Stimulus packages and bailouts have dominated the economic headlines of late, but perhaps running a close second in terms of economic trends is that many governments across the world have made serious pushes for creating green jobs. South Korea is the latest to join the fray, announcing this week a $32.7 billion program to create 1 million green jobs.
The spread of these kinds of initiatives is great news for aspiring ecopreneurs, as the market for green building, alternative energy, and other forms of green products and services becomes the ‘rising tide that lifts all ships’. Well, at least the ships in the sustainable sector.
So, the question of the day is, what does the green tinted crystal ball say? The answer is, of course, it depends.
Some businesses will continue to thrive. Consumer confidence has plummeted, and even those that don’t need to cut back are reigning in spending on discretionary items.
As with anything, there are two sides of that coin. For consignment stores, it’s a bonanza, as consumers look at second-hand goods as a way to continue to fulfill their needs while cutting spending substantially. Those ecopreneurs who decided they wanted to make money by recycling used clothing, sporting goods, printer cartridges, or any number of other goods, the weather is warm and sunny, and the gods of industry are smiling upon them.
There is also tremendous opportunity created by economic downturns. There are a variety of reasons for this:
1.A tremendous labor pool supply. With unemployment reaching towards 9%, there are a great deal of educated, talented, and sometimes desperate workers out there looking for work, with a growing number of them looking for work that has a greater purpose. Read the rest of this entry »
Is your Resolution to Kickstart the Next Clean Revolution?
A post by contributing writer Melissa Chungfat.
I talked to one of my friend’s yesterday and she told me that the staff Christmas party wasn’t nearly as joyful as in previous years. Half of the people who came to the party were let go. There have been record layoffs since the economy has gone south, and it’s hard to talk to someone whose family hasn’t been impacted in some way. Read the rest of this entry »
A post by contributing guest writer Melissa Chungfat.
I’ve been seeing a lot of Thomas Friedman on the tube talking about his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded. The three-time Pulitzer Prize winner is getting a lot of buzz stressing the necessity of a green global industry. Ecopreneurs are key in developing innovative solutions to deal with the tremendous global environmental problems.
The book title refers to the convergence of global warming, the rise of the middle class, and the exponential population growth. These factors drive the following five trends over their tipping point:
Energy and resource
Petro dictatorship
Biodiversity loss
Climate change
Energy poverty
In our culture of convenience, so many people want to help the environment – if they can keep all of their luxuries; they want to green their habits – if it’s convenient enough; they want to buy green products – if it’s easy enough to find. But this attitude won’t fly anymore with the problems we are facing. Read the rest of this entry »
Van Jones has recently surfaced in America’s Shift to Green Living as a strong advocate for the Green Collar Economy. He is the founding president of Green For All, a U.S. organization that promotes green-collar jobs and opportunities for the disadvantaged. He is also the author of The Green Collar Economy, which has been endorsed by Nancy Pelosi, Tom Daschle and Al Gore.Read the rest of this entry »
It was an oversubscribed crowd and Jones sat comfortably on an arm chair on a slightly raised platform, giving the impression of a living room chat. He started by talking about how the floor on America has been torn out, but so has the ceiling and now is the time when we are “free to fall or to fly.” He spoke of our unsustainable economic model that is based on consumption not production, run on debt vs. savings and thrift, and environmental destruction vs. preservation. But soon after the gloom, Jones shifted the rhetoric to one of hope. He spoke of building a new economy with clean energy power centers and a clean enemy corps. An economy where all people, including people often left out of economic expansion such as the poor, people of color, etc…, have a place at the table. He spoke of the low hanging fruit in a new green collar economy: retrofitting. He laid out his vision where out of work construction workers — workers he predicted would be idle for 12, 24, 36 months — are put to work retrofitting existing building across America.
And therein lies the ecopreneurial opportunity. In Jones’ vision, people from all economic strata can start a business that provides retrofitting services or produce the products needed to retrofit. And, retrofitting is just the beginning. Jones went on to say that the days of the environment being a “a box you check off” are over and we have entered an era where environmental impacts are a lens through which all economic activity must be viewed. The result is an economy with a host of ecopreneurial opportunities and where our two worst problems, the economy and climate change, are solved by ecoprenuers. In Van Jones’ world, there never been a better time to be an ecopreneur.
An op-ed piece in the New York Times, The Climate For Change, by über environmentalist, Al Gore, outlines for President-Elect Obama changes we need to make to both improve the economy and decrease climate change.
Much of what he recommends is good news for ecopreneurs.
1…. incentives for the construction of concentrated solar thermal plants, wind and advanced plants in geothermal hot spots .
2… planning and construction of a unified national smart grid for the transport of renewable electricity from the rural places to cities
3…. help America’s automobile industry (not only the Big Three but the innovative new startup companies as well) to convert quickly to plug-in hybrids Read the rest of this entry »
Currently, lobbyists working for Chrysler and General Motors are working to encourage the US Congress to direct part of the $170 billion bail-out to help Chrysler and GM merge into a new car company. The bail-out is intended to help the financial industry recover from the current hemorrhaging taking place and to ensure a stable consolidation. The argument the car companies are making to congress is that they are financial businesses due to their large interest in providing loans and financing for car buyers.
As an Ecopreneur I am outraged at the absurd notion that our government should bail-out two broken and dead-end businesses to encourage their intended merger. This bailout would be the closest thing to socialism we will have witnessed from our Federal Government in many years and would be more akin to the type of intervention typical or France or Italy in the past. The only innovation I’ve seen to come out of Detroit in the last twenty years was to focus on becoming finance companies and to then lose sight of their core business of building cars for their customers. As one executive at GM was quoted to say “We’re a finance company which happens to sell cars”.
These car companies could have made decisions to invest in better designs, quality and fuel efficiency years ago, but decided the margins in large SUV and trucks was where their focus should be. Now they want to be “rescued”. What venture fund or corporation would invest in a business, division or startup with this type of short-sightedness. Imagine if you will the outcome of spending the $10 billion they are asking for on small entrepeneurial companies building technologies which enable cleaner burning, fuel efficient, alternative powered transportation. Do you think ten years from now that $10 billion would show a return for tax payers and those who will be seeking jobs during the ensuing time?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.
This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of ProformaGreen, an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy. John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.
Well, I am certainly not a doomsayer. However it does look like the economy is going to slow down over the next few months if not longer.
Often it is marketing and giving that get hit first as companies focus on their core costs.
So Proforma Green is offering a challenge to other Ecopreneurists that read our column.
Starting now Proforma Green is offering a 20%-30% discount from End Quantity Pricing (EQP) on promotional items to 501(c)3, NGOs, charities, schools and other civic organizations, if they allow us to co-brand the products with our web address www.proformagreen.com in some small way. Not all items in our catalog are available with this discount, but most are, likely 85%. Read the rest of this entry »
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Stimulus packages and bailouts have dominated the economic headlines of late, but perhaps running a close second in terms of economic trends is that many governments across the world have made serious pushes for creating green jobs. South Korea is the latest to join the fray, announcing this week a $32.7 billion program to create 1 million green jobs.
An op-ed piece in the New York Times, 
