Green Options

The year 2008 has been a great year for innovative, eco-friendly products. Technology has really been tapped to provide solutions to many key environmental issues. One of the coolest technologies to emerge, the Solio, has been featured on CNBC, NBC’s the Today Show, MacDirectory, and was awarded National Geographic’s ‘Best of Gear’ award. The Solio website even has a picture of President-elect Barack Obama with his Solio.
Solio is a hybrid [...]

Are you a consumer products company looking for a new product that redefines and reinvigorates its product category, and is eco-friendly? Today could be your lucky day. Brandimage, one of the largest international design agencies in the world, has just the product for you. Jim Warner, Managing Director of Industrial Design, and his team recently launched the 360 Paper Water Bottle, an innovative, eco-friendly solution that needs a brand home.
Each day, Americans throw out 60 million plastic bottles. Only 14% actually get recycled-meaning 86% (or over 51 million) become garbage or litter. This fact drove Brandimage to develop the first totally recyclable paper container made from 100% renewable resources. According to Brandimage the new Paper water Bottle is “Versatile in its range of consumer applications and made from food-safe and fully recyclable materials, and decreases energy consumed through the product life cycle without sacrificing functionality. It is paper packaging that stands up to all liquid categories.”

According to Brandimage the “360 Paper Water Bottle utilizes pressed sustainable material with encapsulated micro-thin PLA film barrier to challenge ‘the norm’ of the category around the world.”

Just days before the Thanksgiving holiday, Lee Scott, announced that as of February 1, 2009 he will step down as the CEO of WalMart. The CEO position will then be filled by Mike Duke, head of international operations.
Now, WalMart is by no means a saint, and makes for an easy target as the world’s largest retailer but it is hard to identify another company that has made such a dramatic transformation and taken such a leadership role in advancing green operations and standards in their industry than WalMart.

During his nine-year tenure as CEO, WalMart experienced severe public criticism, plummeting stock prices, and the retailer fell off the radar for the large majority of consumers lured by Target or Costco.
Much of the eco-friendly innovations in the retail industry today were initiated by Walmart, under the leadership of Lee Scott. Just last month, at the company’s sustainability summit in China last month, Lee Scott laid out even stricter environmental standards, saying;

“Our goal is for the supplier factories to meet or exceed all social and environmental laws and regulations” Wal-Mart President and CEO Scott told the gathering on Wednesday. “I want to be direct: My intention here is to send a strong message about how serious we are. Meeting social and environmental standards is not optional.”

Followed by this stern statement; “If they still do not improve, they will be banned from making products for Wal-Mart,” Scott said.

In 1953, almost 60 years ago, in his American Marketing Association presidential address, Professor Neil Borden of Harvard Business School, introduced the term “marketing mix” and in 1960 E. Jerome McCarthy supplemented that concept with the 4 P’s of Marketing. Ever since then, every student of marketing has learned the 4 P’s of marketing; Product, Pricing, Promotion, Placement. In recent years, and not for the first time, these once-seen as fundamental concepts are coming under scrutiny in the wake of a dramatically altered landscape.

The reality is that consumers shop differently than they did 50 years ago and expect different things from your brand. First, consumers want to learn about your product on their time. Traditional push, top-down, or inside-out oriented marketing from the marketing department that interrupts a consumer experience is ineffective. Think TiVo, iPod, pop-up blockers. Sure, they’ll consume your media – when they want to – not when it is pushed on them. Why don’t commercials get TiVo’d during the Super Bowl? It is part of the experience, for some it is the most important experience, of watching the Super Bowl.

Having a tough time trying to find that perfect gift for your ecopreneur? Below are just 4 oft-recommended books from a variety of topics that may interest the ever hard-to-buy-for ecopreneur. Best of luck on your holiday shopping and if you have any other books that you would recommend please let us know!
Against the Gods – A worldwide bestseller for the ecopreneur that would enjoy a very interesting, historical perspective on entrepreneurialism and the concept of risk. Google book describes it as a “narrative that reads like a novel, chronicles the remarkable intellectual adventure that liberated humanity from the oracles and soothsayers by means of the powerful tools of risk management that are available to us today. This is a richly-woven tale of Greek philosophers and Arab mathematicians, of merchants and scientists, gamblers and philosophers, world-renowned intellects and obscure but inspired amateurs who helped discover the modern methods of putting the future at the service of the present, replacing helplessness before the fates with choice and decision.”
Preview it at Google Books here

Triple Bottom Line – Andrew Savitz. If you have not already come across this book, now is the time. A must read for ecopreneurs, business managers, social responsibility managers, and consumers and investors. The Triple Bottom Line illustrates the connection between the financial, social, and environmental bottom lines of any operation and demonstrates that innovative and profitable solutions to the real problems companies face can come from sustainability. This book is becoming one of the essential pieces of literature guiding many of today’s top companies transition into a more sustainable business model.
Preview it at Google Books here.

I’m a firm believer in voting with your dollars. One of the most effective ways to effectuate change is to voice your opinion by the way you spend your hard-earned money. If you want to support renewable energies, sustainable fabrics, green building or fair trade products - then buy them. You, and all those that “vote” with you, will get attention simply because every business wants to provide what consumers want.
This weekend America will celebrate what has become the greatest logistically challenging holiday in its history – Black Friday. The one day retailers, online and offline, as well as economy and industry analysts, wake up and just watch the numbers,. The staffing, sourcing, shipping, & production cycles generated to meet the demands of this massive consumption holiday are tremendous. All are hoping to capture at least a small portion of consumers’ massive holiday wallet spend.

In the tone of the national election that a record-breaking number of us participated in, we have the opportunity to send a strong signal of support for eco & socially responsible products this Black Friday. For some, this means Friday will be a “Buy Nothing Day”, accompanied by local swap meet events. For others Black Friday will be more of a Green Friday.

Maybe the title should instead read “How to Fail at ‘Greening’ Your Business”. Often times companies seem to approach “green” or eco-friendly as just another product attribute that can simply be added to packaging or website to reach the “green” consumer segment. In the rush to be eco-friendly, and due to the typical structure of many organizations, the marketing team will take the lead of the greening effort and, in the interest of time & energy, they’ll create a brilliant plan to communicate “green” to a target consumer group, but no internal alignment.
The sustainability and marketing strategies of a typical entrepreneur are often times based on the same model - the shotgun approach. Typically, entrepreneurs start to think about marketing after at least 6 months of hitting the pavement, and then sustainability appears as part of a new “marketing plan” or is seen as some kind of charitable giving / community relations campaign. Sustainable business is neither part of a marketing campaign nor a community relations effort. Neither is it about shifting revenue, but rather how revenue is generated.

No matter which presidential candidate walks away today with a key to the oval office, I’ll be a happy man. It’s not at all that I don’t care who sits in the hot seat on Pennsylvania Avenue - rather I’m just happy that I don’t need to be worried about a military coup or massive riots whether Obama or McCain wins the election.
Beyond the rhetoric, the mud-slinging, the polls, and even the “issues” is the fact that this “American Experiment” of democracy is greater than any candidate running for office, or political party. Like Thomas M. DeFrank at nydailynews says

“After 931 days of campaigning, 109 primaries and caucuses, 47 debates and $5 billion spent, this marathon election nears its historic finish. Whatever Tuesday’s verdict, America will demolish political barriers that have stood through 55 quadrennial contests by choosing its first African-American President or its first female vice president.”

The previous 2 presidential elections (2000, 2004) also generated record levels of interest and voters from both sides of the political fence, much like today’s election. Following those elections, the country seemed to become very politically divided and the whole thing created a new breed of partisan-based patriotism. No matter who wins today, the next president will have the challenge of uniting the country and bringing opinions together to reach consensus. So when it comes to eco-policy, just how different are democrats & republicans?

With all the hype surrounding web 2.0, it seems odd that we are already talking about web 3.0, or what some are calling the semantic web. One of the key reasons driving the move towards a new web is the pending shortage of addresses. Both Google and Yahoo are moving towards the new semantic web, but today you can try it out on Truevert, the new Green Web Search Engine.
So just what exactly is the future of the web? Below is a snapshot of some of the buzz surrounding what to expect from the next web.
(Image Credit)
Semantic Search – Well, I’ve read far too much about semantic search and to the best of my understanding it appears that they’ve taught computers to learn the meaning of words based on popular interaction. I could have very easily jumbled that definition so here are some more resources and how the folks over at Truevert describe it.

“Truevert is a truly semantic search engine. Truevert learns the meaning of words directly from the documents that it reads. It does not rely on a prebuilt taxonomy, ontology, dictionary or thesaurus or limit search to only a small hand-selected group of sites.”

And this new version of Truevert is “focused on green, environmental awareness. All searches are done from the point of view of environmental and social concern.” Looking for more on the new semantic web, and web 3.0? Check out Twine! and the links below.
Web 3.0 org.
CNET Article

I know it’s a little premature to be talking about 2009 but I wanted to beat the rush, so here are some of things we have to look forward to in 2009.

Honda hybrid - Apparently someone finally convinced Honda that the ‘cover up half of the back tire’ look was downright ugly and so in 5 short months Honda lovers can own a Honda hybrid …without having to tint the windows so much. No word yet on mpg.

Energy - What do the Phoenix Suns, Jay Leno, and Sun Chips have in common? They’ve all gone solar. Look for the conversation surrounding energy sources to turn up a notch, what with T. Boone flying everywhere to promote his energy plan for the U.S.A., and businesses taking energy procurement or energy-creation under their own wings as part of company strategy. In 2009, and more so in the following years, expect to see the energy industry decentralize and the ability to choose where you get your energy from. What Dean Foods is doing in Gooding, ID (turning cow poo into energy) is a good example of what is down the road.