Wednesday Links

Links on a Wednesday:

Wild Green Yonder on City Farming- the emerging trend of actually growing food on urban plots, and a potentially huge step in the "locavore" movement of sourcing food locally.

PeakEnergy lists the top 10 CleanTech stories of 2007. Some very interesting stories, including blog buzz about whether buying carbon offsets is an odd philosophical compromise or an indicator of a very conscientious consumer, and some top-notch investigation by the Clean Tech blog about IBM's movement into solar.

Interesting take for cleantech investors from AltEnergyStocks on what percentage of a public company's business should be green-oriented to constitute a green investment. GE is the case in point, and the author devises a "Green P/E" and concludes that GE's is $282; you have to buy $282 of GE stock to get $1 of alternative energy earnings (since, per the critics, only 6% of their business is focused on alternative energy and other cleantech stuff.)

Inspiring story for employers from Renewable Energy Access about how alternative energy companies also lead the way in offering innovative benefits supporting green activities to their like-minded employees.

Press release about REI's second LEED-certified retail location.

Did you know people with common interests in the environment may already be meeting for drinks regularly in your neighborhood through GreenDrinks.org? Here's where the Orange County, CA-ites congregate.

Learned about the GreenDrinks meetups above from FundraisingGreen.com, based in Long Beach, CA.

Thursday Links

Links early on a Thursday...

Wall Street Journal breaks the hope and promise of a New Year with the report of a Harvard study and its stimulating conclusion that businesses "doing good works" or pursuing "societal benefit" are only weakly correlated to reap shareholder benefit. (Save yourself the click- that's basically all it says.) The discouraging suggestion is that cash contributions to charities are a better indicator of a company's financial success than community projects, for example...or responsible corporate policies! Expect nothing less from Harvard and WSJ then the stunning philosophy of "Make your money first, and then give it away."

Admittedly my first reaction to news of Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff's book was skeptical; after all, I figured it was easy enough for a celebrity chief exec to cajole all of his/her buddies into writing an essay and throw them together and have them published. On second glance I decided I'd give this one a try, not for my dayjob allegiance to Benioff's web-based software, but for the diversity and star-studdedness of his essayist lineup.

This week's TreeHugger Carnival of the Green is a best-of-the-best of the green web by EBikeBlog.org, leading off with a link to a GreenLivingOnline.com story about "Pedelecs" on college campuses. I've never been a big fan of "motorized bikes" and any time I see one here in moderately temperate Southern Cal, I can't help thinking, "Why don't you just pedal yourself?" Of course the few times I have pedaled the 8 miles to work, I'm covered in sweat by the time I arrive; maybe that's an argument.

Double the wheels, but only multiply the cost of your average bike x 10, and you get the world's first $2,500 car, by Tata of India. It's actually closer to $3k at the moment- and I am fine that we continue to refer to Optimist innovations by their target price, whether it's achievable yet or not. Admittedly the "$100 Laptop" has a lot more cache than the "Buy Two $100 Laptops for $400" that the production economies currently allow...

Great local story from the Indianpolis Star about some Indiana farmers who began using roduce from there all-natural farms to create food products back in 2002 and have since grown Local Folks Foods 20x into a nice-sized (we don't know how nice) specialty foods company.

Another quick local story, this one from the Bismarck Tribune, about 2008 Marketplace Entrepreneurs of the Year winner SolarBee, a North Dakota company whose floating, solar-powered water circulator improves water quality in lakes, reservoirs, and water storage facilities. Another great story about local entrepreneurship with universal applicability- and yet another great (and, not that I could have thought it up, relatively simple-sounding) product marketed toward better water quality.

And finally, on Monday I was absolutely enlightened to absorb this perspective on why my all-time favorite lunch- the All-American Classic Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich (I am very particular about mine and make with Jif Reduced Fat Crunchy Peanut Butter and Smuckers Strawberry Preservers, both marketed by the JM Smuckers Company of Orrville Ohio, on whoe wheat bread with some tortillas inserted for added crunch)- is also far better for the environment than your average lunch! Check out the PB&J Campaign.

Hope Wine

Business Week does its annual salute of America's Best Young Entrepreneurs. My personal favorite is our neighbor, Number 15, Jake Kloberdanz (24!) of Newport Beach, California. His simple business model (I didn't say Easy!) is to contract out wine production, market it and distribute it under the Hope Wine label, and give half of all profits to AIDS, Breast Cancer and Autism charities. Congratulations to this young leader and his peers.

Stonyfield Farms and ClimateCounts.org

Of all companies whose organic-ness you may be tempted to dismiss as marketing ploy or otherwise appeasement of a growing demand for environmental and health concern, Stonyfield Farm, purveyors of tasty and organic yogurt, is beyond such skepticism for two reasons. Their marketing, from cool branding to the wide-open story-telling of their organic practices (check out the Bovine Blog) is too good by traditional measures to need a folksy ploy for organic attention.

And they're thorough. "For a Healthy Planet" isn't just a lone link of the homepage and a banner tag on each yogurt container. Stonyfield goes much deeper, getting involved in student lunch reform, openly opposing artificial bovine, supporting Recycline and more.

Stonyfield is a compelling entrepreneurial tale even strictly in a business sense, but they've been a sustainable success for a long time (see this 1998 Inc. story on the company and founder/CEO Gary Hirshberg's mission.) And I haven't mentioned their greatest Optimist success.

ClimateCounts.org is a Stonyfield- (and Hirshberg-) lead collaboration aiming to build consumer awareness and corporate cooperation on the impact of business on climate change. Among other activities, ClimateCounts scores (based on self-reporting) a bunch of companies in 8 industries on their climate change impact and awareness. In Food Products, Sara Lee is "Stuck" with a score of 2 (!) while Stonyfield ranks itself as the second-highest "Strider" (63) behind Unilever (71). In four categories of grading (Review, Reduce, Policy Stance and Report), Stonyfield docked itself most in Reduce. (After all, even the most conscientious food packager is still a mass packager.)

Canon is the high ranker so far at 77.

Shaq, Obesity and REI

I'm not ashamed to say that I was absolutely absorbed by Shaq's Big Challenge, which wrapped last night on ABC. I'm a hoops connoisseur and sometimes Shaquille O'Neal apologist, admittedly, so it's no surprise that I enjoyed the show. But I didn't expect to get goosebumps during the finale, even though I do goosebump easily.

What was so compelling about? It's realism? The kids weren't dropping 100+ pounds like the full-grown candidates on other weight-loss shows, like Biggest Loser. It would probably have been a warning sign if they were dropping more than the 25-75 lbs. they seemed to drop, given that they're growing teens.

It's completeness? They attacked childhood obesity from every angle, with after school workout regimens, the President's Physical Fitness Test, school lunch improvement, and a trip to the governor to get a commitment to support it all (leading to the only frustrating moment: a footnote that the governor's office was "exploring paths" to implementing Shaq's Wellness Wheel and other programs. How governmenty!)

Shaq? Always likeable, and convincingly fit without being unachievably svelte (a knock he's heard once or twice in the later years of his career). But most compelling: why would he do the show? To make money? Doubtful. The Diesel came off as genuinely interested in reversing the epidemic, and who better to get through to kids? Some remote and irrelevant President's Fitness Test, or one of the most admired athletes out there?

All told, a very entertaining miniseries (let's not curse it with the reality label) that, hopefully, will inspire more local action.

Bloggers react:
Burning The Scale
MediaLife Rev
BuddyTV recap

BONUS CLIP on children and activity: A CSRwire news release about REI's Passport to Adventure, a program that organzies hikes and bike-hikes recommended by store employees for kids and their parents. It's nice community involvement (that probably also drives sales) from a company that is also notorious for passionate employees, hands-on shopping, and localized classes, training sessions, etc. It's also perfect alignment, a great outdoor program from a great outdoor retailer.

Green Beans Coffee: Serving and Supporting Servicemen

As seen in this month's Entrepreneur, Green Beans Coffee Company was launched by Jason and Jon Araghi in Saudi Arabia over 10 years ago. The mission was to give service men and women a coffee shop home away from home, and the military quickly backed the venture and brought numerous locations to bases around the Middle East. The company, also committed to sustainable operations, donates to several charities supporting veterans and is getting ready to franchise in the U.S.

Drinking Bottled Water Makes You Lazy; plus Nalgene

Fast Company's Charles Fishman just destroyed bottled water for me, and I'm glad he did.

He visits Fiji, Maine, and the souls all of us of who have supported the marketing juggernaut of bottled water into a$38B bottle, $16B a year industry, framing the environmentally unfriendliness of our little luxury habit with so many damning soundbites that I can't even summarize, but here's a thought that stuck with me. Most cities in America have perfectly safe tap water- San Francisco's comes from Yosemite and doesn't even need to be filtered!- yet we truck 1 BILLION bottles around weekly, requiring 37,800 18-wheelers (since water, and all the plastic spent in containing it one time, is so heavy that a carrier has to be partially empty). It's not the money, although if we paid for home water what we paid for bottled, our monthly bill would be $9,000. It's that on top of all the this waste, while we trendify the next cool label that we don't need it (the other top-consuming nations, Mexico, etc., do), 1B people worldwide don't have any clean water at all- including half the people on Fiji.

Nalgene gets our nod as an Optimist Company, just because of the stark logical contrast an empty water container makes, and because, as far as I can tell, Nalgene has done the best job of branding, making cool, an empty bottle.

Drinking bottled water doesn't make you lazy, although I think spreading an untrendy rumor about it might help age the trend and get more people toting around reusable bottles. (Guess what! Drinking bottled water makes you smell bad!) I already had some notion that I was lazy by drinking a bottle or two of Smart Water every day, especially as my 20,000+ person employer de-emphasized its free bottled water, gave out free reusable bottles and installed filter machines in our kitchenettes.

But now I REALLY feel lazy, so I'm going to take a crumby old plastic cup with me today, be seen everywhere with it, and make some noise about it.

Where will you see Green next? and Silk..and Timberland

"Green," which we are already drastically over-featuring on only the 11th post (this blog is not about Green but about companies that do good...it just so happens that many are Green- focused...), may pop up in front of you at any time.

In magazine articles, on the news, and in the press releases of many companies touting their eco-friendly efforts, for sure.

On the side of a bus, a clothing label or Timberland shoebox, even.

What about on a carton of soy milk? Silk Soymilk says so with its Green Caps for Green Energy sweepstakes, a simple enough program where the company will buy 30 kWt hours ("enough to power an average home for a day") for every UPC code you, the enlightened consumer, enter at their website.

It's a sweet Activist/Philanthropist maneuver from a company that is arguably Business Model Good in that it provides a delicious and healthy product to consumers who potentially need a milk substitute. As an ice cream addict, I can't imagine needing such an alternative, so you be the judge of whether that's Optimist enough. Delicious, however, is my word choice, not theirs, as I've recently fallen into the habit of using the Vanilla Silk in my coffee.

Kudos to Silk, by the way, for not sending you through the ridiculous paces of mailing in the UPCs and milk caps to some obscure PO Box that you're likely to miswrite, like most rebate programs.

PS I love the clever tagline atop the carton: "Shake Well & Buy Often." Simple, unexpected, and not surprising from an effective CPG brander. So ubiquitous is the Silk packaging, in my ad-cluttered mind, that I actually had to look it up to make sure it was the brand name, and not the category of milk. Look out Kleenex and Xerox.

Completely unrelated side note: In case you haven't heard of another great packaging innovation, Timberland's eco-footprint disclosing "nutrition" label on the side of each shoe box, see Joel Makower article from last year on WorldChanging.com.