It's critical that consumers and employees hold businesses accountable to their social marketing hype, says Adam Werbach, the former Sierra Club President-turned-sustainability chief for advertising giant Saatchi and Saatchi. And "we've got to get out of this thinking that says sustainability is only about being green," he told attendees of this year's Net Impact Conference, a national gathering of social innovators at Cornell University.

Werbach, the CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi S -- the marketing icon's new sustainability arm -- is also the author of the new book, Strategy for Sustainability, in which he urges the business world to consider long-term profitability and transparency and not just environmentalism in its sustainability goals going forward. At 23, Werbach was named to head the Sierra Club; he was its youngest-ever president. Now 35, Werbach -- who sold his global PR and marketing firm, Act Now, to Saatchi last year -- says he has expanded his definition of sustainability to include  "internal innovation" by companies in every aspect of how they make, buy, sell, and produce their products.

Just as key now as being green, Werbach says, is how closely aligned companies are with their employees and customers -- and how outspoken these stakeholders are in making sure the companies they work for or patronize walk the talk. "The financial meltdown marked the beginning of a new relationship between companies and their customers," Werbach said Saturday, "... and acting on the right values across the board is critical."

Werbach, who says he's been "an activist all [his] life but [nonprofit] environmentalism wasn't moving fast enough," told conferees that the Great Recession has been a bit like a wildfire, burning away the weakest underbrush so that new growth may replace it. Out of last year's financial meltdown, he says, will come "whole new breeds of companies" focused on long-term profitability by being transparent about their operations, more engaged with their customers, and more networked with social issues [including environmentalism] that interest them.

Werbach says these goals, to be effective, must be: actionable by every employee; core to the business objectives of the company; achievable in 10-15 years, and clear and simple enough to inspire employees and customers, alike. Werbach says that Toyota, for example, has set a North Star goal, which is "to create cars that never crash and clean the air as they drive." Or consider Starbucks Coffee, which has as its North Star goal the idea that "local is important." The company is moving toward buying all of its coffee as fair-trade and making all of its cups recyclable and re-usable, Werbach says. Meanwhile, Wal-mart's North Star goals, Werbach says, involve having only sustainable products in its stores and 100 percent renewable energy powering the company, plus zero waste. "It is green-washing or local-washing?" Werbach asked his audience. "Let's see how they do it."

To be sure, Werbach said, some companies "cheat" when it comes to marketing themselves for sustainability. But that's why, he said, everyone in the audience "needs to be an activist. The corporate world needs this infusion of employee and customer activism right now because the business world is on the verge of change," he said. "American consumers and businesses seem ready to make changes to save the planet but our challenge as activists now is to give companies something to do."

Werbach urged customers and employees to make their views known to store managers and company executives, and to hold companies strictly accountable to their stated objectives on sustainability, corporate responsibility, and social innovation. "We all need to be reminded that more socially responsible behavior is not just important to the planet," Werbach said, "but important to companies to survive in a marketplace where customers have never before had so many options."

Last Saturday, I had the privilege of being a "pitch coach" at dosomething.org's Social Action Boot Camp in New York City. I was one of 60 official "old persons" [people in business over 30] invited by the organization's CEO [and chief old person] Nancy Lublin, to help coach some of the 14- to 22-year-old participants on their pitches to start and sustain a cause. Their training for the day included how to write a not-for-profit business plan and how to build a successful Web site for less than $10, as well as how to brand and market their causes and start a social enterprise.

I and my fellow coaches, which included VH1 President Tom Calderone and Deutsch Bank Managing Director Steven Beck, didn't participate until the final hours; the young entrepreneurs practiced the funding pitches they'd created earlier in the day and then tried them out on us. It was our job to critique them. Each of the best three pitches were later awarded $1,000.

I consider myself a tough listener; as a journalist and a media executive, I'm pitched daily by nonprofits and social enterprises. But these kids? Most of them had me at hello, and not simply because of their idealism. Their fearless pragmatism and their clarity of purpose, process, and design distinguished them.

One pitch I heard was from Liz Hesterberg, a junior at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she is working to create a nonprofit to raise awareness of child soldiers and the war in Uganda, as well as raise money for a youth center to be built there. Another pitch came from Rebecca Kantar, a senior at Newton North High School in Massachusetts and a founding member of Minga, a teen-run, not-for-profit group working to ease the global child sex trade by educating teens worldwide.

But the real star of the day was Nancy Lublin, Do Something's CEO and lead entrepreneur--the person spearheading these boot camps. "Young people possess the energy, creativity and motivation to rock the world," Lublin told me and the other coaches she assembled last Saturday. "We're here to help them do it."

I first met Lublin in 2006, at a cover shoot for a Contribute Magazine lead story I had assigned as Contribute's Editor-in-Chief that was called "21 Under 40" - profiling 21 young social activists [including Lublin] to watch. Lublin's own story was and remains especially inspiring: Her first activist campaign, she says, was liberating the purple crayons in pre-school after one loud boy had declared them "not allowed for girls." Then, one February more than a decade ago -- when Lublin was a law student at NYU -- she remembers returning to her then-West Village apartment, only to find a $5,000 check waiting for her in her mailbox, sent to her from the estate of her great-grandfather, who had died years earlier. But Lublin, then 23, didn't spend it on herself. Instead, she used it to team up with three nuns in the Bronx to start Dress for Success, the now world-known nonprofit that collects new and gently used business suits to give to women trying to transition from welfare to work, women who often don't have suitable outfits for job interviews.

Initially, Lublin ran the organization out of her tiny student apartment while continuing to attend law school, all the while loudly recruiting donations from her friends and family. "I was a fundamentalist not-for-profit person," she told Contribute reporter Jesse Ellison. "I was evangelical." But when her place became overrun with donated clothes -- to the point where there was jewelry in the vegetable crisper and suits hanging from her shower rod -- Lublin knew she was really on to something. Today, Dress for Success is an international operation with 75 affiliates -- and Do Something, a nonprofit Lublin was recruited to lead in 2003, has gone from being an "old-school" nonprofit on the brink of financial collapse to becoming one of the most popular and Internet-savvy nonprofits for youth in this country.

And Lublin is just getting started. By 2011, she says, her goal is that at least 2 million kids are taking action and reporting back to Do Something about their work. Judging by her past track record, Lublin will certainly make that goal. It's all about walking the talk, she says, and teaching others how to do the same.

True to form, at the end of the day Saturday--just before the pitch session began--Lublin asked the group to recite with her Do Something's rallying cry, which goes as follows:

I am not a rock star. I am not Bill Gates.

I've never sold an Internet company.

But I can rock change.

And I can do something before I go to bed tonight.

So look out world!

I am starting now.

They're on their way.

For more information on Lublin and Do Something, go to www.dosomething.org.

Eben Bayer has declared war on Styrofoam - what he calls "that toxic white stuff" that can be found in the walls of your home, in coffee cups, in packaging, in your back yard and along the sides of the highway. Styrofoam, he says, takes up more space in landfills than any other type of trash.

And the famous Garbage Patch -- that floating island of plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean that's bigger than Texas? It, too, contains a huge amount of ground-up Styrofoam, Bayer says -- and it's killing the birds and fish that feed on it. "Our planet's toxic addiction to plastics is poisoning our environment and our bodies," he says.

So Bayer, the son of a Vermont farmer, and his ex-classmate, Gavin McIntyre, co-founded Ecovative Design, a new company based in Green Island, N.Y., that uses the fibers in mushroom roots and seed husks to produce a type of organically-grown material -- called "greensulate" -- that can be used as a Styrofoam replacement. [The two met as mechanical-engineering students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.]

But don't look for an assembly line at the 10-employee firm. Look for dark rooms instead. Ecovative grows mycelium (mushroom roots)  in a bed of agricultural by-products including buckwheat husks. After about 10-14 days, the root systems, seeded on metal panels, are baked in an oven at between 100 and 150 degrees Fahrenheit and then "harvested" for use in any number of applications. One top app, Bayer says, is called "Ecocradle" - a strong, paper-like material that has the same thermal and physical properties as Styrofoam.

"This material is 100 percent compostable in your own garden," Bayer says, "and for each unit of this material that we create, we release 10 times less CO2 that's in the same volume of Styrofoam and use eight times less energy."

But Bayer isn't stopping there. To help market the product, Bayer has launched an online awareness campaign that asks people around the world to take pictures of the Styrofoam waste they see -- using their camera phones or computers -- and to email them to stop@toxicwhitestuff.com. Bayer plans to aggregate all such content into a Web site that he says will be the equivalent of "a loud, resounding, global 'no'" which he hopes will encourage others to come up with similarly new materials "to replace the thousands of plastics polluting the environment today."

So far, Bayer's Ecocradle and "white stuff war" has earned him a new round of public attention. Bayer, Ecovative's CEO and a 2009 PopTech Fellow, just announced that Ecovative won the Opportunity Green OG25 competition and that his "Ecocradle" is being featured as one of 100 top innovations in the December issue of Popular Science.

Not bad for two 24-year-olds out to grow environmental change that's sustainable.