Category: Business

From the Global Footprint Network website:

August 21st marks an unfortunate milestone: the day in which we exhaust our ecological budget for the year. Once we pass this day, humanity will have demanded all the ecological services – from filtering CO2 to producing the raw materials for food – that nature can provide this year. From that point until the end of the year, we meet our ecological demand by liquidating resource stocks and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In other words, from now till December 31st, we are living on credit. Sound familiar? Talk about a “debt crisis!”

Regular readers of this site know that we don’t often report the gloom-n-doom stuff, but this one is always an important wake-up call. In 2009, we noted the date on September 25th, a full month later than this year!

Yes, it’s depressing. But, remember — we are an amazingly creative species. If we can land people on the moon, we can figure this one out! One way to make a significant difference is to green our businesses. What can you do, today, to help push Earth Overshoot Day back next year? Let’s aim for October, shall we?

Guest post by Lynn Colwell and Corey Colwell-Lipson, mother and daughter co-authors of Celebrate Green! Creating Eco-Savvy Holidays, Celebrations and Traditions for the Whole Family, available at their website, Celebrate Green.

As summer winds down, you might be thinking of an end-of-summer celebration with your office. Here are a few tips for eco-friendly company parties. (Many of these ideas are inexpensive too!) If you are looking for more in depth information, just contact Lynn and Corey at their website.

• Avoid choosing paper anything unless it’s treefree or 100% recycled and printed with vegetable inks.
• If you are giving gifts, make them earth-friendly. Potted plants make great centerpieces and can be given away.
• Instead of centering the party around food and drink, come up with some fun activities that may include poking gentle fun at management.
• Provide drinks in pitchers, punch bowls or glass bottles. Avoid disposable cups and plates.
• If you’re having the party catered, seek out one who emphasizes sustainable, local and organic food.
• Giving out awards? Choose from recycled glass awards, fair trade picture frames, organic chocolate bars etc. You can find these and others at Recycled Products and Green With Envy Gifts.
• Have your party early enough in the day so that lights are not necessary. If you use decorative lighting, ensure that it is LED or solar.
• Serve fair trade, organic coffee (shade grown if possible) and/or tea.
• Plan carefully. Avoid overpurchasing food. If you have leftovers, compost, send home with guests or donate if you can. Unopened bags, boxes and cans can be taken to a local food bank.
• Consider having your party or celebration benefit a local cause. Invite guests to bring books for local book drives, coats for a coat drive, school supplies or whatever else your local community needs.
• Clean up with eco-friendly products and be sure to place recycling bins where guests will use them.

If you like these suggestions and want to read more about greening events, check out our guest series from eco-event planner extraordinaire Lori Hill.

As always, we love to hear from you! What creative ideas have you tried for your company celebrations?

Guest post by Louise Baker of Zen College Life.

With so much time and effort being dedicated to creating sustainable energy sources, reducing carbon emissions, and replenishing endangered species, there are a wealth of jobs now available for socially conscious, career-minded college graduates.

1. Carbon Portfolio Management

Reducing carbon emissions has become an increasingly important task throughout the world. Many nations are attempting to reduce their carbon footprint by creating carbon reduction programs, such as the research and development of low emission motor vehicles. Carbon Portfolio Management is important to not only help nations and corporations maintain an environmentally friendly industrial complex, but also to guide them economically throughout their green revolution. Graduates with a degree in Economics or Environmental Science may want to investigate this increasingly popular occupation.

2. Solar Installation Supervisor

One source of sustainable energy is solar power. Solar power requires the efforts of countless engineers and technicians to bring this sustainable form of energy to places that now rely on conventional forms of energy production, such as coal burning plants and nuclear power plants. In order for these technicians and engineers to perform their task quickly and efficiently, supervisors are required. This is a great position for anyone with a degree in Engineering, a willingness to learn new techniques and procedures, and a desire to travel.

3. Green Reporter

Every revolution needs a voice, and the green revolution is no different. Environmental reporters have rapidly become valuable commodities for most media corporations. The flow of green information is constant and overwhelming, so reporters are needed to help manage that flow. Every major newspaper outlet in the world now has their own green reporters on staff. Magazines, television news programs, internet websites, they all employ green reporters. This is the perfect job for someone with a degree in Journalism and Mass Communication or a degree in Environmental Science.

4. Green Mentor

With so many corporations, government agencies, and individuals dedicated to a sustainable existence, there is a growing market for green mentors, men and women with advanced knowledge of green practices and procedures and a willingness to share that knowledge. Through seminars and demonstrations, these experts teach people how to maintain a green lifestyle. This position would be a great fit for someone with a degree in Education or Environmental Science.

5. Resource Preservationist

Because of overdevelopment and lax environmental laws, much of our natural resources have been lost and continue to disappear at an alarming rate. Resource Preservationists are dedicated to reducing the consumption of natural resources and creating a greater balance between human beings and their environment. These individuals usually work closely with energy providers and national parks to preserve our dwindling resources. Anyone with a degree in Environmental Science or Engineering would be a perfect candidate for this position. (Editor’s note: there is a growing industry in environmental restoration as well. These firms restore damaged ecosystems, such as wetlands, stream banks, and forests.)

Louise Baker is a freelance writer. She currently writes about online schools for Zen College Life. She most recently wrote about the best online colleges.

How does the BP oil disaster affect our businesses? Its effects on businesses in the Gulf are obvious. As a savvy business owner, do you see its effects on your own? Sometimes the answer is so close, we just can’t see it.

As one way to light a candle, rather than curse the darkness, I offer this mindset shift.

In Ian McEwan’s book, “Solar,” a physicist tells the story of a man living in a rainy forest. The man is terribly thirsty. He has been cutting down trees to get at the sap, so he can quench his thirst. The destruction all around him is evidence of his desperate quest to find something to drink. Sure, he could just tilt up his head, open his mouth and let the rain in. Or he could make a bowl to catch the rain. But he’s just so good at cutting down trees. So that’s what he continues to do.

It’s an allegory of our quest for energy: we go to greater and greater lengths to dig up ancient trees and sunlight in the form of fossil fuels. And yet, the earth receives more energy from the sun in just one hour than the world uses in a whole year. But we are just so good at pulling up fossil fuels. So that’s what we continue to do.

One great distinction I’ve heard recently (in Tom Friedman’s book, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded“) is between fuels from hell (fossil fuels from the earth’s fiery crust) and fuels from heaven (solar, wind from the sky). We are living in such an interesting time; this shift from hell to heaven is taking place NOW.

To help you take advantage of this shift and contribute to your business success, here are:

Three tips to shift from hell to heaven

Tip #1: Measure Thyself. There’s that old adage, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Awareness is the first step towards positive change. Your local utility very likely has a program to support businesses in reducing energy use. An audit is the best first step, as it gives you a baseline to measure progress.

Tip #2: Get Smart. Reduce your energy use as much as possible. Two suggestions: 1) Go around your office and plug everything into smart strips. Turn off strips with equipment that’s not in use. This goes for cell-phone chargers and anything with a bulky box at the plug end. These items use energy even when the device is turned off. 2) Lighting retrofits can save buckets of money. Contact a company like Alliance Energy Solutions for turn-key service. They package tax credits and other incentives, even zero-interest loans if you qualify, to make it very affordable. Then, you get to sit back and enjoy the savings from your new, highly efficient lighting.

Tip #3: Welcome the Sun. Two suggestions: 1) Buy Renewable Energy Credits (REC’s), either via your utility or through a third party like Clean Currents or WindCurrent. RECs go to fund wind turbines and solar installations that sell clean energy to the grid. 2) If you own your building, look into putting solar panels on the roof. Most solar installers offer pricing packages that roll in the various incentives from local, state, and federal programs. In some states, this makes the price of solar very attractive.

Were these tips helpful? Let us know. We’d love to hear what else you’re doing to welcome the sun.

A colleague recently asked me, “What do you mean by “green business,” anyway?” Well! No wonder she was confused; there are so many conflicting and fragmented messages out there, each with its own definition of green business.

So, in order to clear up the question once and for all, here is my official definition of green business:

A green business is ANY business that pays close attention to its relationships – to the natural world (planet, resources), to the communities in which it operates, to individuals within the business and that are served by that business.

It is a business that looks both downstream AND upstream – that measures its impacts and creatively reduces the negative ones while profitably increasing the positive. Finally, green businesses have a vision of themselves as being GOOD in these relationships, not just “less bad.”

With this sense of itself, a green business can and does:

• • Increase profitability by slashing waste;
  • Attract media exposure and serve more people;
  • Super-charge employee attraction and retention; and
  • Build solid customer and brand loyalty.

Sounds appealing, doesn’t it? As I quickly discovered when I began promoting green architecture, the difference between green and non-green is primarily about quality. A shoddy, poorly-designed building will simply not be as efficient, healthy, or appealing as a green-designed building.

And business is the same way! A business that has little or no sense of mission, is haphazardly managed, and lurches from crisis to crisis will not be as profitable or as beloved as a green-mission-driven business. It’s all about awareness, vision, and taking decisive, purposeful action.

7 tips to get in the flow

You know the expression that begins, “I’ve got half a mind to. . . ?” Well, guess what? Most of us really are using only half our mind when tackling the tough challenges of greening our business. That’s the equivalent of trying to go three rounds with Mohammad Ali with one hand tied behind your back!

Yes, the focus of the green movement is almost exclusively on a linear, left-brain, problem-solving approach. Give things up, use less, eat your kale. While this has its place, it isn’t very inspiring. It is far more rewarding to engage our whole mind – including the often overlooked right brain.

I am more convinced than ever of the power of creative expression to catalyze new thinking. Brain science confirms this: we have two hemispheres, right and left. By holding only to the rational, linear, and analytical left brain, we treat the right brain as a poor step-child. We need to get over thinking of right-brain pursuits like art, photography, film, poetry, music, and storytelling as mere “entertainment.”

As Albert Einstein observed:

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Relying only on the seen and rational, to the exclusion of engaged intuitive leaps, is one reason why more entrepreneurs aren’t already seeing the green in their own business. It also makes working sessions seem long, tedious, and – dare I say – boring. Since change is often challenging, using half our mind makes things way harder than they need to be!

I was reminded of this recently, working with a successful energy-efficiency consultancy to benchmark their sustainability practices. An early leader in the green building movement, they aspire to be a world-class company. It’s important to them to lead by example, and they want to focus their energies to do even better as they grow.

Our benchmark tool helped them to go deeper and look at operations, community engagement, and employee policies, as well as the more obvious impacts from energy use, transportation, and waste and recycling.

In our debrief after two sessions with them, we realized we had defaulted to a very left-brain focused, detailed, and exhausting mode. Luckily, these were engineers, so they weren’t fazed by the technical language and the linear, logical approach. Certainly, we all made plenty of discoveries and had a satisfying number of “a-ha” moments.

Still, we came away wondering what was left undiscovered. Next time we will structure the sessions very differently, to engage both left and right brains. Why can this help? Remember, our old friend Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. We can get so dazzled by the facts and figures, by the data and the right-wrong mindset, that we can miss all the nuance.

Here are seven tips to making your next collaborative session more fun and productive. How can you open to new possibilities by honoring the gift of intuition this week?

1.  No right or wrong. Start your session by reminding yourself and everyone that you are creating something new. You are not keeping score.

2.  Be a beginner. Even if it’s something you do on a regular basis, think back to when you were brand new. How might a beginner approach the situation? What would a novice ask?

3. Tell a story. Our brains love analogies. A good story can be an economical – and inspiring – way to convey complex ideas and meaning.

4.  Lighten up. Who says meetings have to be dull and serious? Laughter and play are inherently creative.

5.  A picture is worth 1,000 words. Use images to help people brainstorm and make creative leaps. Pictures engage our right brain and help open us to greater possibility in the moment.

6.  Roll up your sleeves. Rather than structuring a meeting with an expert up front giving everyone the Truth, get everyone around the table engaged. Invite them to get to work, rather than sit passively waiting for the answers.

7.  Questions rather than answers. Encourage people to express their ideas only as questions and see what happens. Misunderstandings are treasure!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. How did this information help you? Post your comments below.