Green Options

Another thing to consider when crafting with an environmental conscious are your tools and what they are made from. Tools made from recycled or sustainable materials are out there and available for use.

One of the first items on any crafter’s list is a good pair of scissors. Being able to splice thread and cut a mean line is of utmost importance. Scissors can make or break a project. Luckily there is nifty pair of craft scissors made with recycled plastic.

Kleen Earth’s Recycled Stainless Steel Scissors contain 70% post consumer content and come in several different lengths. Perfect for paper, yarn, thread and numerous other materials. They’re available off of Amazon or can be found at any office discount supply store.

If you sew, you know that a good pair of sharp shears is vital and if you already have a pair that you love, learn how to extend their life by sharpening them, reducing the need for a new pair.

Does this sound familiar? You are a business, and have been obsessive about finding as many ways as possible to do right while doing well. Your paper goods are on recycled paper, your office uses renewable energy, and you bike to work. Or some such combination of the many possibilities you’ve been able to find. Great, you’re doing a fine job being a part of the solution, and are doing business in a way that’s beneficial (and profitable!) all around.

Now what about you payment processing? What about it, you ask? In most cases, it’s some company that you send your money to each month to facilitate credit card and check payments. End of story. Not much action there. Hold on, friend, there is something else to consider. How about a company that donates a portion of their proceeds to causes of your choice? One that uses renewable energy to host their site? One that facilitates their payment processing through a green business, community focused bank? Does such a company exist? Yes, in fact. They’re called Dharma Merchant Services.

As a green business consultant, my radar is always out for tools to make the lives of my clients easier, their business greener, and save some money while they’re at it. So when, amongst all the hullabaloo at the recent Green Festival in November, I saw this company, I had to find out more.

This is another of our Guest Posts through our parent Green Options network. Elizabeth Redmond is a product designer currently based in Chicago. She writes about a range of design issues for Sustainablog.

With the portfolio of commercial and urban green building projects happening across the globe right now, how is it possible to see them all? For those of us who are construction fanatics we like to see them in person but flying to location is definitely not the most or even a sustainable way to do things. Well, as with so most everything these days, there is a solution. To increase our remote access to ongoing and completed green building projects nationwide, Building Green Inc. has teamed up with Google and the Department of Energy to bring us an interactive way to view these projects.

The information is presented in Google Earth (must be downloaded) through a layer called the High Performance Building Layer, which is something that you have to download as well. Once you have both of them, you can choose from the 96 different projects they have highlighted thus far through the collaboration. Most of the projects selected reside in the United States, but there are a couple others around the globe. The models are created in Sketch-up and are completed with a full project description. Each building in the High Performance Building Layer also provides links to detailed case studies on the buildings performance. These studies are located on the web through different databases- AIA, USGBC, Building Green…

Greetings out there in the webosphere from chilly Grass Valley, California, and thanks for reading Ecopreneurist. My name is Paul Smith, and I wanted to take time to introduce myself, and tell you where I see this site going, and what I’d like it to do for you.

A little about me: I’ve been deeply immersed in the realm of sustainable business since being a part of the 3rd cohort at Presidio’s MBA in Sustainable Management program in San Francisco. It was one of the first to have such a deeply green program, and arguably, is one of the best. Those who teach there are not there to be professors for a living. They are there to create more colleagues to enable the conversion of business as usual to business as a force for good in the world. They are people like Hunter Lovins, who, along with being a powerful force in her own right, has collaborated with people such as Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins, creating what she is most known for, the book Natural Capitalism.