Shortcuts can work. Sometimes, they get the better of even the brightest business minds. And, sometimes, they bite us in the posterior as we completely miss the train.

A soundbyte is that modern age, Blackberry-fueled shortcut: a way to stand on the shoulders of giants and give the appearance that we have done our research on complex, science informed concerns like climate change when, in fact, we only Googled the issue’s peripheral details and quotes.

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Long hours, an increasingly saturated playing field: it’s not always a walk in the park for young, green entrepreneurs. But Jack Short and Daniel Lyons make it look easy.

The dynamic, 20-something Missouri businessmen run Factory Green, where they roll out sexy and carbon neutral apparel, accessories, and housewares to college students, a demographic that isn’t too hot on green poster products like low-consumption washing machines or hybrid cars.

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Seminars that go by blockbuster titles - as least for green entrepreneurs - such as “How to manage carbon risk” have authentic learning value.

In our over-wired world, live events are a luxury, an hour or three to feel how much we really love context and contact, not just stoic information glaring out at us from a screen when we’re learning complex stuff - like international carbon trading markets.

More to the point, events are becoming an even more attractive “pull” medium than ever. And, the savvy, green entrepreneur should know how to harness the reputation and client lead potentials of a well-orchestrated event - an eco-friendly supplied event, that is.

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Image source: it all skyrocketed with Gutenberg’s printing press…

A Green Printer dispatch.

Ever wondered how much energy and thought it took to produce that shiny brochure your marketing staff handed to you this week? And no, it’s not just the brand and visual design genius we’re talking about.

Let’s face it: making a few pieces of paper look pretty takes up some pretty hefty resources and the paper and pulp industry is there to meet our paper hungry needs (so much for the paperless office).

In fact, the OECD Environmental Outlooks calls the pulp and paper industry the single largest consumer of water and the third greatest industrial greenhouse gas emitter, right after the chemical and steel industries and the oil and gas industry.

And, that rank, as echoed by Co-op America is not set to go down anytime soon.

The Environmental Defense Fund further attests that paper use is on the rise with paper and packaging still making up one third of municipal landfill waste. And, producing all those nice brochures (or manuals or contracts or….) takes up a lot of energy. In fact,

• Producing paper uses 11.5 percent of all energy in the industrial sector.
• One third of all wood harvested in the U.S. goes into paper products.

Thus, on the bright side, paper use presents the potential for enormous environmental savings. Citigroup took up the challenge of using post-consumer waste paper and saved 43.8 billion BTU’s of energy, enough to supply 430 homes for a year.

But then, what about those cool, “a must” coloured graphs and charts on the company brochure?

More than likely, it was made using inks containing volatile organic compounds (VOCs). That’s short for those nasty major pollutants linked to the deterioration of the earth’s protective ozone layer and, consequently (some researchers suggest), to accelerating climate change.

So what are we to do?
Let’s begin with the water used to print those brochures. Waterless printers have been able to dramatically reduce water consumption. For example, a printer in Switzerland, operating one of the world’s first waterless web presses, eliminated the use of approximately 250,000 liters (about 66,000 gallons) of water in one year. That water would normally have come from a nearby lake, which is a source of drinking water for tens of thousands of people.

The invention of water-washable inks has allowed the waterless pressroom to be virtually VOC-free. Water-washable ink technology takes out the need for solvent-based press and blanket wash solutions, which typically account for a large portion of a printer’s VOC output.

So, have your cake and eat it too. We all love handing a cool looking brochure to a client. It just doesn’t need to cost the Earth.

More resources

• No piece of paper is completely environmentally invisible, even the recycled kind, so choose check out these guidelines for environmentally preferable paper by the Environmental Paper Network.
• Handy printable signs to encourage better office paper use by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).
• Ever wondered where to even start to buy greener paper? The first step starts with asking the right questions and this Paper Supplier Evaluation PDF by the EDF is about as thorough as it gets.
• Recycled paper purchasing article from GreenBiz.com.

Get these brands and more, all while tracking how much CO2, trees and wastewater you’ll save with the Eco-Widget, at Green Printer.

A Green Printer dispatch.

Today, I sat in at an insurance board of trade luncheon conference to learn about the value of investing in our nation’s sewage and water infrastructure as a means to deal with the havoc climate change could wrought on our nation’s coastal communities.

Apparently, history has shown that access to clean water is the first thing to go down in several weather, flooding and tidal storms. Translation: we could be scrambling for bottles of water if our government does not get to upgrading our current system up to par.

It was a serious two hour talk on climate change realities. And, what did we eat for lunch: steak. A large chunk of medium rare cow meat in tepid gravy. Sauce and solemn speech aside, I found the plat du jour ironic. Here we were, serious business people (some even part of the “sustainability task force”), earnest as heck about doing our part to learn about the adapt prong of the two-pronged “mitigate and adapt” prong to tackle climate change. And, we have our mouths full of out of town, agriculture land sucking Alberta beef.

Now, while I’m no brazen vegan, I do try to limit my cow intake and I found it awkward, given the conference topic, that we were not offered a vegetarian alternative.

It’s not their fault really; perhaps, as blogger I simply have more time on my hands to research the contribution cows have to global warming. And no, it’s not just methane flatulence, it’s water too. 4500 litres of water per one 300 gram chunk of beef to be exact, according to this cool traumkrieger poster.

This got me thinking about the share of office hypocrisies we all see on a daily basis. Yes, despite all the wonderful and useful articles we see on recycling our old computers and creating an office local food, “snack wall”, hello, I’ve been at that kind of “what the use, I’m going to throw in my hat and move to a dishelved farmhouse in Sicily” stage – who hasn’t?

But no, meanwhile, there are global carbon capture storage schemes that need my blogger “greenwashing” radar, “go them ‘em” articles on using existing six sigma techniques to green-control existing operations and a solar power generating bra that I’m not sure how to deal with in this article.

And the crusade to green the world, one greener office at a time goes on.

Save trees, time and money the eco-friendly way with our recycled paper, sustainable printing methods and eco-calculator with Green Printer - more details at http://www.greenprinteronline.com. Now, wasn’t that easy?

A Junk Mail “Sculpture” a la http://antiadvertisingagency.com

A http://greenprinteronline.com dispatch.

We’ve come this far in our exasperation with junk mail-apalooza and now people are luring us with cold, hard cash (or the beauty of planting a tree) to get us to stop receiving virgin-forest-eating junk mail.

We’re in love with Green Dimes (thank you to Nate Burgos of Design Feast for the gread tip), which not only offers a widget that claims to track, in real time, how many:

i. trees are saved;
ii. Victoria Secret catalogues are stopped and;
iii. (tongue in cheek style) “people helped”,

but also offers a really convenient online service to cut out those annoying credit card application forms.

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Not a chance you could pull it off unless you’re renegade architect Michael Reynolds, Garbarge Warrior.”

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He also readily admits, with a signature askew smile and hearty laugh, that “being an academic is possibly the worst possible preparation for the business world,” and endorses a strong marketing presence in any renewable energy start up because the engineers “can’t seem to understand why somebody wouldn’t want this marvelous invention!”

It’s 7:52pm Wednesday night at the venture capital-esque forum put on by the VEF on CEO War Stories.

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(Image source: www.treehugger.com)

Ecolabelling.org — looking behind the labels
What’s green? And who says so?

Ecolabels are everywhere from Wal-Mart’s “seafood aisle” to my local grocery store. But, at the end of day, what do these labels really mean? Who’s behind them?

And, most importantly, can I rely on them to make my certified no-rainforests-were-destroyed-in-the-making-of-this-latte latte?

Ecolabelling.org – your source on the background of over 285 ecolabels around the world – makes it easier to answer these questions and more by sharing a global database of who’s deciding what’s green.

Big Room Inc. launched ecolabelling.org for as a resource for consumers, environmental professionals and procurers to learn the source of each ecolabel and what it actually means.

That means: one less consumer paralysed in indecision under the florescent lights of the natural foods aisle and one more green procurer who can sift through nearly 100 food ecolabels with the click of a mouse.

So far, ecolabelling.org has tracked down over 285 ecolabels or green certification systems that exist worldwide and estimate that close to 400,000 companies and nearly 500,000 products have gained a green label or valid certification. The database is a platform that will grow, so they look forward to hearing from eco-labels and certification schemes worldwide. Are they missing your favourite ecolabel? Let them know!

For more information about who is deciding what is green, check out www.ecolabelling.org.