Green Options

This event hosted by ecostiletto.com at Environment Furniture looks like a great opportunity to meet our comrades at arms here in the eco blogosphere. I’ll be there for sure. It’s the day before the Opportunity Green conference, so if you’re in town for the conference anyway, be sure to check this out. There will also be a fashion show of vegan clothing modeled by the Project Green Search [...]

Review of Opportunity Green Conference and an exploration of the emerging movement that encompasses cleantech, social business, sustainability and social media towards a new culture.

This is a guest post from Glenn Croston, author of “75 Green Businesses You Can Start to Make Money and Make a Difference”,

At the Opportunity Green conference held at UCLA November 8-9, many themes related to the growth and changing direction of the green business movement were discussed by the great variety of green leaders present.

One particularly interesting theme was about the mixed feelings some green entrepreneurs have about going big with their business.

Everybody is eager for success, but green entrepreneurs often fear that scaling up products to reach the masses requires compromises that would negate the benefit of what they are doing and hurt the brand in the long run.

Most green products today are still niche products, perhaps as a result of this fear. At the conference Josh Dorfman, author of “The Lazy Environmentalist”, said that contrary to what many are saying, “Green has not gone mainstream.” Some products are starting to change this, like the Prius and Green Works cleaning products from Clorox, but even these successes represent a small percentage of the overall market. Organic food is big, but it’s still only about 3% of the food we eat.

Do products have to be small to be green? Do they sacrifice something in going big?