Green Options

It was a serious two hour talk on climate change realities. And, what did we eat for lunch: steak. A large chunk of medium rare cow meat in tepid gravy. Sauce and solemn speech aside, I found the plat du jour ironic. Here we were, serious business people (some even part of the “sustainability task force”), earnest as heck about doing our part to learn about the adapt prong of the two-pronged “mitigate and adapt” prong to tackle climate change. […]

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After a brief hiatus, Urban Agriculturalist is back! Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.

Last week, the New York Times featured a few part-time professional urban farmers in areas of New York City where a high demand and low supply of produce cause dietary and health problems. Increasingly, residents are seeing their abundance of abandoned lots as a new kind of food wealth.

In places like East New York, Brooklyn and the South Bronx, neighbors are getting together to create community gardens. But instead of toiling away on shared crops, each group grows and tends to his or her own plot. This allows more autonomy in deciding what to do with those hard-earned veggies. While some groups eat or give away their crops, many others decide to bring the fruits of their labor to market as a secondary source of income. One couple featured in the article, Denniston and Marlene Wilks, made over $3,000 dollars last year from four allotments. But the farmers insist it is not about the money: a South Bronx farmer, Karen Washington told the New York Times: “We’re selling so that people in our neighborhood have good quality. There’s no Whole Foods in my neighborhood.”

This is the first of several posts describing “Strategies of Abundance” for ecopreneurs and green business owners.

Even in financially tough times, these Strategies of Abundance reflect interrelationships between personal finance and business, especially for small business owners. The key for ecopreneurs is how they use their business to make the world a better place. Profits from a green enterprise are the catalyst for ecopreneurs to achieve their Earth Mission, whether to restore ecological integrity or make photovoltaic systems affordable to all.

STRATEGY #1: Stop paying the banker.

The longer you hold a mortgage, the more you work for the bank and the more profitable you make them. For comparison, below is a chart from our book, ECOpreneuring, reflecting how interest can pile up on a $100,000 mortgage at 7 percent interest for terms of 15 and 30 years. While the monthly payment is less for the 30-year mortgage (the primary reason many of us choose it), we end up paying more than double for the use of the same pot of money.

By accelerating our mortgage payments on our 30-year fixed mortgage by paying down the principal when we could, we have the ability to earn less income to pay the bank than if we did otherwise over the long-term. Prepayment on principal is usually acceptable and completely legal. Every time you pay down the principal, the remaining interest and balance is recalculated, meaning that more of your regular monthly payments go to the principal and not interest payments.

Many of my recent posts have touched upon the theme that the building industry cannot accomplish major advances in sustainability by itself; first its market must change.

But there is ample evidence that consumers are now driving a change in the market. The USGBC website has printed a report by CoStar Group which has found “that sustainable “green” buildings outperform their peer non-green assets in key areas such as occupancy, sale price and rental rates, sometimes by wide margins…. The results indicate a broader demand by property investors and tenants for buildings that have earned either LEED® certification or the Energy Star® label and strengthen the “business case” for green buildings, which proponents have increasingly cast as financially sound investments.” The report goes on to cite “constricted supply” as one reason for the premium prices associated with sustainable buildings, and many other experts have been making the case lately that consumers either cannot find the kind of sustainable housing that they are looking for, or cannot identify what makes a property sustainable.

Fortunately, The Cascadia Region Green Building Council and the Commercial Brokers Association (CBA) are about to provide a bridge between designers and consumers in the form of a new professional certification, Certified Green Broker®. Jason McLennan, CEO of Cascadia, says, “It is often the brokers and finance professionals, not the architects and builders, who directly interface with the end user: the owner, landlord, and/or tenant. Therefore they have great influence on how owners and users may perceive the affordability and overall value of green buildings.”

A few thoughts and a cartoon popped into my head last week while reading an article in Grist on oil companies having to clean up contaminated groundwater. The article stated that

“Some of the nation’s largest oil companies will over the next 30 years have to pay to clean up groundwater befouled with gasoline additive MTBE. In settling a suit brought by 153 public water providers in 17 states, a dozen companies — including BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron — will also have to pay a total $423 million cash.”

Thought #1: Finally!
Thought #2: 30 years! How about 3? And how about shipping clean water to homes in the affected areas in the mean time?
The article goes on to state that the estimated cost of the cleanup is $30 billion…
Thought #3: Why $423 million then?! I’m taking that same logic with me next time I fill up my car. “What, the cost is $4 a gallon? I’ll pay $1.50.”
It also mentioned that Exxon Mobile (among others) did not agree to settle…
Cartoon #1: Big Oil’s Mess? It MTBE, It Could Be, It Is!
And,
Thought #4: How can 17 states worth of contaminated groundwater even be cleaned up?
That’s when discovered that a few University of Aberdeen researchers have found that a whiskey bi-product may just do the trick.

The Internet is so big, it’s easy to miss shopping resources, especially if you’re environmentally conscientious. Here’s an easy guide to green shopping online:

The Internet has revolutionized how we shop. Shopping has become an interesting intersection between society, economy, and technology. Its also an excellent place to find great deals. It used to be true that many green products were more expensive. Free trade? Organic? Recyclable? Post-Consumer? Get out the credit card and take a deep breath! But nowadays that’s not always true; in fact many green products are less expensive, or can save you a lot of money. That fact helps drive their popularity; so much so that even large corporations are taking efforts - or even pains - to go green. But with the mainstreaming green hype, we must beware greenwashing - misleading marketing or practices that lure consumers. On the flip side, buying stuff for the sake of stuff is not environmentally friendly either.

Green Companies:

It’s easy to know which companies are really making an effort.

National Green Pages: Co-op America provides the National Green Pages, which works like a phone book. Major brands include Patagonia, Seventh Generation, and Clif Bar; also features local stores.

LinksOrganic: an international guide to finding organic or environmentally-friendly businesses.

EcoMall: A 90s flash-back site with lots of great links for anything your heart desires.

Climate Counts: this site covers large corporations. It judges their carbon foot print and efforts to reduce it. It covers major brands in all product categories, but it does not cover individual products.

Green Peace Electronics Guide: similar to Climate Counts, covers large electronics corporations.

Before you can open your doors for business, you need an office. Stocking your office with needed supplies is a great opportunity to show your green side and make sustainable choices. From furnishings to paper clips, there are eco-friendly options out there for every office need.

Whether you’re working from home or from a downtown high-rise, you can conserve paper, reduce energy use, and produce less waste by keeping the environment in mind for all your office purchases. In this article, I’ll share ideas for stocking your green office and sources of green office products.

The big names cannot help but pump out more sustainable paper products on an almost weekly basis. From biology college textbooks gone green to carbon friendly greeting cards, we’ve rounded up the top ten green papier goods that caught our eye.

7. So, the FSC is not perfect. But it’s a start and it speaks volumes when office supply giants like Staples start to sell what most of us want to start using already in […]

Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems (VWS:DC) had a big week. First, the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer announced that they would be building a tower manufacturing plant in Colorado. Second, Vestas reported a 94 percent jump in earnings in the first quarter of 2008, as compared to the same period last year.

Although they have yet to disclose the location of the new tower manufacturing facility, it would be situated to complement the company’s fist North American blade manufacturing plant, which recently opened its doors in Windsor, Colorado.

For the tower plant, the company will need a large parcel of land served by freight rail, a combination that Northern Colorado can provide at several locations, including the Windsor location, where construction proceeds on phase two of the blade plant. According to the Northern Colorado Business Review, more than 1,000 new jobs could result from further expansion of Vestas’ manufacturing presence.

As an entrepreneur, you may at times question your sanity : long hours, uncertain outcomes, energy drain on the rest of your life. And yet you keep on going. You have to. The thrill of successfully launching a new endeavor, whether to make a living, a difference in the lives of people, an impact on the health of the planet, or all of the above is too great not to.

And yet, there may be times that nothing’s coming to you. You’re either stuck for a new idea, or having doubts about or missing pieces to what you’re currently working on. In steps Springwise. Springwise is hub for people to share ideas, and is smartly designed for rapid skimming, by category, keyword, and country.

Now, you may say, what’s new about this? There are lots of business and entrepreneurial blogs and publications out there. Fair enough. Amsterdam based Springwise puts it well when they say,

Springwise scans the globe for the most promising business ventures, ideas and concepts that are ready for regional or international adaptation, expansion, partnering, investments or cooperation. We ferociously track more than 400 global offline and online business resources, as well as taking to the streets of world cities, digital cameras at hand.

They also enlist the eyes and minds of an additional 8000 Springspotters in 70 countries to keep an on the ground perspective on what’s going on.

What does this look like?

At the Investors’ Circle Conference in San Francisco, the Plenary Session of the May 7th Education Day was titled, “Is Organic the Next Clean Tech?” Can organic foods (and other products) can attract major investment capital, in the way clean technology has in the past few years, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.
I am not sure whether the answer is a resounding yes, but panelist Walter Robb, Co-President and COO of Whole Foods Market announced that Whole Foods will be investing in small supplier companies, and all of the panelists were positive about the potential of investing in organics.

Kristen Groos Richmond, Co-founder/CEO of Revolution Foods, who has a wonderful if improbable company, which I wrote about before, can speak first-hand about the ways entrepreneurs can attract professional investors while pursuing goals such as connecting local farmers and consumers.