Obama, quite literally, has the weight of the world on his shoulders. His consistent rhetoric and his positive impacts in the community played a big part in his landslide victory. Now everyone is watching him closely to see if he delivers on what he promised to the public. After all, when it comes to credibility, actions speak louder than words, and people judge companies the same way.
Since green has gone mainstream, there are a lot of companies who have been greenwashing, spending money or time on giving the appearance of being green instead of spending resources to alleviate environmental impact. The environmental marketing company TerraChoice released the study “The Six Sins of Greenwashing“, which found that 99% of 1,018 common consumer products randomly surveyed were guilty of greenwashing. That’s a lot of lying.
When Barack Obama delivered his speech on November 4, 2008, he mentioned the challenges of a planet in peril and the worst financial crisis in a century. In the spirit of collaboration, he called upon all Americans to “join in the work of remaking this nation.”
The dwindling economy isn’t the only thing that’s hurting company profits it’s also the widespread lack of employee engagement. The Towers Perrin firm conducted a global workforce study of employees around the world, and only 21% of employees surveyed were engaged in their work. The study reported that the more employees were engaged, or willing to go the extra mile to help their company succeed, the better the financial results.
But even before the economic meltdown and the lack of employee engagement, many companies felt they had to choose between economic success and the environment. Can the case of economy vs. environment be settled? Read the rest of this entry »
We saw Wal-Mart, a company with worldwide-wide revenues only second to Exxon-Mobile, signal last week in Beijing that it is moving away from “intermittent transactions with many suppliers toward longer-term arrangements with a smaller group of manufacturers“. Then, this week in the news, IBM starts on a roll to eliminate the ‘burden’ of paper — including paper costs, compliance risks and environmental challenges — from their customers’ supply chains with a handful of recently launched software and services.
What is going on here? Both companies are adopting tactics used by sustainability minded entrepreneurs as part of the time tested sustainability supply chain model: measure, purchase local where possible, maintain long-term relationships and integrate accountability at all ‘nodes’ of the chain.
Entrepreuneur.com recently wrote an excellent guide for small business owners on proactive moves they can take to survive - and better yet, thrive - in the nose-diving economy.
“You Can Weather the Economic Storm (Product price sensitivity and financial creativity can help you thrive in any economy)” is especially relevant for green entrepreneurs as many of the principles underlying Dennis Romero’s advice aligns with what sustainable business leaders already know: go for local resilience, understand the value of community-based goodwill and when in doubt, simply, simplify, simplify to the bare essentials (do the latest farm-fresh food recipes or eco-cleaning supplies mantras sound familiar, anyone?). Read the rest of this entry »
Hot off the press, Treehugger readers are in a heated debate (most were against the innovation) over a handfull of XEROX researchers who looked at the challenge of sending good (read: totally reusable and or ready to be recycled paper) and came up with paper that self-erases within 24 hours and can then be re-used. Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s kill the business card, the paper one that is.
Why do we need it anyways? It does that hideous bent corner thing when you take out of your wallet (excuse us “Mr. That’s-why-I-get-my-cards-lamented”, you are an exception), the VP of Financial Genius gets tossed next to the Hatha yoga instructor and besides, that font you chose, with painstaking care, is ugly anyways.Read the rest of this entry »
It’s no secret: businesses who build durable internal systems breed long term and sustainable profits.
In fact, the rule on the street, and this applies to enterprising green businesses who are past their mainstream ‘breaking point’ and are now swimming with the rest of the so-called ’sharks’, is often ‘automate or perish’.
But automation (business speak for “doing it better and faster”) is hardly a Darwinian one-way street – eco-minded companies are benefiting more than just their own bottom line by developing or partnering to develop software that automates green decision making: they are greening entire industries.
And, the three who are doing it – Green Printer, Workforce Software and Sustainable Minds – have a lot to share on what it takes to get there. Read the rest of this entry »
You cannot stop a negative habit without knowing how much and how often you are doing it. Enter the financial “carrot”: the online environmental calculator with a finance edge.
True, public demand, employee engagement, shareholder interest and newly defined sustainability goals are the “pressure points” for companies to cut their consumption habits and curb carbon emissions.
But today, organizations like Xerox, RecycleBank and Creative Citizen are offering more than just a climate change reason to decrease consumption: money. And, they are doing it by showing your employees the financial figures generated in conjunction with their online, environmental calculators. Read the rest of this entry »
My assumption is that kids are already well ahead of their parents in terms of incorporating green living (with less fuss than adults) into their lives and those of their peers. In fact, kids often pressure parents to recycle, according to a study published in the BBC.
Still, raising children to be good citizens and those that can quickly make the link between paper usage, recycling, deforestation, government action and climate change later in their life (I coin these savvy “Forest Citizens”) is not easy but it is well worth it on many levels. Here is who we are watching to help us raise good Forest Citizens as we embark on the craziness of the school year: Read the rest of this entry »
A www.greenprinteronline.com dispatch.
