3p Contributor: Mary Catherine O'Connor
Recent Articles
Doing a World of Good for Fair Trade Artisans
The term “fair trade handicrafts” summons images of wicker baskets and hand-dyed sarongs. But the business side of the fair trade marketplace is getting a little less old-world, thanks to World of Good, an organization that connects artisans in developing countries with mainstream retailers (including eBay and Whole Foods).
The organization, which is comprised of a wholesale business, an online marketplace and a nonprofit arm, was honored last night with the Katherine M. Swanson Equality Award at the Tech Awards, an event that is produced by The Tech Museum and recognizes 15 laureates in the categories of education, equality, environment, biosciences economic development, and health.
Data Storage Startup, Energy Manager, Win GreenBeat Innovation Contest
The winner of the Innovation Competition, held as part of the GreenBeat 2009 conference in San Mateo, California, today, is actually a pair of winners.
The judges could not quite settle on one of the 11 entrants and so instead awarded both Locust Storage, a startup (just out of stealth mode today) and CPower , which provides businesses energy management services, as the co-winners.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah Palin Wearin’ Your Product?
Marketers’ jobs aren’t easy. They need to politely, but aggressively, get the word out about their products, and then get those products into as many pairs of hands as possible. And sometimes that works out a little too well, or in unexpected ways. A good case in point graces the cover of Newsweek this week. Sarah Palin might think that shot of her, taken for a Runner’s World profile, is turned into a sexist statement when in the context of a news magazine. The folks over at Icebreaker, manufacturer of that Icebreaker GT base-layer she’s sporting, no doubt find it perplexing.
“Not only can former Governor Palin see Russia, but apparently she can see New Zealand too,” wrote Lee Weinstein, who handles communications for Icebreaker, in a letter to its list of media contacts this morning. A Kiwi outdoor clothing manufacturer, Icebreaker strives to maintain a sustainable supply chain and responsibly and ethically source the merino wool that makes its garments so fabulous (I say that based on the Icebreaker garments I own, and covet).
EV Tech Center Abuzz Over an Electrified Future
Photo courtesy Southern California Edison
Electric vehicles and the changes they promise to bring to our transportation infrastructure are making lots of headlines these days, but to Ed Kjaer, the director of Electric Vehicle Tech Center, EVs are old hat.
Kjaer drives an electric Toyota RAV-4 every day. He’s logged 83,000 miles on the rig, which he drives to Southern California Edison’s Pomona facility, home of the EV Tech Center. And when he gets to work, it’s all EV, all the time. It’s clear from talking to Kjaer that he’s an EV advocate. But EV technology is about more than just zero-emission vehicles. It’s about a new approach to energy management and storage.
Step inside the EV Tech Center and the first thing you’ll notice, aside from shiny new electric concept cars from the likes of Ford and other carmakers, is an electrical buzz—similar to the buzz you’ll hear walking past power lines in a rain storm. Must be all those power and battery systems that researchers in the lab are putting through their paces. Of particular focus, not surprisingly, are banks of automotive grade lithium-ion batteries.
SoCal Edison: On Teaming with Titan Automakers, and Sharing Customers
Photo courtesy Southern California Edison
The smart grid is coming! And so are (again, finally) electric cars! Want to know how this makes Ted Craver, the president and CEO of electric power generator and distributor Edition International, feel? Excited. And scared.
“We’re looking at the confluence of public policy, environmental issues writ large, and enabling technologies that are really going to change our industry, and our company, dramatically. We’re going to be dealing with more industries, which means more change and stress on business models,” he told a group of journalists touring Southern California Edison’s Electric Vehicle (EV) Tech Center in Pomona, Calif., on Friday. “It’s exciting, a little scary, and [it's] something that will determine the future of this company for the next 100 years.”
We’ve written before about the growing interdependency between automakers who are developing electric vehicles and the utility providers that will provide the fuel for these cars. And we’ve heard from Ford about its work in developing its electric vehicle program and the partnerships it is forming with utility providers.
But what do utility providers have to say about this new vision for transportation?
EPA Data Center Cuts Waste, Finds Savings
The Green Grid, an IT industry consortium that is studying and seeking to standardize metrics, processes, methods and new technologies to make data centers more energy efficient, partnered last year with the Environmental Protection Agency in an effort to assess the energy consumption at typical small to mid-sized data centers, set in motion energy-saving measures, and then develop a set of recommendations for energy efficiency improvements.
In the study, the EPA acted as the guinea pig—the study centered on its data center located at One Potomac Yard near Washington, DC.
By making a number of changes—many of them simple and requiring little capital, the center was able to increase its energy efficiency by 20 percent. The steps will also save the center $15,000 per year in energy costs.
Ford, Partners, to Focus on the “E” in EVs
There are different estimates and projections regarding when, and if, electric vehicles (EVs) will transform our transportation infrastructure, but one thing seems certain: carmakers won’t be able to transform the infrastructure on their own.
Last month I attended a forum presented by Ford in which it previewed its upcoming electric vehicles—the battery electric (BEV) Transit Connect (a utility van) due in 2010, followed by BEV Focus sedan in 2011 and plug-in hybrid (PHEV) in 2012. Nancy Gioia, Ford’s director of global electrification, also provided an overview of the tooling and manufacturing systems that Ford has put into place in order to hit its production targets for EVs while also maximizing its current manufacturing models—i.e creating production lines that can be used for building vehicles with electric, hybrid or fuel-based engines.
But the real work starts where EV production ends.
Is Bike-Sharing Becoming Bourgeois?
Bike-sharing programs are gaining momentum throughout Europe and even in car-loving US cities, but vandals and thieves are doing a bang-up job of chipping away at that momentum, and adding cost to the programs—especially Paris’ Velib scheme, as we’ve reported in the past.
But a recent New York Times article explores the problem with bike-sharing vandalism in Paris from another angle, saying that “resentful, angry or anarchic youth” are destroying the bikes because the bikes are “seen as an accoutrement of the ‘bobos,’ or ‘bourgeois-bohèmes,’ the trendy urban middle class,” and, as such, they “stir resentment and covetousness.”
Or at least, these are the findings of police and sociologists who are studying the trend. While some bikes are stolen and shipped abroad for profit, a great number of them are simply trashed—tossed in creek beds or dismembered and left on curbs.
Finisterre Finds Best Path to Staying Warm and Dry Is to Act Like an Otter
On any given day, you’re likely to find a small team of product designers, material developers and scrappy marketers holed up in a converted mine building in the town of St. Agnes on the North Cornwall coast—unless, of course, the surf is good. At those times, you’re more likely to see these folks, who operate the Finisterre outdoor apparel company, bobbing in the chilly waters of the Atlantic, just a quick walk away from the office of Finisterre.
Finisterre makes jackets and base layers for people who love being outside, whether they’re surfing, hiking, skiing, climbing…whatever.
Most of the baselayers it sells are made of the soft, high-performance wool of sustainably-raised merino sheep. But the company is not only using materials from animals in its products, it’s also designing products that mimic the way that animals stay warm and dry. In developing this season’s Humboldt and Storm Tracker Finisterre jackets, the designers employed biomimicry.
GreenBeat Call for Submissions: Got a Smart Grid Killer App?
Renovating the power grid requires big ideas from start-ups, major technology companies, manufacturers, and university labs. Innovations will range from technologies that increase the grid’s capabilities and efficiency, to new business models that will bring the Smart Grid into fruition.
The GreenBeat 2009 Innovation Competition is seeking the best ideas for making the Smart Grid a reality. Submissions are being accepted until this coming Friday, October 30 November 4 (it’s recently been extended). So if you’ve got an innovation to share, enter it here.
VentureBeat will name the top 10 entrants on November 19, 2009 at the GreenBeat 2009 conference, where Al Gore and John Doerr will provide keynote presentations.
Triple Pundit readers can save 20 percent on GreenBeat 2009 tickets by using the coupon code “TRIPLEGREEN”. Register here.
Will Microsoft and Google Blow Life into British Wind Power?
Giant IT companies with giant energy needs—Microsoft and Google are great examples—have been looking for low-cost, low-polluting ways of powering their massive server farms for years. In fact, both firms built server farms along the Columbia River in Washington and Oregon in order to take advantage of some of the cheapest hydro-power in the country. Could they now be looking to the wind to help power their European operations?
Late last week, the Financial Times speculated that Microsoft and Google could be pondering investments in offshore wind farms in Britain.
The story posits that wind power must play an increasing role in the Britain’s power mix if the country is to meet its aggressive goal of 30 percent renewable energy generation by 2020. And it suggests that financial support from major Internet firms such as Google and Microsoft could serve to resuscitate the wind power industry there, which lost momentum due to the global recession.
Causecast: Getting the Word Out, Bringing Donations In
When he founded Causecast, Ryan Scott focused on one major problem that charitable organizations were facing: they were paying too much in donation transaction fees. So he set out to find ways of lowering those costs, since they bleed so much money away from a non-profit’s core fund-raising goals. “I realized [nonprofits] needed better IT infrastructure because they were getting overcharged on transaction costs. I wanted to bring those costs as close to $0 as possible,” he says.
Now, about two years later, Causecast helps lower transaction fees using a number of methods, from linking the non-profits up with companies who cover the fees through dollars earmarked for cause-marketing, to making the payment processing infrastructure more efficient for non-profits using emerging technology. For example, Causecast is launching a system by which consumers can make donations via their cell phones, using a text-to-pay payment system that generates low or no transaction fees.
Food Compost: There’s Gold in Them-There Green Bins
My desk is at the front of my house, right by a street-facing window, so I keep an unintentional vigil on my San Francisco street. Wednesday is garbage day on my block and at around four o’clock this afternoon, I noticed something unusual: the compost collection truck.
It was coming through a few hours later than usual. But then something dawned on me that today is the first day in which composting in San Francisco is mandatory. These drivers are extra busy.
eBay, Others, Offer Strategies for Turning Customers into Allies
Triple-bottom-line businesspeople aren’t just in it for the money; they seek to satisfy social and environmental bottom lines, as well. And generally, the same can be said of their patrons. That shows up in consumers’ willingness to pay premiums for fair trade, responsibly-sourced products. But the relationship between company and customer does not—and, many would argue, should not—end in a financial transaction. So how can socially- and environmentally-responsible firms go about turning their customers into advocates?
That question was posed to three panelists—Danny Kennedy, founder and CEO of Sungevity; Ron Gonen, cofounder and CEO of Recyclebank; and Amy Skoczlas Cole, director of citizenship outreach at eBay—during the JustMeans Social Media for Sustainability conference on Monday, in San Francisco.
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