Opportunity Green – Staying Green and Going Big

This is a guest post from Glenn Croston, author of “75 Green Businesses You Can Start to Make Money and Make a Difference”,

At the Opportunity Green conference held at UCLA November 8-9, many themes related to the growth and changing direction of the green business movement were discussed by the great variety of green leaders present.

One particularly interesting theme was about the mixed feelings some green entrepreneurs have about going big with their business.

Everybody is eager for success, but green entrepreneurs often fear that scaling up products to reach the masses requires compromises that would negate the benefit of what they are doing and hurt the brand in the long run.

Most green products today are still niche products, perhaps as a result of this fear. At the conference Josh Dorfman, author of “The Lazy Environmentalist”, said that contrary to what many are saying, “Green has not gone mainstream.” Some products are starting to change this, like the Prius and Green Works cleaning products from Clorox, but even these successes represent a small percentage of the overall market. Organic food is big, but it’s still only about 3% of the food we eat.

Do products have to be small to be green? Do they sacrifice something in going big?

Mark Dwight of Rickshaw Bagworks in San Francisco has built a small company with locally produced eco-friendly bags like the Zero Messenger Bag. Dwight suggested at the meeting that “Small brands are defined by their distribution.” Can the same product work at Target or will it lose authenticity he asked?

Tom Szaky of Terracycle posed a telling answer to this question: “If you don’t, I will,” he said. “If there is a demand, it will be met,” suggesting that if an entrepreneur passes up the opportunity to go big and sell their product to the masses, then someone else will seize this opportunity instead.

Szaky spoke of the great demand for entrepreneurs who can provide green solutions and scale them up. “The opportunity to change the biggest companies is massively underserved and in massive demand,” he said. Terracycle in just the last year has formed partnerships with some of the best known brands and is bringing its products out in partnership with some of the biggest retailers like Target. “If you have a great idea, and you can take it and make it on a mega scale, take it to these people,” he said. “There is the opportunity to go big. People say ‘yes’ all the time.”

The path forward seems to be for entrepreneurs to both go big and stay green, not choosing one or the other. It’s a challenging path, but the rewards are large for those who find their way.

Glenn Croston is the author of “75 Green Businesses You Can Start to Make Money and Make a Difference”, providing green business opportunities for entrepreneurs from a wide range of backgrounds, released August 2008. He is also the founder of Starting Up Green, providing green entrepreneurs with strategies, opportunities and resources to help them succeed (www.StartingUpGreen.com).