Green Options

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The Wall Street Journal published some interesting research on consumer purchasing behavior as regards ethically produced products. The study conducted by a doctoral student at Western Ontario University, studied the price consumers were willing to pay under various circumstances.

The researchers studied coffee and asked consumers to determine how much they would pay for ethically produced coffee; how much they would pay for coffee produced by an unethical company and then tested at what level a product is considered ethically produced.

There were a variety of different permutations in the study but the results were a bit surprising!

Though being green is all the rage in the US, one needs to look beyond our borders…well beyond, to find countries in which consumers act truly green. Not surprisingly, those consumers in the developing world, impacted the most by environmentally harmful behavior, tend to be the greenest.

The recently completed National Geographic/GlobeScan “Consumer Greendex,” rather than measuring the overall “greenness” of each nation looks specifically at consumer behavior and tells a different story than that of traditional measurements of sustainability by country.

The US, still doesn’t fare very well

The findings show that consumers in Brazil and India tie for the highest Greendex score for environmentally sustainable consumption at 60 points each. They are followed by consumers in China (56.1), Mexico (54.3), Hungary (53.2) and Russia (52.4). Among consumers in wealthy countries, those in Great Britain, Germany and Australia each have a Greendex score of 50.2, those in Spain register a score of 50.0 and Japanese respondents 49.1. U.S. consumers have the lowest Greendex score at 44.9. The other lowest-scoring consumers are Canadians with 48.5 and the French with 48.7.

As an entrepreneur, you may at times question your sanity : long hours, uncertain outcomes, energy drain on the rest of your life. And yet you keep on going. You have to. The thrill of successfully launching a new endeavor, whether to make a living, a difference in the lives of people, an impact on the health of the planet, or all of the above is too great not to.

And yet, there may be times that nothing’s coming to you. You’re either stuck for a new idea, or having doubts about or missing pieces to what you’re currently working on. In steps Springwise. Springwise is hub for people to share ideas, and is smartly designed for rapid skimming, by category, keyword, and country.

Now, you may say, what’s new about this? There are lots of business and entrepreneurial blogs and publications out there. Fair enough. Amsterdam based Springwise puts it well when they say,

Springwise scans the globe for the most promising business ventures, ideas and concepts that are ready for regional or international adaptation, expansion, partnering, investments or cooperation. We ferociously track more than 400 global offline and online business resources, as well as taking to the streets of world cities, digital cameras at hand.

They also enlist the eyes and minds of an additional 8000 Springspotters in 70 countries to keep an on the ground perspective on what’s going on.

What does this look like?

Both for profit and non-profit businesses are led by ecopreneurs who are making the world a better place through their creative, innovative and ground-breaking enterprises. Lisa’s and my book, ECOpreneuring, features numerous “Ecopreneur Profiles” — including David Anderson, the founder and CEO of GreenOptions.com — along with many other brief summaries.

But there are millions of ecopreneurial enterprises prospering throughout the U.S. and around the world. Perhaps you’re one, too.

So, we have formed a partnership with EcoSector.com, an on-line portal serving as a unique conduit for growing the green economy, offering opportunities to share video clips, feature photographs of products or services, and display blogs.

As retailer to over 90% of US households, Wal-Mart is in the unique position of being an excellent compiler of information.

Recently they started tracking shoppers’ green buying habits. Actually all retailers track products their consumers purchase for inventory control. Wal-Mart however was one of the leaders in using this data to tightly control inventory and share information with manufacturers. They retain leadership in this area with RFID tracking systems and well managed JIT manufacturing cooperative programs with their vendors.

Now Wal-Mart is sharing some of this information with the world with the Wal-Mart Live-Better Index .

Editor’s note: The recent report Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts: Findings from the U.S. Book Industry tried to answer that question; Eco-Libris blogger Raz Godelnik took a look at its findings in an earlier post. Today, he interviews one of the main contributors to the report’s preparation: Tyson Miller, founder and director of the Green Press Initiative. This post was originally published on Saturday, April 12, 2008.

After I wrote here about the publication of the of Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts: Findings from the U.S. Book Industry, and reviewed some of the most important findings, it’s time of the third (and last) part of our coverage of the report.

Today I am very excited to bring you an interview I conducted with Tyson Miller, the Founder and Director of the Green Press Initiative (GPI). The Green Press Initiative, together with the The Book Industry Study Group (BISG), initiated and prepared this impressive report that presents and analyzes the book industry’s ecological footprint.

Not only that Tyson Miller is one of the people who led the work on the report, but he is also one of the most knowledgeable people about the issues brought up in the report. In the last seven years he directs the Green Press Initiative (which he also founded) – a program which is catalyzing environmentally responsible book publishing in the U.S. He initiated the Book Industry Treatise on Responsible Paper Use, which more than 150 publishers have signed so far, and is also involved in the efforts of big publishers, such as Simon & Schuster and Scholastic, to develop green policies.

Therefore, I was very happy for the opportunity to have this interview with Mr. Miller, shedding more light on the report and its implications. I hope you’ll enjoy it as well!

Researchers at Michigan State are trying to get corn-stover to digest itself after harvest. Doing so would mitigate the costly pretreatment steps needed for the production of cellulosic ethanol from the non-edible parts of the corn plant.

MSU’s scientists are adding genetic material to the corn’s genome, genes that would normally be responsible for the digestive enzymes produced by fungi and the microbes in cow rumens. The newly transgenic plants store these enzymes in vacuoles in the leaves and stalk in a way that doesn’t affect the plant while it’s alive.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that particulate matter from diesel exhaust causes a range of respiratory problems including 15,000 premature deaths each year, new research shows that even short-term exposure to nanoparticles found in diesel fumes can affect brain function.

Nanoparticles can travel to the brain via the olfactory nerve, where they could cause an oxidative stress response in the region of the brain critical to information processing.

Researchers placed subjects in a room with either clean air or diesel fumes (similar to a busy street), and used a electro- encephalograph (EEG) to measure brain response. Subjects breathing the sooty air showed a stress response in the brain’s cortex within 30 minutes, which continued even after they left the room.

That’s one of the major findings of the recently-released 2007 National Technology Readiness Survey (NTRS), sponsored by the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, and research firm Rockbridge Associates, Inc. This is good news for ecopreneurs, especially since the survey also notes that many consumers want to buy “green tech” products, but can’t find what they want:

…while 83 percent of adults said they wanted to protect the environment, and 59 percent said they like trying new technologies to help the environment, about 42 percent said such technologies were hard to find.

An ideal situation for ecopreneurs? Perhaps… both for new companies, and for those that want to market green products better. Both P.K. Kannan, director of the Smith School’s Center for Excellence in Service, and Charles Colby, president of Rockbridge, offer some tips for effectively tapping this market:

In January, USDA researchers completed a five-year evaluation of another biofuel feedstock with the potential to make a serious dent in US petroleum usage. In the largest study to date, switchgrass has been shown to produce 540% more energy than was used to grow, harvest, and process it into cellulosic ethanol, while reducing greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions by 94% when compared to gasoline.

USDA geneticist Ken Vogel commented that the study demonstrates switchgrass’s potential to be a major renewable biofuel that reduces GHGs and could “potentially displace 30 percent of current U.S. petroleum consumption.”

A University of Minnesota study found that using higher blends of ethanol (20%) blended into gasoline did not cause damage or cause performance problems when used in standard gasoline engines.

Over half the gasoline sold in the US is already blended with 10% ethanol (E10), but higher blends were thought to run the risk of causing engine damage. Higher blends of ethanol, up to 85% (E85), will only work properly in engines converted to accept the fuel.

Using 40 pairs of vehicles commonly found on American roads, a year-long research effort found that increasing ethanol blends from 10 percent (E10) to 20 percent (E20) in a gallon of gasoline provided an effective fuel across a range of tests focusing on driveability and materials compatibility.