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!

Independent bookstores need a war plan and they need it now!

The news in the last 48 hours on the closing of two independent bookstores, Tree House Books (Holland, MI) and Rodney's Bookstore (Cambridge, MA) got me to realize it's time for independent bookstores to prepare a war plan.

There's nothing new in the fact that independent booksellers are struggling, and not only in the US. The Guardian reported in February that in the U.K. independent bookshops closed at a rate of almost two every week over in 2009. In Vancouver, Canada, After 53 years in the business, independent bookstore Duthie Books closed its doors last January and in April another bookstore in the city, Sophia Books, was closed.

So why War Plan? Because it doesn't seem like this trend is going to reverse itself any time soon. And if independent bookstores want to stop this trend, they have to act fast and they need a war plan, because this is a war and their survival is at stake.

Couple of elements that are crucial for the success of this plan:

1. Awareness - Independent bookstores have many loyal customers, but probably not enough. At the same time, I'm sure there are plenty of readers out there that will be happy to consider supporting them because they like these bookstores, what they represent and their contribution to the local economy and community.

2. Personal Benefit - To move people from condition of awareness to action you need to provide them with some sort of added value or personal benefit. This is a must. You can't just rely on the fact that people like bookstores - they won't show up in big numbers if it won't be worthwhile.

3. No trade-offs - Most people don't like to pay a price even it's for something they believe in. For example, a survey conducted by researchers at Stanford University found that 76 percent favored government limiting business’s emissions of greenhouse gases. At the same time, large majorities opposed taxes on electricity (78 percent) and gasoline (72 percent) to reduce consumption. So my conclusion is that if you want to drive people to do the right thing, you need to create a win-win strategy with no trade-offs. Staying only with the small minority who don't mind these trade-offs is not an option anymore. How do you integrate these elements into an effective yet realistic war plan? Well, that's the real challenge here.

Couple of weeks ago I suggested here a model that will provide customers with both personal benefits and the feeling that they're contributing to the prosperity of their own community. This model is based on creating a collaboration with other local businesses to enable these businesses to provide customers with discounts for each other. I think that if you add to it a creative awareness campaign, this model can definitely be considered to be part of the war plan.

In any case there's a need to act fast. "Publishing is changing fast, bookselling is changing fast" said Skip Prichard, Ingram CEO last week at BookExpo America in a 'A CEO Panel: The Value of a Book'. He is certainly right and I believe there's a real urgency here - the sooner independent bookstores will prepare their war plan, the better their chances are to win this war.

You can find more resources on the future of bookstores on our website at www.ecolibris.net/bookstores_future.asp

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

We have a winner on our giveaway of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping"

We have a winner on our giveaway of the " The Complete Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping"!

Following our review of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping" by Dean Stiglitz and Laurie Herboldsheimer, we asked you to share with us if you would consider beekeeping.

We got interesting replies and we have a winner! Our winner is nfmgirl who wrote:

Absolutely I'd consider it! I actually know a beekeeper who has a small honey business. I live in South Florida surrounded by orange groves and bee hives!

Congrats nfmgirl! You won a copy of " The Complete Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping" and we'll also plant a tree for this book! Thank you also for all the rest of the participants!

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading

10 Ways Geolocation is Changing the World

This post was written by Rob Reed. He is the founder of MomentFeed, a location-based marketing, strategy, and technology firm.

Location technologies are transforming how we experience, navigate, and ultimately better our world. From the global to the local, here are #10Ways geolocation is a positive force for good.



Social media has changed the world. It has revolutionized communications on a global scale, and the transformation continues with every status update, blog post, and video stream. The global citizenry has become a global network.

Since becoming widely adopted just a couple years ago, social media has supercharged social action, cause marketing, and social entrepreneurship. Indeed, the true value hasn't been the technology itself but how we've used it. Today, a second wave of innovation is defining a new era and setting the stage for change over the coming decade.

Mobile technologies will extend the global online network to anyone with a mobile device while enabling countless local networks to form in the real world. We've decentralized media production and distribution. We're doing the same for energy. And we'll continue this trend for social networking, social action, and commerce.

The combined forces of smartphones, mobile broadband, and location-aware applications will connect us in more meaningful ways to the people, organizations, events, information, and companies that matter most to us---namely, those within a physical proximity of where we live and where we are. Can location-based services (LBS) change the world? Here are #10Ways:

1. Checking in for Good: If Gowalla and Foursquare have taught us anything, it's that people respond to simple incentives. By offering badges, mayorships, and other intangible rewards, millions of people are checking in to the places they go. Apps like Whrrl take this a step further and enable like-minded "societies" to form on a local basis. The next step is for these apps to add greater purpose by encouraging more meaningful checkins and offering corresponding badges and stamps, thus mapping the cause universe. Or for a dedicated app to be developed that rewards conscious consumption, social responsibility, and civic engagement. Yes, the CauseWorld app features a cause element, but it's not about cause-worthy places.

2. Eating Locally: Sustainability demands that we source our food as close to its point of production as possible. Many so-called locavores subscribe to the 100-mile diet, which requires that one "eat nothing---or almost nothing---but sustenance drawn from within 100 miles of their home." Given the difficulty of accessing and verifying this information in order to live by this standard, there's a geo-powered Locavore app. It gives you info on in-season foods, those coming in-season, farmer's markets, and links to recipes. This rather simple app is clearly just the start. In time, location-aware apps will guide us not only to the grocery store or farmer's market but through them. All the while identifying foods based on our particular diet or sensibility.

3. Political Organizing: In the next presidential election, politics will not only be local but location-enabled. We saw the power of social media in Obama's 2008 landslide victory. In 2012, location-based apps and technologies will play a central role in how campaigns are organized, managed, and ultimately won. Much of this will be visible through mobile apps and location-aware browsers. Activists and volunteers will be more empowered. Voters will be more engaged in the moment, right down to casting their votes. Behind the scenes, though, we'll see massive new sets of data available to campaigns for targeting, empowerment, and optimization. The party, candidate, and/or cause that has the best handle on geolocation will have a measurable advantage. (The Elections app will soon be updated for 2010.)

4. Finding Green Businesses: The web has effectively replaced the paper Yellow Pages as a way to find local businesses and services. However, this "stationary web" experience is quickly being supplanted by the mobile web and mobile applications, which give us access to this information when we most need it. The Yelp and Around Me apps are popular ways to find restaurants, coffee shops, or hotels wherever you are, but what about green-rated businesses? Greenopia has transformed its printed, local guides into a dynamic, nationwide mobile application that lets you find local, green-rated businesses in any category. No more paper and a much better experience. The Green Map app is another that facilitates discovery and connects us to local green environments.

5. Traveling More Efficiently: We've had access to GPS navigation systems and static traffic information for some time, but only now are we seeing the full potential of these technologies. With access to more detailed traffic information that is specific to your route and updated in real time, we can minimize congestion and maximize traffic flow (as much as physically possible). The new turn-by-turn MapQuest 4 Mobile app is a good start, as you can get traffic alerts specific to the route you program. However, user-generated information from apps like Trapster and Waze can crowdsource more specific details, such as whether to avoid an intersection due to a toxic chemical spill. Or, if you want to avoid automobiles altogether, Google Maps makes it easy to use public transportation and take a bike.

6. Scanning for Ethical Products: With online shopping, we've become accustomed to reading reviews and making comparisons before we buy. This can now be done in the physical world through games like MyTown and services like Stikybits. By scanning a product barcode using a smartphone camera, you can unlock a treasure of additional information (not to mention deals) that can help with your purchase. This might include where it was produced, how far it traveled, the reputation of the manufacturer, chemical contents, carbon footprint, or the full lifecycle analysis. Location-aware applications can also transform commerce itself by giving us better access to local inventories and locally-produced goods. Whether it's fruits and vegetables or books and electronics, if something can be found within blocks of your current location, it makes no sense to ship it from afar.

7. Networking Neighborhoods: One of the hottest categories in geolocation is neighborhood networking. The vision for many of these apps is to strengthen the very fabric of our communities. With DeHood, you can keep track of what's happening in your neighborhood, share your favorite places, and grease the wheels for actually meeting people. After all, if you've made contact through the app, it's a lot easier to say "Hello" in the real world. Blasterous is another that lets you share information locally, whereas BlockChalk does this on an anonymous basis. Finally, NeighborGoods uses your street address to facilitate one-to-one borrowing and trading of useful stuff. In the end, making connections with your neighbors can lead to safer, more productive, and more sustainable communities.

8. Tracking Environmental Disasters: The size and scope of environmental disasters appears to be growing. In 2008, we had the Tennessee coal ash spill, which was billed as "the largest environmental disaster of its kind in the United States." And that was before we realized it was three times bigger than originally estimated. More recently, the BP oil spill set daily records for "largest environmental disaster in the U.S. ever." In each case, geolocation technologies can be used by engaged citizens to monitor and track the effects. They can be used by response teams to coordinate containment and cleanup efforts. Ultimately, these technologies can be used to accurately measure the size and impact of a disaster in order to better understand its damages and costs.

9. Viewing the World Through an Eco Lens: Augmented reality (AR) follows geolocation as one of the hot trends in mobile technology. It enables you to view the world through a smartphone camera (or similar device) and see layers of geo-specific content or information. One of the most popular apps is Layar, an augmented reality browser/platform that lets you choose specific data layers or experiences. The potential for green- and cause-related content is tremendous. You might view green-rated businesses, LEED-certified buildings, or virtual GHG emissions as they enter the atmosphere. Combined with smart meter technology, you could see the most efficient and inefficient homes around you in real time. And for the cynics among us, you could view our mountains, forests, rivers, and oceans as they once were...before the effects of climate change and so many environmental disasters.

10. Capturing the Moment: Better access to information about what's happening around us---right now---can dramatically improve quality of life. This sense of "geospatial awareness" is possible through today's smartphones, whereby a piece of content or information---a moment---is captured and preserved based on the unique time and place in which it occurred. It is essentially to document spacetime. Protests, natural disasters, sporting events, parties, political crises...real-time information about anything happening anywhere at any time, as well as the history of what happened. This will take several years and a number of different applications to realize. In the end, though, it will revolutionize how we access and consume content. It will complete the democratization and decentralization of news and information...based on time and location.

Cautionary note: Privacy is the single biggest issue in the LBS industry. It's important to understand what information you are sharing with regard to your location and with whom.

Author's note: We'll be hosting geolocation events for Social Media Week in Los Angeles this September. This is the third in Max Gladwell's #10Ways series of distributed blog posts. It was published simultaneously on as many as 300 blogs.

What changed since the era of Mad Men? Not much when it comes to E-Readers!

Don Draper can sell you (almost) anything. One of the best examples for his brightness and creativity was his "It's Toasted" moment, when he created the slogan for Lucky Strike cigarettes.

Don defines in the meeting with the Lucky Strike guys the essence of advertising in that era - "Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And you know what happiness is?The smell of a new car, it's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you're doing it's OK - you are OK."

Has anything changed since then? Not much. At least not when it comes to ads of of e-readers that sell you the same perception of happiness, mixed with some coolness.

The first example is the iPad:



So, yes, iPad is thin and beautiful. You can even claim it's magical. Maybe it's already a revolution. It's all true. But at the same time, "it's toasted" is also true. It's just not ALL of the truth. So just like Lucky Strike didn't mention the fact their cigarettes can kill you, Apple also avoids sharing some facts that aren't that happy and might let you think you're not that OK if you buy it.

Here are just couple of examples:

1. The iPad is manufactured at Foxconn, a Chinese factory, where 14 young workers attempted or committed suicide, the last one only couple of days ago. Foxconn was described by Li Qiang, an executive director of New York-based China Labor Watch, as a sweatshop that “tramples” workers’ personal values for the sake of efficiency."

These suicides got representatives of nearly 50 socially responsible investing groups to issue a public call to the electronics industry to step up their oversight of suppliers as GreenBiz.com reports today: "The statement, signed by 45 members of the investment community, condemns abusive workplace conditions in the electronics industry, where a recent spate of suicides at Foxconn -- supplier to some of the industry's largest firms, including Apple, Dell, Hewlett Packard and many others -- led to widespread criticism of the company and its customers, and which pressured Foxconn to offer significant raises to its workers."

2. Minerals that are used to make components for many electronic devices, including the iPad, are bought from Congo, helping to finance a horrible war there. These minerals are usually referred to as "conflict minerals". Nicholas Kristof wrote about it lately on the New York Times:

"I’ve never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo’s, and it haunts me. In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides. Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices.

Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think “sleek,” not “blood.”"

Apple response? Steve Jobs wrote to a concerned customer that "We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict few materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem." Definitely not screaming with reassurance that what you do (purchasing the iPad is OK)..

And what about Amazon's Kindle? Well, Amazon is no different of course, presenting an ad with a catchy and happy tune:

Reality check? Well, the Kindle just like the iPad is been manufactured at Foxconn and has also the same conflict minerals sourcing problems. Somehow (maybe because Amazon is even less transparent about these issues than Apple) Apple is more on the line of fire on these issues, but it doesn't mean that the Kindle is better with regards to these issues.

And the same goes for B&N's Nook: Very happy ad vs. a much more complicated reality:



Bottom line: The legacy of Don Draper's vision is live and kicking when it comes to e-readers! They're not cigarettes of course and they won't kill you, but don't forget the happy fuzzy feeling they try to sell you is just a sales pitch and nothing more. Reality is always more complicated and many times very different from the one you see on these 30 seconds.

And of course, don't forget to enjoy the fabulous season 4 of Mad Men that started yesterday. I know I will :)

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting Sustainable Reading!

Upset about the death of the climate bill? Now it's the time to make sustainable choices!

Now when the climate bill is officially dead, this video,which is from 2008 and talks about our responsibility as producers and consumers to make sustainable choices when it comes to paper, is relevant than ever.

It's sad that Washington can't find the political will to incentivize sustainable choices and push the economy to the right direction, but it doesn't mean that we can't do anything in the meantime. This video reminds us of our options when it comes to paper and the consequences of continuing the business as usual status quo.

This video is from the excellent resource The Secret Life of Paper - A Project of Inform, Inc.

How is paper production related to forest destruction and global warming? Why is recycling and buying recycled paper important?




Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Audiobook of the month: Every Last One by Anna Quindlen (and a giveaway!)

Today we start a new series of recommendations on audiobooks. Each month we'll share with you an audiobook we loved to listen to.

Why? We have a special interest in audiobooks as we believe they represent one of the options to read books sustainably, especially when you download them - an option that represents right now about 21% of all sales (the rest are CDs). Therefore we would like to encourage you to take this option into consideration when you're thinking about your next literary purchase!

Our audiobook for this month is:

Every Last One

Author: Anna Quindlen
ANNA QUINDLEN is the author of several bestselling novels (Rise and Shine, Blessings, Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue), and nonfiction books (Good Dog. Stay., Being Perfect, Loud & Clear, A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Living Out Loud, Thinking Out Loud, How Reading Changed My Life). She has also written two children's books (The Tree That Came to Stay, Happily Ever After). Her New York Times column "Public and Private" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Her column now appears every other week in Newsweek.

Read by: Hope Davis

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Published on: April 2010

What this book is about?
The latest novel from Pulitzer Prize-winner Anna Quindlen

In this breathtaking and beautiful novel, the #1 New York Times bestselling author Anna Quindlen creates an unforgettable portrait of a mother, a father, a family, and the explosive, violent consequences of what seem like inconsequential actions.

Mary Beth Latham has built her life around her family, around caring for her three teenage children and preserving the rituals of their daily life. When one of her sons becomes depressed, Mary Beth focuses on him, only to be blindsided by a shocking act of violence. What happens afterwards is a testament to the power of a woman's love and determination, and to the invisible lines of hope and healing that connect one human being with another. Ultimately, as rendered in Anna Quindlen's mesmerizing prose, Every Last One is a novel about facing every last one of the things we fear most, about finding ways to navigate a road we never intended to travel, and about living a life we never dreamed we'd have to live, but find ourselves brave enough to try.

What we think about it?
I certainly agree with the description of "Every Last One" as a"breathtaking and beautiful novel". I listened to it while driving and I can tell you this audiobook got me to drive more slowly on my way home just because I couldn't stop listening to it. I hope the other drivers (and my wife) could forgive me..

Nevertheless, it's not an easy story to listen to. I don't want to get too much into it, not to ruin it to those of you who haven't listened to it yet, but I can say it gets you very emotional. And this is again the place to remind the great advantage of an audiobook - when it's narrated well, it generates another dimension to the story and it gets to you in a way that a physical book, or even an e-book just never does. And the reader of "Every Last One", the wonderful Hope Davis, is doing a great job, so this added value can definitely found here.

The story as the description mentions is about facing every last one of the things we fear most, and I know not everyone might not feel comfortable to deal with fears. At least I know I don't. But even so I felt this journey with the Latham family was worthwhile and I was happy I took it.

Bottom Line: Recommended! Don't forget to put some tissue in your glove compartment!

Disclosure: We received a copy of this book from the publisher.

You can listen here to the author, Anna Quindlen, talking about the audiobook:

GIVEAWAY ALERT!!

We're giving away one copy of this audiobook, courtesy of the publisher.

How you can win? Very simple. All you have to do is to retweet this post with the hashtag #everylastone. We will have a raffle on Thursday, July 29, 5:00PM EST between all the readers that retweeted this post. The winner will be announced the following day.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!