Indigo Teiwes by Celeste LeCompte - 3.10.08
On the event of our fifth anniversary, Sustainable Industries decided to catch up with 10 subscribers who have been with us from the very first issue and get their perspective on how things have changed since 2002.
A testament to the magazine’s Northwest roots, 9 of the 10 are Portlanders, with a lone Seattle representative in the bunch. Like the rest of our readers, though, the early subscribers profiled in the following pages and online are leaders in a diverse range of industries from green building and law to food processing and investment.
The positive impact of public concerns about climate change, reflections on the growth of greenwashing and a conviction that sustainability will need to tackle social equity issues were common themes among many of the interviews. We hope these interviews provide a moment of reflection on where we’ve been and where we’re headed as part of the green business community.
Read more profiles and join the conversation by clicking here.
When Sustainable Industries last spoke with Indigo Teiwes, senior sustainability research analyst at Portfolio 21, the Portland-based boutique investment firm had just $16 million in assets under management and just a little over three years of performance under its belt [see “Investments pack Progressive punch,” SI, May 2003]. By the start of 2008, the fund had grown to $266 million, and has consistently outperformed the S&P500 and the MSCI World Equity Index, “a very respectable track record,” Teiwes notes. The firm itself has also changed, she notes; five years ago, Teiwes was the entire research department at Portfolio 21. Today, the company has 4 researchers digging through a growing universe of companies for investment opportunities.
Portfolio 21’s investment criteria have also expanded as the sustainable industries have become more sophisticated. The firm has developed sub-sector guidelines and position papers on a variety of issues: “Why we don’t invest in nuclear energy, for example, and which biofuels we believe have the greatest potential to provide solutions to ecological constraints,” writes Teiwes. The number of companies that meet Portfolio 21’s investment criteria has grown from 44 in 2002 to 133 at the start of 2008. At the same time, Teiwes notes that the growth of interest and attention has had it’s challenges: “Green-washing has emerged as the most pressing challenge in my work: How to cut through the fluff and determine which companies are actually addressing the issues and reducing their environmental impacts.”
Today, Teiwes says many of her firm’s investors take a traditional Wall Street approach and see Portfolio 21 not as a “feel good” option, but as the best investment option for capturing the market potential in green investing and managing the ecological risks which are increasingly affecting business. “I absolutely believe this is true, and our performance to date supports this,” Teiwes writes. “However, investing in one publicly traded company over another makes little difference in the larger scheme of biocapacity constraints. The whole multinational corporate system, and the global growth mentality, is unsustainable, and this is the challenge we need to address in the coming years.
“Instead of continuing on the path of unlimited growth, we need to challenge our assumption that economic growth can continue indefinitely, and instead embrace limits-based thinking. We need to approach biocapacity limits as an exhilarating challenge and opportunity for restoration. This is definitely a challenge for us as an investment company, and we certainly don’t have the answers – but we are working on them.”
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