Category: Energy & Sustainability

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Green Marketing, Technology Tagged with ,

American Airlines recently did a great pilot program (no pun intended) to drastically improve the green profile of its 737. I found out about this because the company was proud enough that it put a link in the article in its e-blast to all American Airlines frequent-flyer program members.

In the article, you can read about seven different major initiatives for greener commercial airplanes incorporated into its “ecoDemonstrator” customized plane, six of which demonstrate clear cost savings through increased airplane fuel economy as well or lower maintenance costs. The seventh, switching to vegetable fuel from cooking oil, has major benefits in carbon footprint, waste reduction, and reducing the need for offshore oil drilling and other often-destructive extractive technologies.

The plane had a special paint job, so passengers were aware. And American Airlines acknowledges that both the company and airplane builder Boeing face pressure from consumers and other stakeholders to be more eco-friendly.

And the tests were a huge success. Which makes the closing statement in the article deeply puzzling (note: this is a direct quote, grammar errors and all, except that for SEO purposes, I changed “American” to “American Airlines”):

Prior to deliver to [American Airlines] for regular use, all test equipment was removed and the plane was returns to our normal configuration. And although it will look like an ordinary plane on the outside and inside, we’ll always know that we were the first commercial airline to help test these technologies.

Why? If the program is such a success, saving American Airlines money while increasing its “enviromarketability quotient”—making itself much more attractive to customers trying to chose a commercial airline—why on earth (or in the sky!) would they pull all the cool stuff out? I just don’t understand.

Tomorrow, when the work week starts, American Airlines will receive a Twitter invitation to comment on this blog, and explain their reasons. (I’ve already scheduled the Tweet).

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, Green Marketing, Innovation, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Socially Responsible Investing, Technology, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Heard of Carrotmobs yet? Consumers have used our buying power to avoid companies with the wrong values for decades. Now there’s a positive flip: actively making the effort to buy from companies that support your values. I only heard the term “Carrotmob”—so called because consumers use the carrot of positive business rather than the stick of withdrawing business to achieve social good.

I think I only heard the term a month or two ago; since then, I’ve run across it several times. This concept seems to be entering the language faster than anything I can remember since “Ms.” was invented as a gender-neutral alternative to Miss and Mrs., back in the1970s.

Here’s a particularly cool one with the odd twist that it was initiated by the company—and since I write about out-of-the-box people-centered marketing of green products and services, worth flagging here. I imagine this marketing strategy could get old fast if too many people do it, but the idea of having your customers pre-fund your sustainability venture is a good one. Think abou Kickstarter campaigns; this isn’t so different, after all.

A coffee company has decided that organic/fair trade coffee is not enough; the coffee should be transported on cargo ships powered by renewable energy. Specifically, using wind power.

Thanksgiving Coffee, a California-based artisan roaster, will arrange for wind-powered shipping if people buy $150,000 worth of coffee on Carrotmob. The goal is to prove demand for wind-transported coffee and research ways to make wind-powered shipping a reality in our own time.

It’s worth remembering that all cargo shipping from the dawn of history into the 19th century was either wind-powered or human-powered (by rowers). So there’s no need to prove that cargo shipping can be wind-powered. However, a transatlantic voyage by wind took many weeks, sometimes went way off course, was more susceptible to storms, etc. Steam and then diesel made shipping fast and reliable enough to create the modern global economy. So the real challenge is not to prove that they can use wind-powered ships, but that they can compete effectively using a modern wind-powered shipping fleet.

This of course could have a huge impact on the entire cargo shipping industry, if it can be done effectively and inexpensively enough to transport many different types of items. And certainly, it will inspire the shipping industry to add more sustainable practices even if using conventional diesel-powered cargo ships.

Meanwhile, if you’re a coffee drinker, you can help Thanksgiving Coffee test the waters for sustainable shipping. Go read the article on Ecopreneurist, or skip directly to the Thanksgiving Coffee Carrotmob page and buy a pound or two.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Innovation, Uncategorized Tagged with , , ,

I’ve been saying for years that we have the technology to fix many of the worlds environmental problems; we lack only the will. And new, exciting technologies to go deeper in the quest for solutions are being released all the time.

I just read about a great example: an ultrabsorbent “nanosponge” that drinks up spilled oil, but doesn’t absorb water. It’s even reusable! What a wonderful world!

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics-International, Politics Tagged with , , , ,

An AP story on the Republican Convention in today’s paper puts it this way:

Mitt Romney conceded Sunday that fresh controversy over rape and abortion is harming his party and he accused Democrats of trying to exploit it for political gain.

“It really is sad, isn’t it, with all the issues that America faces, for the Obama campaign to continue to stoop to such a low level,” said Romney, struggling to sharpen the presidential election focus instead on a weak economy and 8.3 percent national unemployment.

Let me see if I get this straight:

  1. Mitt Romney has spent the entire campaign trying to distance himself from the moderate stances on social issues he embraced as recently as 2008, embracing a hard-right radical ideology that would attack women and gays, increase economic disparity, and stack the Supreme Court with more radical-right ideologues.
  2. Mitt Romney chose as his running mate Paul Ryan, whose budget proposals are akin to a hit-man attack on the poor, and whose environmental record makes me worry a great deal about the future of the planet (Paul Ryan gets a miserable 3% rating from the League of Conservation Voters)—and who co-authored extreme anti-choice legislation with none other than the notorious Missouri Congressman Todd Akin, yes, the same one who made the ridiculous remark about pregnancy being nearly impossible in cases of “legitimate rape.”
  3. Mitt Romney is content to stand behind a Republican party platform that contains a full-blown assault on women’s reproductive rights.
  4. As an example of taking the high road, I suppose, Romney made a joke that essentially endorsed the discredited birther movement that claims Obama was not born in the US, just last week. Talk about focusing on the important issues!

And please, finally, let’s not forget that the Republicans have no legitimate claim to run on economic issues. Not only did George W. Bush turn the largest surplus in history—that he inherited from Bill Clinton, who built a remarkable ecnomic recovery after the disaster of the Reagan-Bush years—into a raging deficit, not only did the economy crumple under years of deregulation and defanging the watchdogs, but the Republicans have sabotaged Obama’s recovery efforts over and over again, with the expressly stated goal of making him a one-term president. Even so, housing starts are up, private-sector jobs are up, and the stock market is waaaay up.

And let’s not forget Romney has made it quite clear he will be the president of the 1%. Those of us in the 99% will not find a friend in Romney-Ryanomics.

Joseph Welch asked Senator Joe McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” He’s often misquoted as asking “have you no shame, sir?” That second question is the one I pose today to Mitt Romney.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

Los Angeles Unified School District, a massive consumer of single-use plastic, has banned Styrofoam under student activist pressure—the first district in the nation to do so. And the school district superintendent, John Deasy, will put the topic on the agenda of a district superintendent’s conference.

This is great news—but I have to question why the district switched to compostable disposable trays. It’s certainly more ecological, and probably cheaper, to buy a commercial dishwasher and switch to not only reusable trays, but reusable dishes as well. I would think the materials savings would cover the costs of the machine and the employees to run it, as well as create some needed employment.

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By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business Tagged with , , , ,

Too much goes into the landfill. Good article on Sustainable Brands about how manufacturers can and should be recapturing the materials, and how the US lags behind many other countries on this.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun Tagged with , , , , ,

This article in the New York Times feeds a lot of people’s ideas about what it means to live a green lifestyle: a guy all by himself in the desert, living off the grid in a dwelling he pieced together out of old shipping containers.

That scares a lot of people. Heck, it scares me! But it’s important to note that John Wells, the occupant of said desert paradise, is happy. He’s got a few hundred thou in the bank and he’s there because he wants to be.

I know people like that. My friend Juanita’s no-plumbing, no-electricity hilltop cabin that she and her late husband built by hand is as frugal a dwelling as I know, and culturally about as far from the New York City that both Mr. Wells and I chose to leave behind as it’s possible to get.

But the point I want to make is this: you can still live a green lifestyle and enjoy all the creature comforts and social conveniences of modern life. Consider Amory Lovins, energy futurist extraordinaire, whose spacious and gadget-filled 4,000-square-foot home was sustainability state-of-the-art when it was constructed in 1983. In the cold, snowy Colorado Rockies (just outside Aspen), he doesn’t need a furnace, or an air conditioner—and his monthly electric bill could be made back by skipping a couple of lattes per month at a fancy coffee shop..

Frugal, green lifestyles can be about comfort, ease, lower maintenance costs, and even luxury. They don’t have to be about deprivation—unless, like John Wells, you don’t think of being a hermit in the desert as deprivation, but as liberation. It’s his choice, and I say, go for it.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Business Tagged with , , , , ,

Ray Anderson, CEO of InterfaceFLOR, took his company from a traditional petroleum-based carpet maker to a green pioneer whose name comes up frequently when people talk about merging deep sustainability
AND profitability

Anderson pioneered the idea of modular carpeting, so that if one area is worn out, you can just pop in a couple of new carpet squares instead of replacing the whole darn thing.

In his last years, Anderson created an ambitious program geared toward making Interface a zero-waste company.

Triple Pundit gives us a behind-the-scenes look at Ray Anderson, one year after his passing—written by Giulio Bonazzi, Chairman and CEO of Italy-based Aquafil Group—a supplier and friend to Anderson whose company created a process to recover and recycle polyamide 6, a carpeting component.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Marketing Tagged with , , , , ,

I just came back from my local cafe, where I had a second iced coffee in the compostible cup I’d saved from yesterday (which I did compost when I’d finished it)–and discovered this article about edible coffee cups from Italian coffee giant Lavazza.

We’ve been doing this with ice cream for about a century–why not coffee?

It sounds good in principle–but I have questions:

  1. What if you prefer your coffee unsweetened? This cup is made of sugar.
  2. If this becomes popular, will it worsen the epidemic of sugar-related health problems like obesity and diabetes?
  3. How long will the cup last before falling apart? I tend to wait until my coffee is room temperature–does the sugar start to melt by then? I say this out of some negative experiences with very early biodegradable disposable diapers when my daughter was an infant–some brands had a tendency to start biodegrading while they were still being worn–not to mention leaky ice cream cones (despite this, when I get ice cream, it’s usually in a cone, for environmental reasons—no dishes to wash or throw away)
  4. Considering how much coffee is consumed in transit, can it take a lid?
  5. Is it too hot to hold in your hand?

Still if they can work through these issues, it’s a great concept. Obviously, I haven’t tried these cups. It’s totally possible they’ve worked through all these issues and more. I wish them well; they certainly get points for creative thinking and cross-pollination from different market sectors.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, Green Marketing, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

I’m a long-time fan of Van Jones, and one of the things I love is that he can frame things in ways that those on the other side of the political continuum can relate to.

Too often, the left frames things in its own language (often couched in liberal guilt)—and the right dismisses us as silly and naive. Listen to minutes 30 to 35 of this speech to see how Van Jones puts the argument for going green into an issue of individual economic liberty, and turns the don’t-subsidize-solar argument into a compelling Tea-Party-friendly argument for ending oil subsidies (why doesn’t he talk aobut nuclear, which would not exist as an industry without subsidies?)

Later in the talk, he discusses solar and wind as farmer power, cowboy power, etc. And demonstrates that organic farming is traditional, and that we should return to our roots after a century of “poison-based agriculture.” And calls not for subsidy for green initiatives, but for green as entrepreneurship, enterprise, and job creation—arguments that both liberals and conservatives should relate to.

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