Category: Energy & Sustainability

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

Fascinating interview with Jonathan Porritt, long-time environmental activist and outgoing environmental advisor to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

I find this statement particularly worthy of discussion, and would love to hear what y’all think on this:

Still, he says there are also too many examples of corporate responsibility deployed by companies with fundamentally amoral business models that cannot stand up to scrutiny. He says a particularly stark example is the UK banking industry.

The corporate responsibility teams of UK banks have strong reputations, he says. “They were seen as extremely professional parts of those financial institutions … who used to win lots of awards.

“But the reality is they never, ever got close to the business model of those banks. They were never given access to the decisions being taken about changing the investment strategy, about rethinking approaches to risk, or about the balances of portfolio or a different approach to asset management.”

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Shel's Personal Life

If you don’t count my toddler rebellion against smoking at about age three, I’ve been an environmental activist for 37 years. And yet the Green Work conference tomorrow in New Haven is only the second actual environmental conference I can remember speaking at (I did speak at a couple of anti-nuclear events in the 1970s, but the emphasis there was on protest, not learning).

Anyway, I’ll be speaking at 3 pm on marketing your environmental commitment, and exhibiting both at Green Work on Friday and at the folk festival/Green Expo on Saturday. Say hi if you’re in the neighborhood.

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

Since John Wiley & Sons is publishing my next book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), I was very pleased this morning to discover a press release about its first sustainability/responsibility report.

Wiley’s press release includes ten accomplishments for the fiscal year just ended, addressing everything from responsibly sourced paper and lower paper consumption to carbon control to social outreach in its headquarters town of Hoboken, New Jersey–and eight goals for the current year, focused on broadening its impact beyond its own corporate borders.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Who knew? The tomato blight that’s been ravaging organic farms and gardens in my area of Western Massachusetts has been traced to starter plants apparently grown originally at one location in the South, and shipped to some of the big-box suppliers like Wal-Mart.

I know at least three local farms growing tomatoes in commercial quantities that have no crop this year. Thousands of infected plants had to be destroyed. At least one of those started their own plants from seed, and yet was done in by blight spreading from infected plants grown far away form the local ecosystem. And of course, organic farms can’t, by definition, use chemical fungicides.

Just tearing out our half-dozen rotten, smelly, toxic plants and doing our best to dispose of them properly was a job and a half. I can’t imagine dealing with a whole field’s worth.

In 2007 and 2008, we averaged about 1600 tomatoes, with a taste that simply cannot be equaled with commercial methods. This year, we managed to harvest *one* San Marzano before the blight set in. We still have a few from the hundreds that I dried last year, but not having fresh tomatoes is a huge disappointment. Still, I count my blessings. Compared to those who farm for a living and/or supply CSA members, we had a lot less to lose. Farms are faces losses of thousands and thousands of dollars.

The sad thing is, the farms hardest hit are those with a commitment to local, sustainable agriculture–tainted by other companies’ reliance on non-local, centralized systems that allowed this nasty disease to blanket the Northeast all the way out to Ohio.

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By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Energy & Sustainability, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People Tagged with , , , ,

OK, so everyone knows by now, bottled water is uncool if you live in a place where the water is fit to drink (and that includes most of the U.S., Canada, and Europe, as well as many other parts of the world). Issues include environmental impact, cost, depletion of public resources, and centralization of corporate power.

On the other hand, the health benefits of water are very clear—and having suffered a kidney stone, I personally make a priority of drinking water a whole lot.

So…what do you do when you need that second (or third, or eighth) drink of water, but you’re out and about? Triple Pundit just featured a free service that matches those offering water with those who need it.

And quite correctly, TP spent some time on the advantages to businesses of participating: getting people in the door, positive word-of-mouth, and more—but they missed a big promotional opportunity: This clever idea, called TapIt, so far has database listings only in New York City and Orlando, but the concept is infinitely scalable. If you have a physical location and can wash a few extra dishes, visit the TapIt site and click “become a partner.” And then, smart marketer that you are, send out a news release in your local area announcing that you’re the very first business in (location) to participate in this environmentally friendly act of good will.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun

I’m always looking for ways to keep stuff out of the trash, and I’ve been saying for years that we ought to collect and recycle the prodigious offerings of fur that our dog and cat leave around the house–that someone could spin it into yarn or stuff pillows out of them. But actually doing it was more than I wanted to bite off, so I either deposit the pet hair in the compost, put small quantities outside for birds to line their nests with, or (gasp!) throw it out.

Today, I discovered someone has actually been running a business making yarn out of pet hair, since 2001, and has a long waiting list for the product.. Yee-haw!

But VIP Fibers‘ market isn’t me; it’s people who want quality yarn from their own pet and are willing to pay to get the yarn made. Since I would never actually use the yarn, I’ll have to keep on searching.

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

While you’re reading this, I’m on my way back from the California desert. I’m actually writing it before I depart, from my home in Massachusetts where there’s plenty of water. But going to the desert, where water is taken for granted, always makes me reflect on how profligate we are with water, and how sorry we’ll be about that a couple of decades down the road.

Yes, I believe that within my children’s lifetime, the price of water will soar, its availability will decrease, and we’ll have a serious resource crisis. Actually more serious than the oil crisis. There are plenty of energy substitutes for oil; we can easily generate the power we need from clean, renewable sources: sun, wind, water, and especially a complete rethinking of what is possible in the way of energy conservation. Reading people like Amory Lovins makes me aware that as a society, we could easily reduce our energy consumption by 80 percent or so, without any negative impact on quality of life.

Water is not nearly as replaceable as oil. Human beings, other animals, and all the plants we rely on directly or indirectly for food need sources of clean water, and the supply is not infinite. So it’s incumbent on us not to squander the good water we have, through waste or pollution.

The good news: like oil, water use could be sharply curtailed without any negative impact on lifestyle. I estimate that I probably use no more than 1/10 as much water as the average American–and I’ve met people who use 1/10 as much as I do. I’m not suggesting you collect buckets of rainwater and use them to flush your toilet, as one woman I talked to recently is doing. But I do suggest you look at the obvious places where you’re running water harder and longer than you need to.

Here’s one simple, totally painless example: if you’re like most Americans, when you brush your teeth, you turn the water on (often full-force) and let it run for three minutes or so while you brush. When I brush my teeth, I do it like this: Wet the toothbrush with a small trickle of water, and then turn the water off! Turn it back on to rinse the toothpaste off the brush at the end. So instead of several gallons each time, I consume a couple of ounces of water.

Want to know more? 28 of the 111 conservation tips (yeah, I snuck in a bonus tip) in my e-book, Painless Green: 110 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life-With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle, are about saving water.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Uncategorized Tagged with , ,

I think this is soooo cool! Bicycles are already an incredibly liberating, essentially nonpolluting technology. Now someone in Africa has found a way to use native bamboo as a bicycle-building material. Sustainable, renewable, widely available, and with potentially an enormous impact.

How great would it be if this were widely adopted?

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , ,

Great discussion on Green Biz between Green business expert Joel Makower and emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman, on the roles of informed consumers, “radical transparency,” and social media in eco-friendly consumer buying patterns. Start with Makower’s post, click over to Goleman’s response, and then read the comments on both pages.

This was my comment:

I don’t see you really at odds. Joel says the eco-friendly products have to show a clear advantage–but couldn’t that advantage be something idealistic like lower carbon footprint, especially if it’s combined with, say, a health benefit from avoiding toxic chemicals?

Daniel puts a lot of faith in social media, particularly for the generation coming behind ours. And he’s right. Social proof is in the process of leapfrogging in importance.

I find it interesting that Daniel looks to the Internet, considering he and I both live in the Northampton, MA area, which has very strong offline culture in favor of eco-friendly purchases. Offline cultures, too, can provide social proof.

In the research I’ve done for my books, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, and my forthcoming eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), I found that consumers will indeed choose the better choice, the choice more in line with their values, all things being equal. They will even pay more for it. The challenge then becomes to make Green products as good or better than the choices that don’t align with values, and then choosing the better one becomes a no-brainer. Examples abound, from organic food and bodycare to hybrid cars. The danger, I think, is if people find out they’ve been greenwashed (hybrids being an example), the new habits may not stick.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability

Visionary futurist Amory Lovins recently spoke at the Virtual Energy Forum about how to make cars, planes, buildings, power transmission, etc. so much more efficient that we can actually lower carbon impact and reverse climate change. His delivery is not exciting–but his material is life-changing. (You probably have to register to watch it.)

A lot of this is stuff that is feasible to do RIGHT NOW. We could save 3/4 of US electricity for 1 cent per kilowatt, and building new power plants can’t touch that cost. He has 1000 ways to do it.

If the presentation is too technical or dry, or you have trouble accessing it, I profiled Lovins and some of his ideas several years ago, here. Of course, his thinking has advanced since then.

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