Category: Green Business

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Green Business Tagged with , , ,

When is certification NOT a good idea? When the body doing the certifying owns the company being certified but doesn’t disclose this. Can you say “conflict of interest?”

“Tested Green” Environmental Certifications were neither tested, nor green.  The Washington, D.C. based company was apparently running a pay-for-certifications program and improperly stating that independent associations endorsed the certifications (the “independent associations” and Tested Green were all owned by the same person).

Ironically, the page where I first found this was trying to sell people on a high-priced and kind of dicey-looking conference about certification fraud. I had to dig around on Google until I found a link I felt comfortable sharing.

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

Packing waste is a scourge in our society. Filling landfills, choking birds, littering our streets, it definitely is a problem that needs to be addressed.

One way, of course, is by generating less packaging in the first place. Do companies really need the little plastic baggie inside the pouch inside the form-fitting foam insert inside the cardboard box inside the shrinkwrap inside a forest of packing peanuts inside a shipping box inside another layer of outer wrap? That kind of overpackaging is all-too-common among boxes I’ve opened. 100 years ago, many products were sold in bulk. We could certainly return to bulk packing for more things.

But another way is to deal with the packaging once it is created. As individuals, we can do a lot of this: reuse glass jars and plastic containers, recycle or compost cardboard and paper, bring our egg cartons back to the farmer, and so forth. But for a lot of the products sold through mainstream retail channels—and particularly for the less simple packing like aseptic boxes, snack chip bags, and drink pouches—we simply don’t know what do to with the packaging.

Enter TerraCycle(R). This company actually pays consumers to pack up their trash and send it off, where it gets transformed into a host of interesting products like fencing, picnic coolers, and—isn’t this cute—recycle bins. In all, the company creates 256 different products out of recycled packaging that would have (in many cases) been thrown in the landfill.

Cool, huh?

Also cool is the way the company involves schools in the collection effort.

BUT…with my particular consumption habits, the site doesn’t work for me. First of all, the company only collects 38 different types of waste, out of the thousands of possibilities. And of those 38, 13 require specific brands—not necessarily the brands I buy. I might dispose of one tube of Neosporin in a year, and that’s not worth collecting. But if I could bring all my empty tubes of toothpaste, skin cream, mentholated muscle-relief cream along with my single tube of Neosporin, that would be worth setting aside, if the drop off was convenient.

The company has made big strides since my last visit, in broadening many of the items from specific brands to generic categories taking any brand, but still…

Then there’s the matter of collection. Each of the 38 has a different set of collection sites. I can’t really see that I’m going to drive hither and yon, dropping off three wine corks here, two cereal wrappers there. And I don’t really understand the logic of having multiple collection streams for essentially the same kind of waste (e.g., a cardboard box for macaroni and cheese is handled differently form a cardboard box wrapped around a tube of Colgate toothpaste).

Using schools as an organizing force makes sense, but not all of us have school-age children. I’d love to see the company partner with landfill and transfer station sites around the country, so collection could be streamlined at the place we’re bringing our trash anyway.

And finally, while I recognize that e-mail can go astray and forms can break, it does bother me that I wrote the following and submitted it through the company’s website back on November 21. Six months later, I haven’t gotten an answer yet:

I was hoping to come to your website and determine whether there are collection points near me. I am surprised by how difficult that is–there’s no way to search by geography, only by product. And the products–so many of them tied to specific brands–don’t correspond well with my buying patterns.

Thus, even though I would be delighted to ship off my trash to you, I see no practical way to participate. I’d love for instance to be able to send you the plastic bags my home-delivery newspaper arrives in on wet days. Or sandwich baggies that are contaminated with food residue and no longer suited to direct re-use. Or the pet food bags which are paper lined with plastic.

Still, I wish them well. I’d love to come back in another six months and discover that it’s vastly easier to get rid of my junk and see it turned into great stuff.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, poverty Tagged with , , , , ,

(This is Part 2 of my report on the Sustainable Foods Summit. If you missed Part 1, please click here.)

And some insights that I knew already, but appreciated the reminders—most of which were echoed by several presenters:

  • Yields, quality, and taste of organics have improved a lot in the last couple of decades—often due to technology innovations that allow packaging more quickly after harvest and longer shelf life.
  • Private-label supermarket brands have moved from their original positioning as generic, low-quality price-leaders to elite niche brands.
  • The best sustainability initiatives combine multiple benefits and create wins for multiple players in the supply/consumer chain (examples include a new packaging process that lowers energy use, costs less, delivers fresher food, and reduces worker risk…a commitment to ship product on trucks with full loads…ways to turn wastes into inputs for a different process, closing the loop and reducing both pollution and cost).
  • The lack of definition for “natural” causes problems.
  • Turning cropland from food production to energy production has unforeseen consequences. For example, the much-heralded corn ethanol movement a few years ago resulted in higher food prices both in the developed markets and, critically, in developing countries where the increases led immediately to greater hunger problems—and ultimately, did not have a positive impact on the energy picture.
  • Just because other people tell you a positive initiative is impossible doesn’t mean it is. Many “impossible” goals turn out to be quite possible, once buy-in spreads through an organization or its customer base—even sourcing from small farms to serve food at big cafeterias.
  • People have a wide range of reasons for going green—from committed environmental or hunger activism to personal and family health.

Although organized by Europeans—they also do one in Amsterdam—most attenders were American or Canadian, with a handful from Latin America (including one presenter who’s part of a large family-owned sustainable sugar plantation and mill in Brazil). It looked to me that about 180 people attended. The conference had only one track, which means everyone got to hear from all the presenters—a nice change.

Despite all the questions that have no consensus answer yet (see Part 1), there was a lot of agreement:

  • GMO is a major threat to organic growers because of its ability to infiltrate and contaminate organic fields.
  • Only 3rd-party certifications (as opposed to self-declaration by a grower or an industry trade group) give the consumer something to trust in, but there’s a problem of certification clutter and oversaturation, leading not only to consumer confusion but also a burden on growers and suppliers trying to comply with and document multiple certifications—and of course, very crowded packaging labels. This is likely to shift as more comprehensive certifications (for example, covering both organic and fair trade) start to come on the market.
  • The best certifications cover not only growing methods but also working conditions—and their attention covers not only the absence of chemicals, but also positive steps to rebuild soil, spread health, etc.
  • The range of practices considered “sustainable” is quite wide, and ultimately the consumer has to decide what’s really important—but any definition of sustainability has to include an adequate livelihood for the growers and their workers.
  • Sustainable products may originate locally, or from far away, though the later can have a pretty big carbon footprint.
  • Sustainable products need sustainable packaging. Many companies have drastically reduced their packaging through careful redesign.
  • Both to save money and to reduce environmental impact, many farmers and producers are moving at least partly toward green energy sources.
  • In the end, sometimes you have to make choices. You may not be able to get organic, local or fairly traded, biodynamic, minimally processed, and appropriately packaged all in the same product—so you do the best you can and help the world reach the point where you can get all the desired attributes without having to choose among them.
  • The sustainable foods industry has a responsibility to make an impact on issues around hunger, poverty, and the economic viability of indigenous suppliers.
  • Sustainability is a process, a journey of many steps. And while all of us need to start taking at least some of those steps, even those who have been on the path a long time still can find ways to improve.

Shel Horowitz is the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and writes the Green And Profitable/Green and Practical monthly columns.

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By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business Tagged with , , , , ,
  • Can you preserve the soil by switching to no-till farming if it means you can’t use organic methods?
  • Which is more sustainable: a lightweight plastic bag made from virgin materials (i.e., petroleum), or a plastic clamshell using 40 times as much material, but made from recycled water bottles?
  • If biodegradable (PLA) plastics are made from GMO (genetically modified organism) corn, are they any better than non-biodegradable plastic?
  • Is organic enough of a standard, or do we hold out for the much stricter but much rarer Demeter Biodynamic certification?
  • Are food-industry giants squeezing out small artisan brands, or opening up new opportunities for them?
  • And can we achieve a food system that combines the artisan quality and chemical/petroleum independence of pre-20th century food production with the massive volume and ability to feed hungry people of the 20th century Green Revolution, while achieving the distribution necessary to end hunger?

These are some of the questions attendees at the Sustainable Foods Summit grappled with on January 18 and 19, 2011 in San Francisco.

Conference presenters included a number of certification agencies and a few consultants (including me on the marketing side) as well as producers and retailers both from major companies like Tesco’s Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, Safeway and White Wave (whose brands include Silk and Horizon) as well as much smaller companies like Theo Chocolate and Washington State’s Stone-Buhr Flour.

Some of the things I hadn’t heard before:

  • It’s well-known that cows are a huge source of methane emissions (a worse climate change problem than CO2)—but I hadn’t known that cow burps cause almost twice the emissions of cow manure, and that cow burping can be greatly reduced through feeding the cows a healthier organic grass-based diet rich in flax, which also raises the Omega-3 level in the milk (a good thing).
  • Cows fed a healthy organic diet live an average of three times as long and have more lactation cycles; this translates directly into increased profitability of the farmer.
  • Organic farming can sequester 7000 pounds per acre of CO2 per year.
  • By converting some acreage to oilseed crops such as sunflowers, farms can supply a goodly percentage of their energy needs, feed cows, and gather the seeds as a cash crop. (These four bullets from Theresa Marquez of Organic Valley dairy cooperative; the percentages on cow emissions were from Bree Johnson of Straus Family Creamery)
  • Makers of biodegradable plastics often source from GMO corn. (Adrianna Michael, Organic and Wellness News)
  • No-till farming vastly reduces soil erosion (which can lower the altitude of a conventional farm by more than a foot in 40 years), but is difficult to do without chemical weed control.
  • Organic, interplanted, and no-till soil hold a lot more water, and look, smell, and even taste healthier than conventional soil.
  • Some private-label supermarket brands, including Safeway’s O Organics, are now being marketed through other retail channels not owned by the original company. (Alex Petrov, Safeway)
  • Even though it’s more expensive to start with, you get 20% more yield from a natural beef patty compared to a conventional one, which makes progress toward evening out the price. (Maisie Greenawalt: Bon Appetit Management Company, an institutional food service provider for colleges, museums, and corporate cafeterias)

(This report will continue tomorrow)

Shel Horowitz is the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and writes the Green And Profitable/Green and Practical monthly columns.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Green Business, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

1. To move forward on my goal of reaching critical mass for the two self-syndicated columns I’m launching, Green And Profitable, for business, and Green And Practical, for consumers. Both emphasize easy, low-cost, high-return approaches. Click here to see samples of the business column. (I’ve written text and sample columns for Green And Practical, and bought the domain, but this is so new that the site isn’t live yet.) My goal is to have 1000 paid subscribers and/or generate $10K/month from this by the end of 2012. It’s going to be really cheap for media, $10 per insertion—and I’m also offering private-label (PLR) e-mail/print rights to corporations and associations at 25 cents per name per year, which is where I suspect the money will mostly come from. If I’m successful, I will actually, for the first time, make my living as a writer of consumable content, rather than of marketing materials—this after publishing eight books and more than 1000 articles.

–>And by the way, I’d be very grateful for connections to people who might want to license PLR rights to one or both of the columns (people with a green product or service, for instance). I am willing to pay $200 commission for any column client who commits to $1200 per year or more. shel (at) principledprofit.com or twitter to ShelHorowitz.

2. To structure my work days to include two hours of billable/client work, 1 hour on my own writing or marketing (blog, columns, speeches, services), 2 hours maximum on e-mail, 15 to 30 minutes on social media, 1 hour of professional reading, half an hour each on office organization and bills/postal mail, and an hour of exercise. I have timekeeping software, and I’m going to use it.

PS–instead of an annual letter, we did a humorous quiz. If you want to learn more about my family and get a smile in the process, click over and have a look.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Events, Green Business, Green Marketing, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

I have only half an hour left of being 53. It seems a good time to reflect on the whirlwind year I’ve had. Professionally, a lot has gone right for me this year.

First, of course, this has been my initial year as a Guerrilla Marketing author, and the publishing world is definitely nicer to authors who have hitched their wagon to a star. The folks at Wiley have been far more collaborative and helpful than many authors experience with their big NYC publishers, and certainly more so than Simon & Schuster was with me all those years ago. I’ve been promoting the book constantly all year long, and the publisher and even Amazon have also worked on that goal. And as a result of all that effort, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green has been on the Environmental category bestseller list for at least 11 of the last 12 months—we’re not sure about March—and was #1 in the category for part of April and May. Even cooler—within three weeks of publication, a Google search for the exact phrase “Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green” brought up 1,070,000 hits—far more than I’ve ever seen for anything else I’ve been involved with. Some of those pages have come down since, but as of today, it’s still quite respectable at 551,000. And a search for my name peaked last month at 119,000, nearly double the previous high point of 62 or 64,000.

Because of the new book, I’ve also done quite a bit of speaking this year, including my first international appearance (at an international PR conference in Davos, Switzerland, home of the World Social Forum and World Economic Forum. This was a different event, but in the same venue, and it felt pretty trippy to be speaking from the same building that the likes of Bill Clinton and Warren Buffett speak from. And when you write a book called Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, you have automatic “chops” in both the green community and the marketing world—which is great, since the book really looks at the intersection of profitability and sustainability. I’ve spoken and exhibited at quite a few green events this year (ranging from the mellow, outdoor SolarFest in Vermont to the huge Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival in the Washington, DC Convention Center) and made numerous great contacts.

And I discovered, particularly when doing media interviews, that I really do know quite a bit about going green, on a much deeper level than just “made from recycled materials” stuff. I was very pleased with the quality of some of the more than 100 interviews I did this year, finding that a number of the journalists went a lot deeper than others I’ve experienced in the past—and I was able to take them deeper still. I’m not saying this to brag, but because I didn’t actually realize how much I do know about many substantive issues around sustainability until I started answering so many great questions about it.

Part 2 will discuss the most exciting part of my year: a way to get the message in front of a much wider audience. Stay tuned.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Business

Absolutely fascinating BBC News article about the ultra-energy-efficient, ultra-tiny future of supercomputers (Thanks, Twitter friend @whatgreeninvest).

I found some bits especially startling: According to the IBM researcher leading the team,

“The cost of a transistor works out to 1/100th of the price of printing a single letter on a page.”

“In the future, computers will be dominated by energy costs – to run a data centre will cost more than to build it.”

“It takes about 1,000 times more energy to move a data byte around than it does to do a computation with it once it arrives.”

Even the early protoype of the team’s water-cooled computer is half again as fast as today’s fastest supercomputers—but it’s larger than a refrigerator. Scientists want to shrink it to the size of a sugar cube!

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By Posted on Posted in Green Business, Green Marketing, Shel's Personal Life

Just a quick brag: Monday, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, my hometown paper in Northampton, Massachusetts, became the first newspaper to contract for and publish an installment of my new column, Green And Profitable (Note: this paper may not let you see it if you’re not a subscriber–but it’s one of the sample columns on this site).

1 down, 999 to go to make my goal of 1000 paying markets for the column within two years.

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

I’ve written a great roundup of the cool Green trends I discovered walking the floor of the Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival in Washington, DC this weekend. some amazing stuff in fashion, transportation, shelter, food, and more. They’re doing another one in San Francisco November 6-7.

This will be the lead article in November’s Clean and Green newsletter, which will be published next week. If you’re not a subscriber yet, visit https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/ to sign up, so that you’ll see this coverage (no charge–just put your e-mail in the space at the upper right). You’ll also get eight freebies: Seven Tips to Gain Marketing Traction as a Green Guerrilla–and a series of seven action tipsheets covering:

  • Green printing (eight specific steps)
  • Saving energy (six steps)
  • Reducing waste (ten ideas)
  • Conserving water (five ideas)
  • Green transportation (six steps)
  • Deep-Green measures (six steps)
  • Effective Green marketing (six ideas)

So what are you waiting for? Just visit <a href=”https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/”>https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/ and leave your e-mail in the form at the upper right.

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By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Green Business, media-general, Shel's Personal Life

Shortly after starting my blogging career, I switched from Blogger to WordPress and began hosting the blog on one of my own sites, Principled Profit. Since the blog was called “Principled Profit: The Good Business Blog,” this made sense. I also had a radio show called “Principled Profit: The Good Business Radio Show” from 2005-09, and of course, my award-winning book at the time was Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

But from now on, my blog’s primary home will be on GreenAndProfitable.com, and the blog will be known as the Green And Profitable blog

So after all this time, why change? I still feel a lot of empathy for the brand, after all.

First of all, as a condition of publishing my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, John Wiley & Sons required me to take Principled Profit off the market; they didn’t want my self-published book competing with theirs.

#2: Yes, I have a website at https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com—but that didn’t seem the right place to put the blog. I’m in a thinking-big mood lately, and I wanted something that would encompass the whole world of successful green business, not just the marketing slice.

And finally, I’ve had a long-held dream (at least 25 years, maybe longer) of being a syndicated columnist, kind of like George Will but with progressive, earth-centered viewpoints. I want to use the “bully pulpit” to make a difference on the environment, move the world toward ending hunger, poverty, and war, and reach a lot of people who haven’t read my books or e-zines. I’ve sent out column queries a number of times over the years, but so far, no luck. (I have served as a non-syndicated columnist for various publications over the years, most recently Business Ethics for over two years, until the magazine rebranded.)

With some good coaching from my Mastermind group, I’ve decided to move forward and begin at least by self-syndicating a column called—want to guess?—”Green And Profitable.”

I’ve long been a believer in speaking, writing, and consulting reinforcing each other and moving forward both a business success profile and a social agenda. If I can begin to find newspapers and magazines to take a monthly column (and pay at least a little something for it), I’m hoping my ideas will reach enough people to make a difference in the world. And as the climate crisis worsens, I feel like I can not only be an antidote to all the doom and gloom, but a conduit for ideas that people can incorporate into their own lives…ideas that make a real difference in the world and in my readers’ personal success.

Wish me luck!

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