Green Options

Mokugift is enabling attendees of the Blazed & Confused concert tour (headlined by Snoop Dogg and Slightly Stoopid) to voice their opinions and fight climate change through the power of online video.

Mokugift will be at two events on Aug 19th in the San Francisco Bay area. We would love to meet you and its a great opportunity to mingle with other environmental, tech and fashion folks.

June 5th is United Nations World Environment Day. The U.N. Environment Programme has setup a twitter campaign called ‘twitter for trees’. All you have to do is ‘follow’ http://twitter.com/unepandyou and they will plant a tree. The goal is to get 100,000 followers by June 5th. That plants 100,000 trees, so lets get started!

With so many sources of information on sustainability and green living choices, you’d think it would be easy for you and me to live a greener lifestyle. And yet, how many times have you found yourself out there, doing errands, going out, or traveling, and you have no idea how and where to make greener choices?

3rdWhale is a bridge between talk and action, with an iPhone app that allows you to search for green businesses in proximity to you, plus submit your own finds that aren’t already on there, all listings filtered by 3rd Whale and then rated by users, ala Yelp. An Android version is on its way.

But here’s where it gets interesting: As seen first in Mother Nature Network 3rd Whale are joining forces with Creative Citizen, a hub for crowdsourced, specifically measurable sustainable choices. Each is broken down to how much energy, waste, water, emissions you’ve saved, and in what I think will help it bridge to a broader segment of the population, money. When you have this kind of clearly tangible benefit laid out for you, and it’s on something that you carry with you, action is much for likely.

The purpose of mokugift is to make make tree planting easy and affordable. Making that mission a reality isn’t as easy as the concept.

In addition to learning from and being inspired by other ecopreneurs, Ecopreneurist is a great place to reach out for partnerships. I encourage other ecopreneurs to contribute here.

“Go Green.”   It may have started out as a catchy slogan, but people everywhere are realizing it’s not just a nice idea, or even an option.  It’s necessary to preserve our way of life.  Businesses are not only heeding this message and providing ground-breaking support, they’re keying into the profitability factor as well.  Helping the environment, simply put, can have an immediate ROI.

“Consumers are thinking about it, and therefore retailers think they need to think about it as well,” said Mary Brett Whitfield, senior vice president at consultant TNS Retail Forward.

“Retailers have woken up to the idea that not only is this going to be good from a public-relations perspective but also from a profitability perspective“.

Public awareness of global warming is at an all time high.  People are looking for ways to make the world a better place.  In fact, “83% of Americans would choose products and services with environmental benefits over similar non-environmental alternatives.”

Businesses are noticing this trend, and stepping in to provide their customers with the resources and the opportunity.  As The Wall Street Journal’s Livemint.com notes,

“ …for the corporate world, “green” can be a mantra with a dual advantage: it’s the right thing to adopt, not just as an environmentally responsible entity, but also — more important — as a profitable proposition”.

I’m Krates Ng, cofounder of mokugift. I’m delighted to become an occasional contributor here on Ecopreneurist.

I have always considered myself environmental. I care. I drive a hybrid car. I recycle religiously. I minimize the use of electricity, paper and water. I even cut down the amount of meat I eat (started with no meat 2 nights a week) with the intent to reduce the amount of live stock it takes to support our lives.

However, I hadn’t thought about pairing business with the environmental initiatives until we started mokugift the end of 2007. In this post, I’ll write about how we transformed from entrepreneur to a ecopreneur.