Green Options

Sometimes I find myself in quite a rut- focusing on the negative aspects of my life rather than the positive. The past year of my life however, has been quite incredible (and I need to remind myself that.) Jobs have fallen in my lap and people have been placed in my path for a reason. And at times, when I get muddled down by negative thoughts I have to remind myself of the opportunities I’ve been so gracefully handed. Which quite a few, wouldn’t have happened without my main source of income.

My full time job (amongst many small ones) has been working at the eco-friendly fashion boutique, Eco-Tique, in St. Paul, MN. During the past year working here, I have had the wonderful opportunity of meeting Terri Bly, owner of The Nature of Beauty, and being able to work not only for Eco-Tique but her company as well. So today, I give a shout out to Eco-Tique’s top fall must haves which can be found at The Nature of Beauty.

In yesterday’s Disruptive Innovation panel at SoCap09 “Three Successful Approaches to Scaling Impact”, Kevin Jones moderated a panel of three very different but equally disruptive business models. Instead of establishing a nonprofit organization to increase computer access around the world, founder Mark Beckford explained that NComputing is a for-profit company leveraging existing distributing channels and repair services in developing countries. Their hardware and software solution, which they call “the $70 PC”, can actually yield more margin and profit for distributors than more expensive computers with high-cost distribution networks.

NComputing is also using a technical solution to green PC use. With distributed computing, nComputing systems draw less than five watts, using 90% less energy than a typical PC, and can be run by solar power or a battery.

Sungeeta Chowdry of the Acumen Fund spoke about the Ripple Effect Project, their collaboration with IDEO (represented by Sally Madsen) to create solutions for customer-centered, sustainable and affordable delivery of water.

They brought together twenty organizations (both for-profit and nonprofit) on the ground in India and East Africa, in addition to the nonprofit Gates foundation, the private company IDEO and the Acumen social venture fund, for a complex cross-sector collaboration. IDEO led a human-centered design process, which means rapid prototyping, speaking to potential users immediately, iterating while continuing to listen, and coming up with a fairly quick solution. The resulting projects are commercial water sales operations, with some unusual aspects such as government ownership of the land and/or equipment in some places.

So why is water sales a more effective and scalable solution than donated aid? Some of the answers are compliance and aligning incentives. Madsen and Chowdry explained that people aren’t always able to make the best health decisions. Using a standard business practice of customer segmentation, IDEO put together a set of behavior profiles, so on-the-ground organizations could talk about more than health, such as by emphasizing the status of buying clean water or following  government direction.

By Contributing Writer Melissa Chungfat.

Design Goes Green - The first of a series of articles by Green Printer on the cross-section between the environment, business and the creative communications industry.

Every day we hear about companies going under and pub meals having more value than bank stocks. At at time when profits are low across the nation, some company executives think that now is not the time to implement environmental initiatives. So why did companies committed to sustainability in 2008 perform better that those that didn’t?

Management consulting firm A.T. Kearney did a study comparing the performances of  99 companies with strong commitments to sustainability against industry averages from May to November 2008. Companies that leaned towards green outperformed industry averages by 15% over the six months in 16 of the 18 industries.

Ecobrain, a green publishing company offers ebooks, the ideal green reading choice. Ebooks can be instantly downloaded to your desktop. Ecobrain has a series of ebooks that make ideal reading for Ecopreneurs.

EcoBrain.com offers thousands of other titles about or relating to the environment. Their genres include environment, sustainable living, cookbooks, biographies, kids’ books, how-to guides, green architecture titles, organic gardening, composting, fiction and more.