3p Contributor: Paul S
Recent Articles
How To Make Your Business More Sustainable: Put it on Wheels!
For most people without a washer and dryer, there are three choices: carry your dirty stuff to the local laundromat, drive if it’s too much to carry, or pay someone to pickup and deliver it. For all of these, there are both a business and an environmental opportunity: Bikes.
Yes, as mentioned recently in Springwise, Argentina based Laundry Company has taken advantage of the increasing ability of bikes to carry larger loads, and is now offering a service that picks your laundry up and drops it off, all via a 3 wheel cargo bike (or old fashioned foot power) at no extra charge.
It’s not just a gimmick. Laundry Company provides a reusable fabric based laundry bag and its machines and detergent are designed to be lower impact, an energy savings of 40 percent. The company also neutralizes it carbon footprint via tree planting.
How Has Microfinance Changed Since 2005?
Microfinance, something now fairly common and even mainstream in 2010, was a novel concept when we first wrote about Kiva in 2005. At that time, you could only lend to people in Uganda. Now you can lend to people around the world, and in a clear sign microfinance has moved beyond being only about helping those in developing countries, it now includes North America.
Entrepreneurs needing funding is a universal thing, it seems.
The model has shifted since then, in useful ways:
The Next Urban Development Frontier: On the Water?
In our increasingly crowded world, there are many schools of thought as to how and where to fit all those people. Where do they live? Where is their food grown? And particularly vexing, where do they work? Smart urban design is fast becoming a must, around the world.
You could just keep building upward, sprawling outward, or even building underground, but what about on the water?
Can You Create Food, Energy, Heat and Fuel in the Same Place?
The subject of where our energy, food, and fuel comes from is frequently contentious.
With just about all the options, there’s a down side: environmental effects, lack of infrastructure, cost as compared to current cheap options, the need to transport long distances, shifted energy burden location from vehicles to power plants or inability to scale. Each camp claims it has the solution, and much posturing happens by politicians of all persuasions, frequently for little more than pleasing their base.
But there’s a company I came across recently, San Juan Bioenergy, that deftly sidesteps all these issues, and is already proving its sustainable business model. It’s doing so by being many things in one place: A food, fuel, heat, and energy producer. And it produces these products for local consumption.
How?
Mission Street Food – The First Full Time Co-op Charitable Restaurant?
Opening a restaurant is a dicey proposition. Even more so in this shaky economy. You have to be part masochist, part trend rider/creator. A keen intuition for what’s missing in the market, and how to serve it well, at a price people are willing to pay, repeatedly, is a must.
Various models have been tried over the years, including pay what you will and even turning the tables, so to speak, choosing who gets the privilege of eating at the restaurant.
Mission Street Food has taken another route, arguably a smarter one for these times: They borrow another restaurant’s space two nights a week, feature guest chefs and donate the profits to charitable organizations. This minimizes overhead while giving patrons an incentive to eat out that is more than just for their own pleasure, further justifying them spending their money there.
But it’s Mission Street Food’s recent announcement of seeking to create a co-op style full time restaurant that highlights a key advantage to the model:
Recyclable, Compostable and Biodegradable, in the Same Bottle? Yes.
More and more of us are making an effort to live a more sustainable life. And yet, there’s this nagging sticking point. Packaging. So much of what we buy, particularly liquids, comes in packaging that is either from raw materials or is not recyclable. Or both.
Oakland based Ecologic intends to solve that problem.
Environmental + Film Festival Does Not Have to Equal Drudgery. Wild & Scenic Proves It.
I recently had the pleasure of attending the 9th edition of the Wild & Scenic film festival, America’s largest environmental film festival, organized and hosted by SYRCL, in the tiny but vibrant town of Nevada City, California.
Through these events, SYRCL has made people across the nation aware of its fight to preserve the Yuba–a river mostly unknown outside the local region. And even if you didn’t know that SYRCL stands for South Yuba River Conservation League, the group’s new logo, prominently featuring a leaping salmon, makes it even more clear, quickly.
Bottled Water Bad. Reusable Bottle Good. Tap Water Gross. 321 Water Fixes That, Beautifully
You probably by now know that the plastics that go into bottled water are bad for the environment, and perhaps even not so good for you if it’s just nicely labeled tap water. Add to that the possibility the bottle contains BPA and they’re not such a healthy choice after all. And yet, they’re so convenient and obtainable anywhere. And drinking your local tap water? Not going to happen.
If you add into the equation that you’re not even close to hippie, and don’t want to look like one, your healthy, sustainable water choices get slim.
Australian startup Half a Teaspoon has designed a product to answer all these concerns, in a design-, environment- and people-friendly product: 321 Water.
Recycle Match: The eBay of Recycling?
Waste. Every company creates it, in some form or another. For some materials, the path to recycling is clear – paper, plastics, and industry specific waste that has a known reuse within your sector or a related one.
But what about the less obvious materials, the ones for which you have no feasible reuse, and therefore pay disposal fess, month after month? Is that the end of story, a “necessary evil” you must resign yourself to?
Not if Recycle Match can help it.
Much like eBay has created a global market on the consumer items that previously sat in people’s homes or were thrown away, Recycle Match seeks to match up those who generate either one-time or regular streams of hard-to-recycle materials, with those seeking that material for their own use.
The source company gets revenue from that which they previously paid to have taken away, and the recipient finds a resource they need, likely at a lower cost, and definitely with less of an impact on the environment.
What does Recycle Match get out of it?
Looptworks – A New Way to Think About Sustainable Clothing
Take a look at the tag of the clothes you just got for Christmas. Where were they made? Most likely, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, China or Peru. And? And with clothing manufacturing comes the scraps. The overage of a particular color fabric or button. The average factory produces 60,000 pounds of excess material each month–much of it thrown away.
But you’re not responsible for that, right? There’s not much you can really do, yes? If Looptworks has its way, that will begin to change. The startup makes clothing that upcycles this material into new clothing. In some cases, particularly the men’s clothing, you would never know the clothing wasn’t made from first run material. So much so that I had my doubts as to whether the clothing was indeed made from waste material, until I delved further into the source - the excess from manufacturers in the countries mentioned above.
I think this is a smart way to go, at least for the men’s line, so it will be more easily accepted, more broadly appealing, and wearable in a greater number of settings, making for a quicker mainstreaming of the idea that wearing clothes made from “waste” can be an everyday activity.
GlowFungi: Glowing Advertisements Using Natural Fungi
When you hear the term “green marketing,” it typically conjures up images of recycling symbols, meaningful imagery, and stories of passionate company founders. But Curb, a London based “natural media company” takes it to another, more literal level: It creates marketing using natural elements, including sea salt, snow tagging and compost art (sans manure, thankfully!).
The components of Glowfungi
But its latest innovation, upon viewing, may appear totally artificial: Glowing signs, looking like they were made from black light paint or glow stick material.
Can the Words “Eco” & “Travel” Ever Go Together?
In recent decades, travel has become cheap, thereby allowing a large portion of the population to go wherever it pleases. While, at first glance, this seems a good thing, it has contributed in many ways to the increasing homogenization of world culture, and an increasing environmental footprint–something that more then 70 world leaders are meeting to discuss at this week’s COP15 meetings.
You’ve probably heard of ecotourism, traveling with a lighter impact and more meaningful experience, but you might be surprised to know that Travelocity, one of the major online travel agencies, has been running its Travel For Good program since 2006.
The program came not from some opportunistic marketing department, but from within the staff of the company, and it is composed of several people who wanted to find ways to make travel more meaningful, and help connect a more mainstream audience with voluntourism opportunities. When Travelocity reached out to its customers, it realized that there was a lot of interest out there as well, but consumers didn’t know where to look.
Like Walmart mainstreaming sustainable consumerism, Travelocity then set about creating Travel For Good.
COP15 Begins: Here Are the Solutions We Need Now
Today marks the start of UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, or COP15 as it’s widely known. A culmination of years of planning, months of lobbying by pressure groups such as those coordinated by TckTckTck. There’s a lot of anticipation and speculation as to what’s going to happen. Not all of it optimistic.
While the outcome of these meetings isn’t clear, one group is doing its best to offer hope, knowledge, and actions for us mere mortals. Ode Magazine has created The Solutions We Need Now, a publication it will be distributing 50,000 copies of to delegates and participants in Copenhagen. A free digital version of it is available to everybody else for a limited time here.
It pragmatically addresses these solutions in three sections: What needs to be done; how to do it; and what you can do.
Sustainability heavyweights such as Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, Al Gore and Lester Brown weigh in here with encouraging words and big ideas, but it’s the real world examples happening globally that are intriguing:
EcoFactor and the Truly Smart Grid
Technology works best when it’s least intrusive and does the heavy lifting for you. Apple understands this. And so, it seems, does EcoFactor, the winner of the recent Clean Tech Open.
What it does behind the scenes is fairly complex, but for the user, easy and out of the way: It keeps your home at an optimum temperature, via an externally managed system. And it doesn’t require you to buy expensive or not yet available equipment.
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