Green Options

If you have every put your heart into a movement, you know that anyone who is coerced becomes a drag. Unfortunately, the national service issue is surrounded by the others-should-want-to-do-it-for-their-own-good myth.

Whether they are “social” entrepreneurships or just plain entrepreneurships, it is clear that New Orleans is laying the right groundwork for a full-scale “and then some” recovery.

New housing programs target specific populations or neighborhoods that have been dislocated by the sequence of events initiated by Hurricane Katrina and which are critical to getting the New Orleans economy thriving again.

Grameen and its managing director (Nobel Peace Prize-winner) Muhammad Yunus, known for the Grameen Bank, recently launched a new partnership with German conglomerate BASF to create a joint social business venture called BASF Grameen Ltd., to be based in Bangladesh. BASF Grameen Ltd. is being modeled as a “social business”, whose purpose will be to improve the health and provide related business opportunities for poor members of Bangladeshi society (reminiscent of the base of the pyramid framework) through the distribution of dietary supplement sachets and impregnated mosquito nets.

Starbucks has decided to stray from its ideals of “real coffee” by adding an instant coffee to its repertoire.

The World Trade Organization will meet in Brussels Monday (Feb. 9, 2009) to head-off the rising wave of protectionism.

In the January 5, 2009 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, the official trade journal of the American Chemical Society, the ACS announced the formation of the Formulated Products Roundtable. This organization, which will begin operating later this month, is an industry-financed partnership between the ACS’s Green Chemistry Institute (GCI), a not-for-profit group devoted to promoting green chemistry, and sixteen prominent companies that manufacture cosmetics, perfumes, soaps, detergents, and other household and industrial cleaning products. Its aim is to share [...]

Eaton Corporation (NYSE:ETN) has been an icon of the American markets for many years - a definite example of traditional US industry that provides power management, hydraulics, and automotive drivetrain systems among its many offerings. Cutler-Hammer is one of its most recognizable brands. Sales in 2007 were $13B.

The 21 economies of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), which represent more than half of the world’s productive power, assured the world yesterday (Sunday) at the end of a 2-day summit in Lima, that the global financial crisis can be quelled in 18 months. But how they expect this to happen - or how their governments can help remains to be seen.

When I look at my email inbox, it seems that double-digit percentages of incoming emails now have something to do with green. Manufacturers, retailers, service providers — they are all finding green angles to their company announcements. Even opening a Twitter account is an excuse to say marketing is going green by reducing the amount spent on print.

As I was participating in an online discussion as part of an industry discussion group, I was pleased to see that a regional lettershop, St. John Associates, was also promoting its sustainability efforts. At the bottom of its posts, as part of its company signature, it included the following:

We are an EPA Certified Green Power Partner!

We buy enough monthly Wind Power RECs to offset 50% of our electricity usage and enough monthly Carbon Offset credits to cover 100% of our direct emissions!

Want to know more about our environmental efforts? Visit our website at . . .

Beer and alligators?  Sounds like a dangerous mix, or, at the very least, the beginning of a bad Cajun joke. For Anheuser-Busch’s (whoops… Anheuser-Busch InBev’s) Jacksonville, FL brewery and turf farm, this mix of wildlife and business has been standard for eleven years.  The Jacksonville facility is one of ten A-B operations certified as Wildlife at Work (SM) sites by the Wildlife Habitat Council.

The WHC is a twenty-year-old partnership between corporations (A-B was a founding member) and environmental organizations (the American Farmland Trust, Izaak Walton League of America, National Wildlife Federation and World Wildlife Fund). The organization was founded in order to “…[help] large landowners, particularly corporations, manage their unused lands in an ecologically sensitive manner for the benefit of wildlife.” The Wildlife at Work program not only certifies wildlife restoration programs, but also provides step-by-step training for companies interested in making unused lands more friendly to animal and plant life.