Green Options

Here is a short video from Leeds that explains the basic process of turning old water bottles into bags, totes, padfolios and other item in the Owl Line.

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

Spring is in the air and with it the spring line up of new eco-friendly promotional items. Here are a few stand outs from Leeds.

The first of the new items of note is the Tempo 100% Recycled PET Urban Messenger Bag from Leeds. This thing is 100% recycled PET (old water bottles, that type of thing) but you would not know it to look at it. Yes it is green, but it also has some great lines and is a very functional messenger. The Tempo is also manufactured in the US (which helps its total carbon footprint) and it is certified made from eco materials.

EQP on the Tempo 100% Recycled PET Urban Messenger Bag is $8.92 with one color imprint. That is a great price for this good sized H 11.17″ x W 4.33″ x L 15.25″ bag. Again, where is this cost premium everyone is talking about to “go green”?

The Tempo is a solid marketing choice for any Ecopreneurist focusing on a number of audiences such as the urban commuter, the college crowd, or even forward looking IT firms.

Green business practices are not limited to factories and buildings anymore. According to Yahoo Finance, soem insurance companies are offering clients who drive green cars or live in green homes a break on their premiums. Still others are offering to rebuild a green home that is lost due to fire or other catastrophes “greener” than it was before.

For the Ecopreneurists out there that are going to be running - or in some other way associated with these events - I would like to suggest an item that can both help promote your organization and educate your young audience. The Owl Tempo 100% Recycled Backpack.

Vinegar can clean windows, kill weeds, and even cure the common cold.  Now a team of scientists at the University of Leeds is studying how vinegar could clean up sites contaminated by chromium compounds discharged from old textile factories, smelters, and tanneries.  As a source of chromium contamination, coal mining could also benefit from a dose of vinegar - or would that really make a difference?

A lot of manufactures now have eco-friendly computer mouse pads for sale. And since tech companies - and tech ecopreneurists - seem to always be at the cutting edge of green, these make really good promo items.

The Conserve Energy Conservation Set from Leeds is a great example of an education focused promotional item that also provides the Ecopreneurist big bang messaging platform.

Well we often get questions about the source of this cotton and other organic cotton used in our industry so we decided to ask Gemline for some answers. Clif Jordan the Regional Manager (South West) for Gemline was nice enough to send some answers.

As we predicted, it seems 2009 is becoming the year of the great green push in our industry. Leeds is again up front with a number of functional and stylist additions to their Owl line of 51% & 100% recycled material bags, portfolios and totes (see certificate from Leeds website).

Aladdin® mugs are common items in many stores, the program with Leads offers Aladdin® items that can be branded with a company name, logo, etc.

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

Gemline, Leeds and a few other vendors leading in the move to eco-friendly promotional items are now using a technology from a company called Technologo to produce virtual catalogs for their clients. The Gemline catalog is located here, Leed’s here.

It is an interesting platform and this solution from Technologo might be a good way for Ecopreneurists to market to clients of their own without the need for paper catalogs, but I see two main problems.

First, these files are large and reside on a server, so yes you can email the link to clients but I don’t understand how you can email the whole catalog. The system is designed to allow you to send individual pages from the catalog, but you already need to be on the site to do this. Second, how are these any better than a normal web page display?

I guess if you look at it as a living catalog, something that could be loaded onto a PC and taken out to clients, or loaded on a CD or flash drive and mailed, that might make more sense to me, at least that way the catalog is not tied to the PC.