KeepGreenGoing

Again, in the marketing world –

Greenwashing is a term that’s been catching on in the media. Seems to me, it’s about ready to enter the public lexicon, too, just by virtue of its increasing applicability as consumers become simultaneously more eco-conscious and less trusting.

Here’s a simple definition: When a company makes a green claim that’s either false or misleading, it’s greenwashing.

Thanks to Rob Walker at Murketing for linking to The Greenwashing Index, what is already an interesting resource that has the potential to become the go-to guide for navigating green claims in advertising. I’m not a fan of the ratings system as it stands — the criteria is good, but I’d love to see numbers based on more informed reviews from advertising and environmental professionals — but I like the sharing of information that occurs in the comments section of each ad.

On a very basic level, it’s been helpful to consider their criteria (assembled by “advertising academia,” according to the site) when I come across any new “green” ad.

1. The ad misleads with words
Do you believe the ad misleads the viewer/reader about the company’s/product’s environmental impact through the things it says? Does it seem the words are trying to make you believe there is a green claim when there isn’t? Focus on the words only — what do you think the ad is saying?

2. The ad misleads with visuals and/or graphics
Do you think the advertiser has used green or natural images in a way designed to make you think the product/company is more environmentally friendly than it really is?

3. The ad makes a green claim that is vague or seemingly unprovable
Does the ad claim environmental benefits without sufficiently identifying for you what they are? Has the advertiser provided a source for claims or for more information? Are the claims related to the company/product?

4. The ad overstates how green the product/company/service actually is
Do you believe the advertiser is overstating how green the product/company actually is? Are the green claims made by the ad believable? Do you think it’s possible for the product/company to do the things depicted/stated?

5. The ad leaves out or masks important information
Do you think the ad exists to divert attention from something else the company does? Do you believe the relevant collateral consequences of the product/service are considered in the ad? Does it seem to you something is missing from the ad?

Millions of ink jet, laser and toner cartridges are thrown away each and every month. But why? My guess is there’s a lack of knowledge when it comes to deciding, “What do I do with this empty cartridge?” And by all means, I’m at fault too.

Today I stumbled across a unique resource that has the answer to our question: www.RecyclePlace.com

How it works?

1. Register. It’s quick and free.

2. Collect empty ink jet, laser, toner and fax cartridges.

3. Return the cartridges using one of the pre-paid UPS labels sent to you after       registration. Enclose a copy of the completed Cartridge Return Form.

4. A check will be sent to you.

5. Yes, Recycle Place pays you for empty cartridges.

Why recycle ink cartridges?

1. More than 3 quarts of oil are used to produce each laser cartridge.

2. The plastic used in each printer cartridge takes more than 10 centuries (that’s 1000 years) to decompose.

3. 25 million printer cartridges go to land fills each month.

4. Toner cartridge remanufacturing saves over 38,000 tons of plastic and metal from landfills.

5. Stacking 125 laser toner cartridges end-to-end equals the height of the Statue of Liberty.

I’m sure we all own at least two pairs of shoes, right? Today’s links are provided to encourage you to stop your regular shoe shopping routine and check out some shoes that really matter. Each of the follow shoe companies are doing great things for the environment and humankind. Maybe you’ve never thought of buying an eco-friendly shoe. Maybe you’ve never heard of these companies. Maybe… you have no clue what an eco-shoe is. Today, none of that matters. Take a few minutes and check out these fantastic options when it comes to shoes that really matter:

Simple Shoes - Shoes made from recycled car tires, organic cotton, recycled plastics and hemp.

Earth Footwear - 100% vegan.

Sanuk Sandals - Eco-Friendly, socially-conscious sandals.

Terra Plana - Urban respect and eco-sustainability whilst producing shoes that are good for your feet.

TOM’s Shoes - For every pair you purchase, TOM’s will give a pair to a child in need.

How many of you drink from a Nalgene bottle?  What’s the number within the triangle on the bottom?  If you’ve got the wrong number down there you may be putting yourself at risk. 

You’ve probably seen something in the news lately that some plastics are getting a lot of negative press; most notably, drinking bottles made with hard plastic. This all surrounds a chemical known as Bisphenol A to the chemists and engineers or “BPA” on the streets. This chemical has been shown to leach out of common plastics and cause health issues ranging from behavioral issues to irregular breast growth. 

What can we do about it? Be aware that the Nalgene that most of us are drinking out of is probably contributing to our BPA intake. Also know is that not all Nalgenes are created equal. The hard polycarbonate plastics are what we want to stay away from (#7 on the bottom). The soft cloudy plastic Nalgenes (#2 in the bottom) are considered to be the safest and you’ll be happy to know that in light of the elevated attention to BPAs Nalgene is discontinuing production on their polycarbonate bottles. 

BPAs are found in more places than water bottles though. Food cans, baby bottles and the fillings in our teeth also contribute to BPAs in our body. Check out the resources below for more information. 

Nalgene’s Response

A Washington Post Article on BPAs

The other side: A response from the “American Chemistry Council”

Thanks to KGG contributor Alex Dow for an open, honest account of his meat-free week. My open, honest admission? I love meat, and that love is fiercely loyal.

For now, I’m sticking to my bone-gnawin’ guns. Even so, Alex’s food diary encourages me to do as he did and think about the consequences of consumption.

This builds on the lessons I’ve been gleaning from Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle — a remarkably clear-eyed treatise on food ably disguised as a winsome family memoir.

So far, I’ve learned to shudder at the thought of ever again buying fruit and vegetables off-season. I’m cultivating a farmers’ appreciation of the ominous Dark Storm Cloud. And I’m finding a whole bunch of ways to connect with my food by buying locally.

LINK IT UP! (from animalvegetablemineral.com)

• LocalHarvest: “The best organic food is what’s grown closest to you. Use our website to find farmers’ markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area…”
• New Farm’s Farm Locator: “Consumer Search links you to farms selling directly to consumers…”
• Farmers’ Market: “Farmers markets allow consumers to have access to locally grown, farm fresh produce, enables farmers the opportunity to develop a personal relationship with their customers, and cultivate consumer loyalty with the farmers who grows the produce…”

Last week, KeepGreenGoing had the opportunity to sit down with publisher and editor-in-chief, Kelly Magill, to discuss her new and upcoming women’s magazine Positively Green.

Kelly, how did the whole idea for Positively Green come about?
Well, one of my sales people called me this fall. She told me “Kelly, You’ve got to do something this fall. We’ve got to think of another magazine to put together. Why don’t you do a green magazine – That’s your thing… You’re so into it.” So the more I thought about it I really started to consider a regional publication on green topics for women. When I called my distributor they liked the idea so much about a women’s magazine focused specifically on green issues they told me I really need to do this on a national level, not regionally. And.. That was it. That’s how it all got started.

More and more we’re seeing green magazines pop up. What would you say makes your magazine different?
First of all, most environmental magazines are written for men and women both. There’s nothing out there written specifically for women. Also 90% of women describe themselves as the primary household buyer. So as a gender we’ve got so much ability, even in grocery shopping, to decide what companies we’ll support with our money and what companies we won’t support. And I’ve noticed, with this enormous ability, no one is talking to these women. Another thing I think that’s happening is the fact that there’s a huge group of mainstream women who are interested in doing things a little more green. But when they pick up magazines and read articles there’s nothing that really addresses what the solutions are. So if you have a peanut butter container and you want to recycle it, but don’t know how it should be properly cleaned out - What do you do to clean it? Ya know – It’s about what are the simple solutions you can do everyday to change your thinking and your buying habits. How do you change so you can buy more green… in fashion, in travel, with sending your kids back to school. And I just don’t think that’s happening to that degree yet, where it’s really focused on women’s daily lives and how we live, how we accomplish the tasks we have to do everyday in a simplified way.

That’s great. Here at KeepGreenGoing, we try to focus on simple solutions as well. What else have you noticed lately in regards to green publications?

Another thing that’s been happening lately is there’s been several articles in the past few months about bottled water and how the greener option is to filter your tap water. Those are all great articles… But as a very busy women the thing that those articles failed to do was to direct me the products that would solve the problem. Most women are too busy to go research which filer is the best. If someone can give them the article where they can make the decision and say “Okay, I really want to eliminate bottled water” - They got the article on one page and on the very next page there are the products you can buy, here is where you get them, this is how much they cost. Now, these women no longer have a barrier to this decision in there life to eliminate bottled water. And I don’t think that’s something a lot of people are doing yet – is giving women very specific details and tools to make the necessary change.

The staff at KeepGreenGoing would like to thank Kelly for her time in this interview. Even though we’re not women, we’re really stoked for this magazine to hit newsstands. Please take some time and check out the Positively Green Website. You can even download a sample of the first issue.

Other useful information regarding Positively Green:

Website

www.PositivelyGreen.com

Launch
First issue – August (All major bookstores, Whole-Foods and Wal-Mart)

Pre-Subscribe

Get the magazine even before it hits newsstands. A subscription (4 issues total) cost is $14 for the year. Of that $14 Positively Green will give $2 to the eco-charity of your choice.

Ever feel like everything you learned in college amounted to a pile of trash? Now, how about if that were a positive? In a piece that ran in the New York Times last week, Edward Rothstein turns a cultural critic’s eye on garbage in the modern age, referencing an NYU course offered last fall on creating a museum for the Department of Sanitation (from the syllabus: “What is the cognitive, practical, and cultural role of garbage in contemporary life?”) while making some wry observations about how and why we’ve come full-circle to embrace our refuse.

I first spotted this on Murketing, where Rob Walker followed up his post with an interesting link to a guy who literally sells trash — in little plastic cubes — and his prices are rising.

All this leads me to wonder: How accurate is Rothstein’s cultural barometer? Granted, there’s nothing new under the sun (or the mountains of trash baking in its heat). I remember re-interpreting trash from childhood D.I.Y. projects, designing many an aesthetically-questionable birdfeeder out of a rinsed-out Sprite liter bottle. But I think we’ve progressed since then, and if Rothstein is right, it’s with a renewed “feeling of virtue that seems to transcend considerations of cost.” Help kick-start my creative juices with some of your own ideas. How have you managed to re-classify your garbage?

Did you know that when you eat beans rather than beef you use 1/27 the amount of fossil fuel to produce the equivalent nutritional/caloric value? Here is the story folks - eating as much factory farmed meat as we do in the United States is environmental suicide. Here are a couple points from earthsave.org:

• Cattle produce one fifth of the methane emissions in the world (were talking cow farts, has anyone ever driven through Greeley Colorado?) Did I mention, with regards to global warming, methane is 24 times more potent as the carbon dioxide that we are familiar with?
• We loose acre after acre of rain forest each day all in the name of the almighty burger.
• Over two thirds of the land (private and public) in the mountain states, my dearest Colorado included, are used for grazing. This poorly managed grazing has a disastrous effect on our natural resources from irrigation concerns to erosion.
• 284 gallons of oil are burned up in the production of one head of cattle.
• By conservative estimates 2,500 gallons of water goes into the production of one pound of beef.

If you are a meat eating fellow like myself you are probably feeling more than a little bit guilty at this point. Good. We should feel guilty; the consumption of factory/farm raised beef is a leading contributor, if not the leading contributor, in the collapse of the environment. Where does that leave us, should we just give up meat all together? Maybe… as Bryan had alluded to earlier, I’ve begun what I will call an experiment in vegetarianism. Over the coming days I will provide a couple posts including my journal and thoughts on my time spent as a vegetarian moving from an omnivore with carnivores tendencies. Let the experiment begin…

::a

Social design organization Design 21 recently launched a power-pedal, bicycle-focused design competition called Power to the Pedal. Today, bicycle use is gaining global recognition and gaining relevance for transportation, fitness and fun.

Citywide bicycle initiatives and other public awareness projects have been increasing more and more over the last few years. However, promoting bicycle use means more than an hosting a “special day,” it means to enable it.

“This competition calls for a biking accessory or add-on for existing bikes that would improve the bicycling experience and encourage more people to make biking their primary means of transport – more convenient, more enjoyable, safer and more integrated into daily lifestyles – whether it’s for commuting, working, shopping, transporting, leisure or all of the above. In your description, you should define the user scenario and design problem that your design attempts to solve.”

Deadline: Wednesday April 30, 2008 at 11:58PM UTC.
Prizes: 1st - $5000 2nd - $3000 3rd - $1500 Most Popular - $500

JUDGING CRITERIA:
Overall effectiveness: How well does the solution provide an answer to the design problem?

Creativity: How innovative and cost-effective is the thinking behind the design?

Practicality: How successfully can the design be produced or put into practice? Can it be adapted for local production? Does it add to the safety of the cyclist, too?

Aesthetics: How strong is the design in terms of overall form and presentation?

Ecology: How well does the design respond to environmental concerns through considerations such as choice of materials, production techniques, life-span, upgrade, durability, weight, recycle, or re-use factors?

Fore more information on the competition, visit the competition page here.

Love the Do Not Call registry? Wish there was something similar for junk mail?

American mailboxes are inundated with junk mail. More than 100,000,000,000 pieces of junk mail are delivered each year. If you do the math, that’s more than 800 pieces of junk mail per household. I think it’s time for a national Do Not Mail Registry!

Luckily, there’s an organization taking the stance and launching the movement: DoNotMail.org.

In 2003, Congress created the national Do Not Call Registry, the most popular consumer rights bill in history. Today, DoNotMail.org has launched a comparable registry to end the ambush of junk mail. Currently, they are counting names on a petition (20,000 and counting) to show the government and direct mail industry that there needs to be an easy way to opt out of junk mail.

Junk mail in the United States accounts for 1/3 of all mail delivered in the world. Even though 44% of that mail goes to the landfill unopened, people spend 8 months of their lives dealing with it all. Junk mail invades our homes, wastes our time and destroys the environment:

• The greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the manufacturing of the 6.5 million tons of paper required for junk mail annually is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emission of 3.7 million cars.
• More than 100 million trees a year are cut down and made into paper for junk mail. Those trees come from Endangered Forests like Canada’s Boreal and Indonesia’s rainforests - forests that play a critical role in the fight against global warming.

Just as the Do Not Call Registry liberated Americans from telemarketers, a Do Not Mail Registry would give us the choice to halt junk mailers from violating our privacy, wasting our time and damaging the environment.

Free your house from junk mail and sign the Do Not Mail registry petition. Take a stance and help save the environment. It’s time to end the junk mail catastrophe.