If you were wondering what would be the next stop in the journey of businesses to identify their impacts and dependencies on ecosystem services, you got an answer earlier this week. After disclosing their carbon and water footprints, companies are moving now to disclose their forest footprint. Why they do it? Are these companies becoming the new treehuggers?

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Just as in our personal lives, companies go through growing pains. Organic beverage company, Honest Tea, now faces their own growing pains. From brewing batches of tea in his kitchen in 1998, Seth Goldman and his colleagues have now created one of the best selling organic teas in the country. The business model was so successful that in early 2008, Coke purchased a minority stake in the company for a whopping $43 million.

The dilemma rests in the fact that Honest Tea is trying to maintain its status as a truly organic, ecologically aware and low-calorie beverage company. Coca-Cola sees cost cutting measures and expansion of product portfolio as primary drivers. To add to this drama, Coke has the option to buy the whole company come 2011.

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Clif Bar’s new retirement plan- creating an employee trust with 20% of the company’s equity- uses CSR to solve problems.

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By Dennis Salazar I am not a Gen Z, a Y or even a Gen X. At best I would be classified as a late baby boomer and in my wallet you are likely to find my AARP card along with my Green America and my Hispanic Chamber of Commerce membership cards. I don’t drive [...]

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The recent announcement about USDA’s final regulation on access to pasture for organic livestock is a clear victory for the organic movement. The present language of the National Organic Program (NOP)  merely stipulates that grazing livestock must have access to pasture. As the organic market share has grown, the differing interpretations of this language have created fissures [...]

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By Richard Seireeni The following is an excerpt from The Gort Cloud: The Invisible Force Powering Today’s Most Visible Brands. It has been adapted for the web. The Challenge The birthplace for many of today’s green brands is the verdant hills and valleys of New England. This is where Tom’s of Maine, Ben & Jerry’s, [...]

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Unemployment. Inflation. Anemic economic growth. Everywhere you turn there is bad economic news. As a business owner, this can be demoralizing as you try to survive. Luckily there are several ways you can green your profits and the environment, even in the midst of a recession. 1. Understand Your Customers Better This technique is a [...]

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Released at the beginning of the month, Business Week announced its list of most promising social entrepreneurs, voted on by its readers. The idea, according to the site, “was to track down trailblazing companies… that aimed to turn a profit while tackling societal problems.” Out of over 200 nominations, here are the top-5:

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Are things like Tetrapaks and Dannon/Stonyfield yogurt recyclable today? Yes and no. Here’s why: There are a few recycling centers that accept Tetrapaks and yogurt cups, but they are the exception. Most recycling centers do not except these materials, and those that do are so few and far between that only a small percentage of [...]

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Amidst a free-falling roller coaster global economy, social capital is an encouraging bright spot. While traditional profit-driven capitalism has come into question, the social capital movement is budding, striving to do good and make money at once, shattering the traditional for-profit, non-profit dichotomy. I was a relative newbie at the first Social Capital Markets Conference [...]

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Tuesday night, sustainability leaders from all over the Bay Area made their way to the Berkeley facility of Clif Bar and Company to hear Gary Erickson, Kit Crawford (the husband and wife co-owners of the pioneering Clif Bar and Company) and Gary Hirshberg (President and CE-Yo of the tremendously successful and equally pioneering organic dairy [...]

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