaging by more than 80 percent, which was a big hit with consumers. Lowry said product designers at the company kept in mind the end user and how people purchase detergent at the grocery store and then have to lug it home.

"Because of this new innovation, which was a small step, we plan to innovate again," Lowry said. "We will create something for the consumer that doesn't make it more difficult or questionable to do the sustainable thing."