A Mobile-based coalition of businesses, educators and community organizations is calling for nominations for its annual awards recognizing companies that have made notable environmental and economic contributions along the Gulf Coast. Partners for Environmental Progress, known locally as PEP, is accepting applications for its 12th annual Member Awards, which honor companies that have combined economic growth with environmental and social responsibility. The awards will be presented during PEP’s annual membership meeting, scheduled for April 19 from 5 to 8 p.m. at the Five Rivers Delta Resource Center. For an organization that has spent more than a decade trying to prove that industry and the environment can share the same agenda, the annual meeting has become its most visible annual statement.
A coalition built on cooperation
PEP was founded in 2000 to encourage cooperation between business and environmental interests across the Gulf Coast region. The idea was a deliberate response to a history of conflict. Mobile’s economy had been shaped for more than a century by paper mills, chemical plants, shipyards and the Port of Alabama, and for just as long those industries had been at odds with fishermen, conservationists and residents worried about the health of Mobile Bay and the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. Rather than another round of lawsuits, PEP’s founders proposed a standing table where the two camps could talk to each other instead of past each other.
The organization now counts more than 200 members, ranging from major industrial employers to small nonprofits, all working under the shared goal of promoting both economic prosperity and environmental sustainability in south Alabama. Its membership roster captures the breadth of the regional economy: heavy manufacturers with thousands of workers, engineering and construction firms, banks, utilities, waste handlers, and conservation-minded nonprofits that in an earlier era might have refused to share a room with their industrial neighbors. Monthly meetings and technical workshops have given members a place to trade ideas on air permits, stormwater management, habitat restoration and the regulatory issues that follow any company operating near the coast.
“If you look back over the past 12 years of award winners, it is apparent that our member companies are actively working to make sure that we have a clean and healthy Alabama Gulf Coast,” said PEP executive director Jennifer Denson. Denson pointed to past recipients as examples of the kind of work the awards recognize, from a company relocating gopher tortoises ahead of construction projects to a major utility testing large-scale carbon capture technology, and from a chemical manufacturer converting industrial waste into a usable product to another cutting its natural gas consumption enough to offset hundreds of vehicles driving thousands of miles a year. “PEP members are making a difference,” Denson said.
The examples are more than symbolic. The gopher tortoise, a candidate for federal protection across much of the Southeast, depends on the dry sandy uplands where many construction projects are planned, and relocating colonies before breaking ground has become a way for developers to avoid costly delays while preserving a species whose numbers have declined for decades. Carbon capture testing by a regional utility placed south Alabama among the handful of places in the country where the technology to keep power-plant emissions out of the atmosphere has been demonstrated at scale. Converting industrial waste streams into marketable products, meanwhile, turns a disposal cost into revenue while shrinking what goes into landfills.
The region’s biggest employers, and its smallest firms
Member companies include some of the region’s largest employers, among them Alabama Power, Mobile Gas and Austal USA, alongside smaller firms and nonprofit partners. Alabama Power’s generating stations and service operations anchor energy employment across the region; Mobile Gas delivers natural gas to homes and businesses across the greater Mobile area; and Austal USA, the shipbuilder on the Mobile River, has grown into one of the city’s signature industrial employers with its work on Navy combat vessels. Their participation gives PEP a credibility with industry that pure advocacy groups lack, and their environmental staffs supply much of the technical expertise the organization draws on.
PEP also works closely with groups such as the Mobile Chamber of Commerce, the Mobile Metropolitan Planning Organization’s Citizens Advisory Committee, Mobile United’s Natural Resources Committee, the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program’s Executive Committee, Alabama Coastal Cleanup and the Coastal Kids Quiz program. The ties matter because environmental outcomes in coastal Alabama rarely respect the boundaries of a single organization. The Mobile Bay National Estuary Program coordinates scientific monitoring and restoration planning for the bay system; the Alabama Coastal Cleanup mobilizes thousands of volunteers each year to clear litter from beaches, bayous and waterways; and the Coastal Kids Quiz puts elementary students from across the region on stage to test what they have learned about the ecosystem that surrounds them. PEP’s leaders argue that a business community seated alongside these groups produces better policy than one locked out of the conversation.
This year’s award categories are expected to again reflect the diversity of the region’s economy, spanning manufacturing, shipbuilding, engineering, construction, health care, finance and personal services. The spread is intentional. Health care systems, banks and professional firms may not run smokestacks, but they consume power and water, generate waste and make siting decisions that shape the landscape. Organizers said the judging criteria emphasize creativity and best practices rather than the sheer scale of a company’s environmental footprint. “Because the focus of the awards is on best practices and innovation and not simply overall environmental impact, small businesses are just as likely to be recognized as larger companies,” Denson said. A five-employee firm that redesigns its process to cut waste, in other words, can outrank a plant that spends millions on end-of-pipe treatment.
Nominees are reviewed and selected by PEP’s board of directors through an individual priority voting process, with an eye toward recognizing companies that have adopted more earth-friendly practices in their operations. The board-based selection keeps the judging in the hands of members who understand both the technical and business sides of what a nominee has done, rather than an outside panel unfamiliar with the region’s industries.
“Too often we only hear negative comments about industry and the environment,” Denson said. “We are honored to recognize our local member companies’ innovation and commitment to environmental stewardship. A clean environment is good for business. Our past award recipients demonstrate that being environmentally conscious and innovative is also good for the company bottom line.” That argument — stewardship as strategy rather than sacrifice — has been PEP’s signature message since its founding, and the awards are designed to document it with local proof.
Recognizing the community partners
In addition to the Member Awards, PEP also presents a Community Partners in Recognition Award to organizations outside its business membership that have made significant environmental contributions. Last year’s recipients were the Mobile County Commission and Goodwill Easter Seals of the Gulf Coast, honored for establishing and operating the Mobile County Recycling Center. The pairing of a county government and a social services nonprofit was itself a statement about how environmental work gets done in the community: government provided the site and the public mandate, while Goodwill Easter Seals supplied operational capacity and workforce involvement.
The facility gave West Mobile residents a local drop-off option for household recyclables, including aluminum, paper, cardboard, glass and non-alkaline batteries, sparing many of them a roundtrip of 25 miles or more to the nearest recycling center. Before it opened, convenience had been the single biggest obstacle to household recycling in much of the county; a family willing to separate its waste had no place nearby to take it. The project was funded through $2.4 million in federal grants tied to offshore oil and gas revenue, money that flows to coastal states to help offset the impacts of offshore energy production and to support conservation and public facilities in the communities that host that industry.
“These award-winning companies exemplify PEP’s mission to promote sustainable economic growth while conserving, protecting and restoring the natural resources that make our region a unique and desirable place to live and do business,” Denson said. The mission statement draws a direct line between the health of Mobile Bay, the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and the Gulf beaches, and the region’s ability to recruit and keep employers. Recruiters for the Port City have long understood that a company choosing between Gulf Coast locations weighs quality of life as heavily as tax abatements, and a bay fouled by pollution would cost the region jobs as surely as any recession.
The deadline to submit Member Award nominations is Feb. 26 at 5 p.m. Applications can be submitted by email to [email protected]. Additional information about the nomination process, past award recipients and the April membership meeting is available at www.pepmobile.org. Denson urged members not to let capable companies go unnominated, noting that many of the practices the awards celebrate go unpublicized because the companies that adopt them are busy running their businesses. The annual meeting at Five Rivers, where the honors will be handed out in April, doubles as the organization’s largest gathering of the year, drawing the industrial, civic and environmental leadership of the Gulf Coast into a single room on the banks of the delta the awards are meant to protect.
Twelve years in, the awards program has become part of how south Alabama measures its own progress. The region’s economy has repeatedly bounced between booms tied to shipbuilding, energy and the port, and busts that followed when those industries turned down. Through all of it, PEP has kept its membership — and its awards list — pointed at the same proposition: that the companies willing to innovate on the environment are the ones most likely to still be operating on the Gulf Coast a generation from now.