Green Options

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Editor’s note: Here’s the final installment of Alexis Madrigal’s series on California’s ethanol mandate.  If you haven’t read the first four parts, you’ll find them linked at the bottom of the page.

V: Where the Khakis Meet the Carhartts

Dozens of companies up and down Silicon Valley are hard at work rethinking the gasoline that’s powered internal combustion engines since Henry Ford oversaw assembly lines. They’re designing and growing fatty algae whose bodies are filled with oil that just so happens to mimic diesel fuel. They’re using genetically-modified bacteria to munch tires and sugar cane into petrol. Anything that contains carbon, they reason, can be turned into a liquid hydrocarbon with the right combination of chemical process and engineered microbes. They call these experiments advanced biofuels, and they, we’re assured, will be better for the environment than ethanol.

And yet, for all the press, all the beautiful minds at work on the best science, the ultimate success of the enterprise might rest in the crusty industrial checklist of the logistics situation. Trains, trucks, and the people who connect one to the other could have as much of an impact on the market as the particular molecular manipulations that produce the right fuel.

Big Oil and some politicians are constantly clamoring to open up more regions for oil exploration, but why?  Look at all the land they are already leasing or have been offered for leasing!

Image and Via: Sierra Club

Think for a moment, if you wanted to make the maximum impact in greening one product area, what would it be? Cars may come to mind first, but that requires a significant commitment and investment by the buyer.  While it can and will make a positive impact, there’s an area that’s much more ubiquitous and may not even register on the radar for some - office supplies.

Think about how much you use. Think about how much a company of 50 uses. 500. To use supplies that are less impactful, or perhaps even eliminating the damage they typically do, has enormous potential.

It’s this thinking that led Gil Yaron, once a lawyer focused on shareholder activism and socially responsible investing to create Vancouver based FrogFile in 2006. In his work leading up to this, he saw that many companies were interested in greening their office operations, but they didn’t quite know how or where to do that. Then once they did know what they wanted to do, there wasn’t a place to get what they needed.

FrogFile seeks to be a remedy for this quandary. And yet, you might say, green office supplies seem to be everywhere these days, both online and in office supply stores large and small. What does FrogFile contribute, and how do they stand out from this growing chorus?

A www.greenprinteronline.com dispatch | You cannot stop a negative habit without knowing how much and how often you are doing it. Enter the financial “carrot”: the online environmental calculator with a finance edge. True, we at Green Printer believe that public demand, employee engagement, shareholder interest and sustainability goals are the “pressure points” for companies to cut their consumption habits and curb greenhouse gas emissions.

But today, organizations like Xerox, RecycleBank and Creative Citizen are offering more than just a climate change reason to decrease consumption: money. And, they are doing it by showing your employees the financial figures generated in conjunction with their online, environmental calculators.

Civil and environmental professor and ecopreneur-inventor Jack V. Matson, PhD.
dedicates his life to practicing “intelligent fast failure,” an expression he coined to capture the essence of innovation. It’s captured in his irreverently titled book, Innovate or Die: A Personal Perspective on the Art of Innovation. As an ecopreneur, he started an environmental design firm, Matson & Associates Inc., housed in a green office building and personally holds two patents on water purification products.

In Innovate or Die, Matson suggests that the goal with intelligent fast failure is to move as quickly as possible from new ideas to new knowledge by making small and manageable mistakes — intelligent failures. By moving quickly, we can determine what works, and what doesn’t, without draining the bank account and energy devoted to developing the idea. With the increasing variability in climate and rapidly changing global marketplace and social fabric, ecopreneurs are creating new business models, products and services that defy common conventions. Some will fail. The key is to keep learning and try to avoid letting your intelligent failures negatively influence your emotions and self-esteem. And by all means, fail falling forward.

Given the widespread interest in producing biodiesel domestically, Matson launched the Green Biodiesel, LLC, a spinoff venture of Matson & Associates Inc., seeking to develop a new biofuel production process that relies entirely on nontoxic materials to produce a clean-burning alternative fuel from renewable resources in the US. One of the problems facing biodiesel producers and users is that the conventional biodiesel production process uses a number of toxic chemicals to convert vegetable oil feedstocks into a usable fuel. Methanol and sodium hydroxide, two toxic industrial chemicals widely used in the transesterfication process to produce biodiesel, are potentially dangerous to humans and the environment. In order for biodiesel to be a truly environmentally friendly fuel, current and future producers need an alternative process that does not use toxic chemicals or produce significant waste products.

HP has announced that their EnergyStar Pavilion dv6929 laptop will be packaged in recycled-content messenger bags instead of the traditional cardboard boxes.  As a result, they’ve won Wal-Mart’s Home Entertainment Design Challenge, a contest open to all suppliers of consumer electronics products that focused on good design and  innovative packaging design that facilitates reducing, reusing, and recycling.

Want to be on the cutting edge? According to Trendwatching.com its time to start leveraging the online into your offline promotions. The following five “Off-On” trends are hot:

1. Online symbols turned objects: merging well-known digital visuals (from pixels to logos to black-and-white QR compositions) with physical objects such as outdoor fencing, to google-branded products only available to google toolbar subscribers (in Japan) to iconic “pixel” fabric to my personal favorite, the incredibly beautiful jewelry made from precious metals and ethernet plugs by Jana Brevick.

This post was originally posted on Eco-Libris blog on August 30.

Today I read a very interesting article at by Rod Edwards (”Paper from Wheat, not Wood“), who reports from Canada about exciting developments in what seems as a very eco-friendly alternative to trees as the source of paper: wheat.

No, it’s not the case of corn here where a food crop is transferred into (what some think is) an alternative “green” product. We’re talking here about pure agricultural waste - wheat straw.

The issue comes up following the printing of the Canadian National Geographic magazine’s June issue, which was printed using 20% wheat straw. The rest of the paper was made of 40% post-consumer recycled paper and 40% virgin paper.

Well, the wheat straw pulp was imported from China (because straw-pulping facilities have yet to be retrofitted in Canada), and that’s not that eco-friendly, but the point was definitely made in terms of feasibility and quality of this alternative. And the potential is huge, as we can learn from the Canadian printer Dollco, which was part of this effort and explains in its news release what could be the impact of using wheat straw for printing paper in Canada:

Performance gear-producing Patagonia, known for their forays into sustainable clothing produced with environmental ethics in mind, has produced the first recyclable-nylon shell and pants for technical outdoor wear.  The company has produced recyclable nylon gear before, in the form of pants and shorts, but these are the first shells produced in the industry that can be recycled.  Patagonia will provide recycling for their Shelter Stone products through their already-active Common Threads recycling program

This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of ProformaGreen, an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy. John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.

OK, the name is a little cheesy but these signs are a great idea for businesses that need eco-friendly signage which still shows a professional edge.

Primarily constructed of bamboo, the Panda Stand is an environmentally friendly retractable banner stand for the exhibit, display and graphics markets. The unit is made from 90% renewable resources (bamboo casing and pole) and designed to maximize visual impact.

The Panda Stand’s eco-friendly style helps to emphasize your message while contributing to a greener planet for us all. In fact I would say the stand itself contributes to your message.

The manufacturer - Megagraphix - is working on using a 100% recycled solution for the banner itself as well as printing the unit using 100% vegetable based dyes.

This sturdy and premium portable display unit offers the same high performance attributes as other retractable displays. Its precision-engineered retraction system makes it easy and quick to set up virtually anywhere - simply unwind the graphic stored in the bamboo base and insert the support pole.

This is Part Two on a debate by The Economist. The official debate concluded earlier this week, but you can still vote and leave comments or critique. The question was:

“Can we solve our energy problems with existing technologies today, without the need for breakthrough innovations?”

Though we often envision debates as pitting two opponents against each other, hopefully in an intense battle of wit and wordsmithing, this one was not so. Both sides found themselves agreeing with each other more often than not, and parried with points on implementation.