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

It is estimated that six billion pens are thrown away every year in the US. BIC, one of the largest pen producers in the United States seems to have decided to do something about that and has entered the eco market in a big way with their new line of BIC Ecoluctions pens.

Like other companies BIC is taking the designs they already have in house and pairing them with new materials to make pens like the Clic Stic Ecolutions which is an exact copy of the standard click pen seen in offices the world over, but now made with 67% pre-consumer recycled material. (BIC’s green website offers a lot of info on these item, though it is a little vague on what the pre-consumer materials are, also there is no mention if the pens themselves are recyclable).

For Ecopreneurist working within or with main street businesses that are not big on change, the ability to offer branded BIC eco-friendly pens is very helpful as it is so simple and painless a change to make.

One of the issues a lot of us have is gaining creditability for green products and green thinking. Sometimes when shopping going green ideas to established businesses - like banks for example - there is strong resistance to our ideas because it is assumed we want the CEO to start coming to work in a hemp suit and that green means throwing away common, accepted business practices.

Well the Ecoluctions pen is not going to rock the boat. It is just a pen, but it is also an example of the types of minor changes companies can make in an effort to go green. And as I have written before small changes add up.

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Like your 3M Post-it notes but are concerned about their impact on the environment?

Well so is 3M and starting in 2007 they started to provided eco-friendly versions of all their basic products called Post-it® Recycled Notes.

Is this green washing or real concern?

I suspect neither and both. Really I think it has to do with their bottom line and the growing chorus of folks that want green alternatives in the office. So the more we support items like a green Post-it the more will be sold and the more the idea will work itself into the fabric of 3M.

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