Ecopreneurist

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Green collar jobs are rapidly becoming fashionable. The new trend represents a shift to the mainstream of the good old environmentalist approach to life. But what exactly makes a job green? The experts are far from agreed.

Green collar jobs have a magic lure to them. Not only because the people involved in the sector are supposedly making a conscious effort to salvage what’s left of the earth’s natural resources, but also because they’re hoping to drag the ailing economy out of its current quagmire.

The environmentalist visionary Van Jones, who heads up the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, is drawing massive crowds across the country to his speeches about the green sector. He has helped initiate a green jobs program in Oakland and it is in part due to his work that the Presidential candidates have included green collar jobs in their programs.

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A climate change summit is taking place March 31st-April 4 in Bangkok. Representatives of over 170 countries are meeting to get a draft accord in place for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012. The deadline to reach a new protocol has been set for a December 2009 meeting in Denmark.

An interim summit held in Japan mid March convened representatives of the world’s top 20 greenhouse gas emitting countries responsible for 80% of the world’s pollution. It appeared that little progress was made. But all countries including the US agreed in Bali that they’d participate in the negotiations to the Kyoto’s successor and that promise was upheld two weeks ago. What was termed a “principle of common but differentiated responsibility” was accepted as a framework for negotiations. In other words, the new pact will bind all countries to various actions.

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The Open Skies agreement which deregulates the aviation industries of the US and Europe will come into effect March 30th. But the treaty is undermined by a row over offsetting pollution.

Theoretically the agreement whereby airlines from the US and Europe are allowed to land in any airport on the two continents, should lower flight costs, open up airlines to foreign ownership and the create new flight routes between Europe and the US. But it ain’t happening. All of these targets are obscured in heavy clouds.

Virgin Atlantic, which inaugurated the world’s first biofuel flight a few weeks back, told a recent New York news conference that it doesn’t foresee any progress on Open Skies in the near future. The company hasn’t even chosen any destinations for new flight routes and says this is not in the cards for at least another two years.

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New solar technology based on organic photoelectrochemical, dye-sensitized cells, is being implemented in hundreds of every day use consumer products ranging from clothing, smart cards, gadgets, lighting to windows and building facades.

Konarka, a Lowell, MS, company pioneering the technology, says it’s ready to market the products in which the solar dye has been implemented after the summer. The technology has a light to energy conversion rate of of 7.2 percent. This compares to 16 to 20 percent of regular, photovoltaic, solar technology.

The advantages of dye solar technology include flexible implementation options. Dye-based solar technology also converts low light and light rays at obscure angles. Plus the electricity generated can be applied to specific current wavelengths.
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Effortlessly perched along the spectacular coastline of Big Sur, California, along the winding Highway 1, rests the Esalen Institute. While waves crash upon the rocky cliffs, up to 250 people per day participate in enriching workshops or research activities, often followed by a soak in the hot mineral baths tucked in a cliffside crevice. Since 1962, the nonprofit educational institute has provided transformational workshops for people eager to explore and realize human potential through experience, education and research.

My journeys along Highway 1, in search for leading ecopreneurial enterprises, brought me to this healing place and, as I discovered, a thriving residential community that draws energy and sustenance from their surrounding biological richness. It’s this residential community of researchers, staff, and educators, along with the enrichment programs and remarkable natural setting, that have drawn over 300,000 visitors from around the world seeking a greater connection to community and the land.

In their Solarium, a building attached to the main lodge where all the meals are taken in the community, I talked with Juliet Johnson, a former water engineer turned sustainability guide for the Esalen Institute as its Sustainability Coordinator. Read the rest of this entry »

Depending on your business, mailing can be a major expense and large use of resources. But it doesn’t have to be that way. EcoEnvelopes is a new company that has created reusable envelopes. As in they can be two-way, between you and your customer, eliminating the need for reply envelopes. It’s been said that a mailer, in order to be effective, needs 6 distinct pieces to it, to engage the potential customer in a number of ways. With such a visually striking mailer as the ones offered by ecoEnvelope, it could take much less then that.

These envelopes can serve the dual purpose of reducing resource use in terms of paper, handling, and tracking, and at the same time shining a green light on your company. With more then 80 billion reply envelopes mailed each year in the US, this is not an insignificant impact. According to ecoEnvelopes, every one million ecoEnvelopes used saves an estimated 250 million BTUs of energy and 37,000 pounds of greenhouse gases. Read the rest of this entry »

All businesses have “variable expenses” related to energy, right?

Not always. There’s nothing in the IRS tax code preventing businesses from investing in renewable energy systems (and energy conservation/efficiency) that allow these businesses to operate more efficiently, sustainably, and green. In fact, often there are tax credits and other incentives to encourage these kinds of investments. Some businesses, like ours, generate a surplus of energy, essentially wiping out energy costs not to mention cutting carbon emissions (more on this another day). Taking such an approach to business, boosts our bottom line profitability.

Around the Summer Solstice every year (this June 20 - 22 in 2008), the Midwest Renewable Energy Association, or MREA, hosts the world’s largest and longest-running “Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Fair” in Custer, Wisconsin, a fifteen minute drive from Stevens Point in the central part of the state. It’s one of the places where we learned the basics to transform our business, Inn Serendipity, into an independent power producer by harvesting the wind and solar energy with a 10 kW Bergey wind turbine and .7 kW photovoltaic system, respectively. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve probably heard about carbon offsets. They’re everywhere these days, and it seems not a week goes that I don’t hear about a company pledging to go carbon neutral. And yet, it all seems so…full of hot air. What’s real? What do they really do? Which will make the most impact? How are the different purveyors, well, different?

I have a suggestion: Take a look at LiveNeutral.

Why? Well on a basic, financial level, they are a non-profit. And? And that means that offsets purchased through them are tax deductible. More, you say? The resulting lower overhead means better priced offsets as compared to similar for-profit companies offering similar quality offsets.

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After the mighty industrial military complex (the companies behind the missiles and the satellites to guide them), tourism is the world’s largest industry, according to the World Tourism Organization.

While tourism is big business, much of the industry can be just as destructive as the other extractive industries (mining, lumber, agriculture), sometimes operating in the same places around the world, places like the spectacular Alaskan Wilderness or rainforests of Indonesia. Oceans containing fish or oil hidden deep below the surface in certain parts of the world, provide the setting for the popular love affair by many people, of living on floating cities called cruise ships, turning port stops into Mall of America-type shopping sprees.

Not all tourism, however, thrives on the consumptive value of mass tourism that burns through resources or exploits people for the benefit of pleasure seekers. A small, but rapidly growing segment of the tourism industry, “ecotourism” has emerged which now accounts for as much as 4 to 7 percent of the industry, depending on definitional terms. While the academics debate these definitions ad nauseum, the industry and number of ecotravelers are growing at double digit rates according to The International Ecotourism Society.

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What do you think about Whole Foods Market’s plan to bag disposable plastic grocery bags in their 270 stores on this coming Earth Day, April 22? Can corporations on the greener side of the aisle like Whole Foods Market truly put purpose before profit?

I’m voting a cautious “yes.” Maybe the tides are slowly turning when Whole Foods can successfully mix education and advocacy into our routine shopping experiences, from showcasing produce from local family farms to reminding us that how we transport the product home is just as important as what we buy. Bagging plastic bags illustrates that going green and protecting our food system reach beyond the choices we throw in our shopping cart. Like nature, and as we talk about in our book, ECOpreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet Before Profits, we need to be mindful of how all our actions integrate and work holistically together. In a country where we pass through the check-out aisle infinitely more times than the voting booth, retailers possess the potential to serve as change agents through their choices and actions.

Let’s not kid ourselves, though.  Once again, America is trying to keep pace with the rest of the world.  Countries from Ireland to Australia have taken steps to ban plastic bags.  Even the Chinese government just banned certain types of plastic bags.  Turns out that getting rid of plastic bags reduces harmful effects on wildlife and cuts the need for increasingly more expensive oil. In China’s case, the ban will save 38 million barrels of oil according to the Chicago Tribune. Decrease waste, help the environment and improve the bottom line — now that’s classic ecopreneuring.