3p Contributor: Paul S
Recent Articles
How to Bring Green Weddings to the Masses
One’s wedding is usually one of the pivotal, most memorable events in one’s life. And yet for an increasing number of people, there’s a nagging sense that things could be done differently. The wedding favors, where did they come from? Who made them? What are they made of? My choice of location, while idyllic, does it necessitate thousands of cumulative extra miles by my guests to get there? What can I do to make my event enjoyable and memorable, while not leaving a huge impact?
But there’s a confusing array of choices out there. One option is to hire a green wedding event specialist. But in this tight economy, many may want to just take care of the details themselves.
So it’s a wise move that Dream Green Weddings launched an online store that serves as a hub for just about everything but the food, photographer, and where to have it.
EcoUnit Partners with Organic Valley to Supercharge Sustainable Consumer Behavior
How do you effectively shift consumer behavior with minimal cost to you as a business and minimum effort required of consumers? EcoUnit is one company attempting to answer that question.
When we last wrote about them in June, they were testing out ways to reward customers for bringing in their own bags. This earns them EcoUnits, redeemable for anything from store discounts to donations to local eco non profits of choice. As mentioned, the pilot store program was a huge success, a 77 percent increase in reusable bag use in the first two months after launch.
Where are they now?
Crowdsourcing: Why it’s Not a Waste of Time
Crowdsourcing. You’ve probably heard the term over and over, and when I began to hear it from Dwayne Spradlin of Innocentive as he presented at the inaugural Social Media for Sustainability conference in San Francisco on Monday, I began to tune out. A buzzword with not a lot of tangible results. A recipe for messy, small-results projects.
But what he did earlier got my attention. He said that if we in the audience as a group of 100s could synchronize our claps in under 45 seconds, he’d donate to a charitable cause of note. We did it in about 10 seconds. Trivial as this may sound, it served as a micro example of how, given the right incentives, people can coordinate and focus activity towards a goal, getting results faster than otherwise thought possible.
In his presentation, “Creating Value Together – Online Collaboration and Competition Networks,” Spradlin gave several real-world examples of opening, widely, to help get supposedly intractable problems solved quickly.
Green Tomato Cars: A Smart Use of Twitter
Twitter is being used for all sorts of interesting purposes these days, from collaborative book writing to street food vendors fighting for mind (and stomach) share.
Now it can be used to hail a taxi.
You send a direct tweet to greentomatocars, and they tweet you back with a confirmation. While it may sound gimmicky, in a world where many people use their mobile phone for everything but phone calls and practically live on Twitter, it’s a wise move. Businesses that make a point to go where their customers are most comfortable interacting stand to benefit greatly.
Green Tomato Cars doesn’t just use its Twitter account just for bookings; the company is active on the site, sharing articles of interest, company news, and tweeting green-minded people traveling in London. Doing so, it strikes a smart balance of promoting its services and adding value to the conversation.
Ponoko: Carving a Truly Sustainable Business Niche for Themselves
Back when I was a student at the sustainable MBA centered Presidio Graduate School, one of the more oddball students was Edward West. A mad scientist in the making, complete with wild hair, a secondary concern for such an idea driven man, he now leads the charge (pun intended) at electric motorcycle startup Mission Motors.
Edward told me about how he knew of people that could take most any idea you had for an object, and using lasers, carve it for you. Print on demand products. Another wild eyed green MBA dream, perhaps?
No. Now it’s really happening, and happening successfully.
As reported in Inc recently, New Zealand based Ponoko was first a one machine shop, cranking out the products that their sellers sent them the designs for, helping leap the big hurdle from concept to business, the typically large quantities fabricators require.
Having now adjusted their pricing model to make it more affordable for designers to use their services, it’s gotten busier, itself going from gee whiz idea to viable business. But there’s more.
Zumbox Is Not Another BS “Paperless” Mail Option. Here’s Why.
I have to admit, when my friend Rob Reed of Max Gladwell first told me about Zumbox, the “Paperless Postal System,” I didn’t get it. How was it different then, say, Earth Class Mail and other digitized mail services? How many of the many companies I get mail from would actually participate?
So when I again heard from Rob about some big Zumbox news this week, I remained skeptical. Then I watched a brief video on their site, and it all made sense: For every physical mailing address in the US, they’d created a digital Zumbox as well. When you sign up, they send one physical piece of mail that you use to verify your address. Then here’s where the difference is:
Most non personal mail sent to you typically starts as a file on a computer somewhere. It gets printed, put in an envelope, then shipped via the postal service to your mailbox. With Zumbox, that file goes directly to your Zumbox account, bypassing printing, scanning, and mailing it. All those resources, energy, and time are saved.
But who’s using it? As of this week, the Mayors of San Francisco and Newark New Jersey are.
How to Turn a Mountain Dew into a Graduation Robe
This is a story about a 120 year old start up. Or re-start up, as it were. Oak Hall Cap & Gown is a US based company doing what, for the most part, has been moved overseas: Making what we use in our graduations. Often by hand.
They’re one of those rare companies that eschews laying off people in seasonal lulls, treats people as family, and has a dedicated workforce as a result. They’ve made many of the gowns for honorary degree ceremonies, and were infamously seen twice in the swearing in of Barack Obama.
They were in search of a way to make their product more current, and apparently on a visit to one of the 1,600 colleges and universities they serve, EVP Joseph D’Angelo was looking at a biodegradable spork while at lunch, and thought, “If a spork can be environmentally friendly, why not a graduation gown?”
After getting “terrible” results trying bamboo, they went with recycled PET (plastic bottle) based fabric that mimics polyester cloth. After thoroughly testing it, Greenweaver robes were created, and will be ready for the December 2009 graduation season. Graduations can be a source of a tremendous amount of waste, but here are some greener graduation suggestions we shared earlier. With GreenWeaver, each uses the equivalent of 23 bottles.
While only one part of graduation, these robes could serve a larger purpose then just their one time use there:
Two Ways to Go Beyond Ecycling
What do you do with your old electronics when you’re done? For most, they get stored in some back corner of your house, doing a great job gathering dust. Ecycling is a step beyond that, and has become part of the broader consciousness, with major office supply stores now collecting devices.
But ecycling comes with a big package of issues: Where does it get shipped to to have it done? Who does it? What conditions are the workplace where it’s done? Are workers getting poisoned as they do this work?
Despite assurances, in many cases what’s being promised is not what’s delivered when you do you think you’re doing your part in seeing that your old electronics get reused rather then disposed of.
How would you like to know for sure that your electronics are either benefiting those in need or benefiting your pocketbook by getting paid or reducing your costs? And we’re not talking only recent vintage, in demand gear either.
Beyond Organic – Looptworks Upcycles Textile Waste into Treasures
Look at the shirt you’re wearing now.
What do you think happened with the material cut to make that shirt? Despite likely making every effort to be efficient in how much material is used, there is always extra. In some cases, one factory can produce 60,000 pounds of textile waste a week. Currently, nearly all of that goes to landfill. Or it goes overseas, dumped into communities of “need” that then devalues the market for domestic, locally made clothing there. In both cases, there’s an additional carbon cost, with transportation to their destination.
What’s a way to address this? Yes, buying organic is a solid step forward, reducing chemical inputs. And yet, did you know that one pair of jeans takes about 1800 gallons of water to manufacture?
What can you do? Aside from going naked, there’s Looptworks.
Can Junk Mail Ever Be Considered Sustainable? Possibly
Junk Mail. It’s a bad thing, all around, right? Forests worth of paper, tons of emissions delivering it, and 98%+ of the time, ignored. What good can possibly come from it?
Hang on a minute. Dukky has something different to offer, which may just make junk, er, direct mail an increasingly efficient thing, for all involved. And it comes from a completely unexpected source:
An Innovative Social Business Model Based on…T-Shirts?
OneTribe social enterprise TShirt
T-shirts have long been used as a mechanism of expression. Your favorite band. Your life stance. An obscure quote. That you’re a brand whore. But beyond that, what good are they?
Sure, you can buy an organic cotton one, or perhaps bamboo, soy, or any of the other options. Great, but still a small and perhaps abstract feeling gesture, when you’re just one person. Made by fair trade labor? A step forward, but it’s still this nebulous idea, a benefit that sounds good but doesn’t have a personally identifiable aspect to it.
OneTribe has arrived on the scene, with quite a different offer.
How to Promote Your Business with a Glass of Water
Now that carrying a water bottle has long passed being the domain of the crunchy crowd, there’s another hurdle to address: Where to get good water once you’re done with that first filling you did in the morning, when you’re out there in the world. What do you do? Get it from potentially dodgy tap water? Buy another, bigger bottle of water to fill it with, defeating the original purpose?
Tapit has come up with a solution that is both supportive to those that carry bottles, and businesses we may never have found were it not for Tapit.
The Latest Open Source Innovators: Nike and Best Buy?
Nike and Creative Commons are not two organizations you’d typically hear in the same sentence. And especially not working together. Try, “…a project of Nike, Creative Commons, and Best Buy.” That’s what GreenXchange is. Here’s a video laying the groundwork:
GreenXchange is a part of CC’s Science Commons project. As in other Creative Commons efforts, this is about sharing knowledge so that others can create new works based on this knowledge, building upon it in ways that weren’t anticipated by the originator. The GreenXChange website goes into some depth as to the how and why the acceleration of sustainable innovation is important and possible, but these three sentences from their pdf on the project sum it up quite well, in a way that the most tight fisted businesses can understand:
Bringing Personal Energy Savings to a Concrete, Financially Rewarding Level
In recent years, both business and individuals have gotten increasingly clear that it’s necessary to reduce our energy consumption, both for the emissions it produces and the increasingly limited sources of it. Or have they? For most people, aside from their monthly energy bill, there’s little connection to the rest of the world when it comes to energy use.
Carbon offsets, while potentially useful, remain for the most part an abstract thing, removed from people’s daily lives. My Emissions Exchange have come up with an idea that appeals both to people’s desire to do good with their need to get paid.
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