Green Options

Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay up to date.

Both for profit and non-profit businesses are led by ecopreneurs who are making the world a better place through their creative, innovative and ground-breaking enterprises. Lisa’s and my book, ECOpreneuring, features numerous “Ecopreneur Profiles” — including David Anderson, the founder and CEO of GreenOptions.com — along with many other brief summaries.

But there are millions of ecopreneurial enterprises prospering throughout the U.S. and around the world. Perhaps you’re one, too.

So, we have formed a partnership with EcoSector.com, an on-line portal serving as a unique conduit for growing the green economy, offering opportunities to share video clips, feature photographs of products or services, and display blogs.

When I decided to start my own business, I knew that I wanted it to be green. Of course, my definition of green could be quite different from everyone else’s. There are varying shades of green, which makes it very difficult to quantify or define. Perhaps this is why there are so many different green certifications, seals, labels, and standards out there. With the dizzying array of options for green and sustainable certification available, it’s hard for a business owner to decide which certifier to use or if it’s even worth bothering at all.

Since I’m trying to start a graphic design studio, I started by searching for a green certification agency that specialized in creative services. It seems that many of the certifiers lack standards for service-based businesses, as most focus on products. The only design specific green “certification” that I found was the Design Can Change Pledge, a voluntary pledge for designers who commit to move towards sustainable practices. The site includes many ideas for going green as well as a great introduction to what sustainability in graphic design means, but doesn’t offer certification for green design businesses. As of yet, there’s no LEED for the graphic design industry.

Once consigned to reading tech magazines, green entrepreneurs in the tech space now are drifting to business sites - as it should be. More and more tech sites are covering business issues and more importantly, business sites, particularly those focused on green business are delving into the technology, particularly computer technology, fields.

Green entrepreneurs of every stripe face similar business challenges.

How to write a marketing plan.

How to handle inventory.

And in a tighter money era, how to find financing.

May 1: May Day.

For the average American working for a paycheck, May Day — a pagan spring ritual where you dance around a Maypole — marks yet another, less festive occasion.

From the first of January until around the first of May, all the money many of us will earn goes to pay our share of income tax to the US government.

Kiss those months — that money — goodbye (the present tax stimulus package is really just a refund).

We followed the advice of our parents, as most children do: get a good education, go to college and get a job — a nice, secure, well-paying one, with great fringe benefits, stock options or profit-sharing. But the bimonthly paychecks — after the government gets its share for income, Social Security and Medicare taxes — aren’t enough to keep up with the bills. Even with raises and promotions, many of us feel that we keep getting further in the hole, since the more we earn in earned income, the more it’s taxed. The reality is that the system is largely devised this way, not to tax the very rich but to exact a fee on the middle class and poor to keep these wage earners on the treadmaster of a job — or “promising career.”

The more income-producing and complementary projects my wife and I have in our ecopreneurial business, the more stable and secure we feel, careful to not let work override quality of life considerations.

After all, we, like many ecopreneurs we’ve interviewed or met, don’t live to work. Instead, we find our livelihood and the businesses we navigate deeply satisfying as we make the world a better place through the green businesses — for profit and non-profit alike — that we own or direct.

The key to our approach to ecopreneurship is looking to nature for inspiration. Our green business is both diversified in enterprises as well as the products and services we offer, filling economic niches in much the same way as plants, animals and fungi fill ecological niches that create sustainable, interdependent and healthy ecological systems. For example, there are thousands of bed & breakfasts in the U.S., but only a few that specialize in serving vegetarian (or vegan) organic breakfasts with ingredients mostly harvested a hundred feet from their back door, like we do. That the Inn is completely powered by the wind and sun and welcomes children as guests, serves as additional niche experiences we offer our guests who we generally refer to in our ECOpreneuring book as “conserving customers,” not consumers — but more on this in a future blog.

SCA poll by Harris Interactive, conducted in the beginning of April, found that consumers were definitely willing to pay more for green products…up to almost 20% more.

Good news for green businesses. But, take a little closer look at the findings.

Some scary truths about consumers’ assumptions could lead to a “green” backlash concludes The Green Gap Survey, released this week by Cone LLC and The Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship.
We in the business of making environmentally friendly and natural product know that little regulation exists around the terms, “green,” “environmentally friendly,” and “natural.” But, consumers don’t and are, perhaps naively, trusting.

• 47 percent trust companies to tell them the truth in environmental messaging
• 45 percent believe companies are accurately communicating information about their impact on the environment
• 61 percent of Americans say they understand the environmental terms companies use in their advertising

Whole Foods Markets will stop using disposable plastic grocery bags on Earth Day, April 22, 2008. Banning plastic bags is undoubtedly good for the environment–is it also a boon for Whole Foods?

According to the Whole Foods Market website, Americans toss out about 100 billion plastic bags annually (we recycle a pitiful 0.6% of our plastic bags), crowding landfills with an energy-consuming product (it takes 430,000,000 gallons of crude oil to make the 100 billion bags) that lasts for at least 1,000 years. Whole Foods estimates that their action will save 100 million plastic bags in 2008, alone.

By drawing attention to their company policies that are good for the earth, Whole Foods also gets some good press. Was this part of their plan?

That smiling face belongs to MC Milker, head writer for Ecopreneurist where writers focus on sustainable and social entrepreneurship .

MC is well-suited for this project, she spent 20 years in corporate marketing, working for Fortune 500 companies as well as start-ups. She’s taught marketing and public relations at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hong Kong in China.

Here’s our interview:

milkerfinal.mp3

Visit Ecopreneurist.

A nation of 9-5-ers is giving way to a spirited movement of innovators, searching for ways to make a life filled with purpose and meaning, instead of simply earning a living. And they’re thriving in the place-based “honey bee economy” that restores, preserves and conserves the planet.

From an enterprising individual operating a small retail business to an inventor who comes up with a better way to fuel our vehicles, from the founder of a non-profit organization to the organic grower who feeds our local community, just about anyone can be an ecopreneur and run a green business.

Are you one? See how many questions you answer affirmatively below.

• Are you more interested in what you do and with whom you work than how much you make?

• Does community, environmental and social issues drive what you focus on with respect to your livelihood or volunteer time?

• Do you view your experiences, growing and diverse knowledge base and unique skills sets as the primary value you can offer clients, customers or workplace?

• Do you think the late Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman ate too many Big Macs after he argued — much to the chagrin of the massive multinational corporations and millionaire politicians — that “the only social responsibility of business is to make profits”?

Starting a green business (or making an existing one greener) can often seem like a daunting task. As I start my own business, I am compiling a mental checklist of all small, simple things I can do in my day-to-day operations to lighten my footprint on the planet. By building environmentally conscious practices into my work flow from the start, I hope to start off on the right foot and keep taking steps toward sustainability.

There’s always more you can do, but the most important thing is to do something! Baby steps in the right direction are certainly better than going backwards or not moving at all. Thankfully, many green business practices are not only eco-friendly, but they’re friendly on the company budget as well. So even if the benefits to the planet are hard to see, benefits to your bottom line may be more visible.

Since I’m a habitual list-maker, here’s a handy list of ten simple things you can do to make your business a bit more sustainable every day.