Friday, July 30, 2010

Green Business Blog Carnival #8


Welcome to week #8 of the Green Business Blog Carnival, a weekly green assembly that highlights the news, opinion, and insight on green business published during the past week.

We're very happy to host the carnival this week and thank all our green biz colleagues who arrived to celebrate with us another week of green biz progress. So let's check who's here.


The first guest is
Dinesh Thirupuvanam of Viv Business Club who followed up an interesting on a LinkedIn group called the Compost Network about plastic food packaging. He's exploring the question whether plastic food packaging is getting in the way of the recycling and composting efforts of many of our small businesses, and adding three recommendations to prevent this from happening and to help businesses move toward zero waste.

Speaking of materials,
Kalen Smith of Engineer-a-Business wrote about the potential of potato starch based polymers. One of the problems associated with the depletion of the world's oil supply is that the polymers we use in our world come from this ever disappearing substance. Fortunately, we can already use the starches from potatoes to create new polymers for someconsumer applications. But is it possible to use these polymers for more later on as well?

Kalen is not the only guest occupied with green innovation.
Jeff McIntire-Strasburg at Sustainablog who is talking with Eco-entrepreneur and runner Carolina Baker, who couldn't find an eco-friendly sports bra that she liked... so she created her own.

Green marketing was also on the agenda of the green community this week.
Lorna Li of GreenMarketing.TV wrote on the importance of adopting green marketing practices, with five actionable ways you can green your marketing campaigns today. Lorna's first advice is to have your product or service eco certified.

Taylen Peterson at CalFinder
agrees with her. Going Green with Your Business? Certify! he says in an article that explored green certifications and eco-labels, explaining that the competitive edge of the future will go to certified green businesses.

We celebrated the beginning of season 4 of Mad Men on
Eco-Libris blog, wondering if anything changed since Don Draper tried to sell us Lucky Strike, explaining that advertising is about selling happiness and assuring us that whatever we're doing is OK. We conclude that not much, at least not when it comes to ads of e-readers.

And no carnival is complete without some radical thinking - RP Siegel presented at Triple Pundit a great video presenting Seventh Generation’s Jeffrey Hollender idea about radical transparency. In this video, he tells the story of how several years ago, he posted a list on the company’s website of all the things wrong with their products and how they fell short of what the company was, and still is, trying to achieve in terms of their focus, which is to “restore the environment, inspire conscious consumption and create a just and equitable world.”
We hope you enjoyed this week's carnival and we invite you to visit the green business blog carnival
next week at Matter Network.
Also, if you want to host the carnival on your blog check out the opportunities at Sustainablog and to submit posts visit Triple Pundit for the submission form.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!