Meet the New Left: Small-Business Owners | The Nation

Ally LaTourelle went to law school expecting to become an environmental lawyer, but instead wound up on the frontiers of industrial reinvention. She is vice president of BioAmber, a company creating biodegradable alternatives to replace the toxic petrochemicals that now permeate industry. “From learning about the law, I was convinced that sustainable business is the engine for systemic change,” LaTourelle explains. “Sustainable business rights the sinking ship, because it creates underlying value and economic integrity. It is more in line with the reality we are facing of limited resources and a global population surge.” 

About the Author

William Greider

William Greider, a prominent political journalist and author, has been a reporter for more than 35 years for newspapers...

Also by the Author

The Bangladeshi Blood on America's Hands (Government, Labor, World)

When will free-traders-gone-wild own up to their complicity in brutal injustices like last week’s deadly factory fire?

William Greider

Obama: Mortgaging the Living to Save the Wealth of the Dead (Barack Obama, Economic Policy, Politics)

Obama’s “chained CPI” saves only half of what the estate tax exemption loses. Do dead millionaires really matter more than Social Security?

William Greider

Among its pioneering products, BioAmber has a platform chemical—derived from sugar beets, corn or agricultural waste—that can replace petrochemicals in personal-care products like lotions and is “100 percent natural, biodegradable, eco-certified and sustainable,” the company says. Another BioAmber innovation will be used for biodegradable automotive plastics. These new chemicals are not only renewable and nontoxic; they will dramatically reduce the oil needed in auto manufacturing and the gasoline required by lighter cars. This industrial revolution is only beginning, and it has enormous promise for creating a sustainable economy. But the United States lags behind other nations, in large part because the chemical industry has used its squads of lobbyists and lawyers in Washington to block the way. This is a concrete case of how the old order uses its political muscle to keep a new and better way from replacing it. 

Last summer, another bioplastics company, Purac, announced a new biodegradable product that can replace styrene, the ubiquitous plastic used in appliances, luggage, telephone casings, sporting helmets, auto parts and electronics. Styrene is everywhere in our consumer society. It is also a cancer-causing agent, as experts have known for decades, but the EPA has failed to classify it as such. The chemical companies, joined by other industrial sectors, have repeatedly blocked federal action with relentless lobbying, spurious scientific objections, lawsuits and back-room fixes in Congress. The best that government has achieved so far has been to say that styrene is “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” 

LaTourelle and the ASBC are wildly outnumbered, but they have plunged into the thickets of Washington politics to speak for the innovators. She testified at a congressional hearing last year because word was being spread among House members that regulating styrene and other toxic chemicals would be a job killer. “We wanted government to know there is an industry out there of nontoxic substitutes that can get to scale very quickly and provide the marketplace with alternatives,” LaTourelle says. 

The thirty-year failure to designate chemicals like styrene, formaldehyde and chromium in drinking water as carcinogens is one of the great scandals of modern governance. It hasn’t stirred the indignation it warrants because it’s difficult for the press and public to follow regulatory actions. Meaningful events are spread over years, not weeks or months, and the crucial discussions often occur behind closed doors at law firms. Meanwhile, some 70 million Americans are still drinking water laced with chromium—the scandal Erin Brockovich exposed twenty years ago. 

The ASBC learned that ingenious lobbying by the chemical crowd has seduced the Small Business Administration into fronting for big business’s demands to kill new regulations. An investigation by the Center for Effective Government, a watchdog group, uncovered e-mail traffic from industry lobbyists coaching SBA officials on what to say. When the SBA meets with trade associations, the conclaves are typically dominated by big-business lawyers and lobbyists from outfits like the US Chamber of Commerce and the NFIB—no press or public allowed. David Levine of the ASBC wangled an invitation to let one of his council’s representatives attend a private meeting. The ASBC rep felt lonely and out of place. 

Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!

Despite these odds, Ally LaTourelle isn’t feeling defeated. She confidently predicts the big boys are going to lose their fight against sustainability because bioproducts of many kinds, developed and produced in many other countries, are already coming onto the global market. “These changes are really inevitable, because the alternatives are already here,” she says. “Stalling the inevitable is the most the industry can do. Stalling through litigation is what good lawyers do—I’m an attorney, so I can say that. It’s a classic technique for draining resources [from a competitor] or drawing attention away from new business opportunities.” 

BioAmber itself is truly global—based in France, Canada, China and the United States—and it competes with dozens of fledgling producers around the world. “Our compliance department has a global perspective,” LaTourelle says. “Our clients and customers can check the database and see for themselves that this chemical is banned in California or that chemical is banned in Germany, and another is not allowed in Canada but is allowed in the United States. The US chemical companies have created a dark shadow over their industry. They are not doing anybody any good—including themselves.” 

By using their outsize political influence to protect their own profits, the established industrial powers are blocking progress. That might be admired in business schools still preaching that the bottom line comes before everything else, but it does long-term injury to America’s future. 

Small-business people can change things. With their various shades of green, they can awaken the populace and help build a future-looking consensus. Ally LaTourelle thinks it’s possible. “To me, sustainable business is not only about injecting the concept of the public commons back into the marketplace, which is critical to our economic survival and social fabric,” she says. “It’s also just plain common sense.”

William Greider blogs regularly at TheNation.com. His latest dispatch: “Why Don’t White-Collar Criminals Get Equal Time?”