EPA's Greening Your Products

Hello, fellow Charleston Green Business supporters! I just wanted to share a document with you that I ran across while surfing the Internet.

In February 2002, the EPA released a very educational document entitled “Greening Your Products: Good for the environment, good for your bottom line”. In the paper, they give reasons why introducing green products can be more profitable. The authors provide thoughts on identifying, producing, and marketing green products.

They also provide many useful links, diagrams, and environmental program descriptions that may aid in a green businessperson’s product/service conceptualization. The article also supplies several case studies that set the ecopreneurial mind in motion.

Whether you already have or are considering launching a green business, this publication is definitely worth your perusal.

The full document (a great source of reference) can be viewed and downloaded at:
http://www.epa.gov/epp/pubs/jwod_product.pdf?cm_sp=ExternalLink-_-Federal-_-EPA

Purchasing New Computer Equipment

If your business (or you personally) is in need of upgrading and expanding your computers, I recommend checking EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) from the Green Electronics Council. I recently was in the market to buy a new laptop and wanted to get the most environmentally benign (let's face it, electronics are far from "environmentally-friendly") laptop I could reasonably afford. Over a couple of days searching the Internet, the best resource I found was EPEAT. What is good about the site is that you can search for various specifications that you are looking for, not just environmental impact, but things like screen size too.

The program rates equipment on "23 required criteria and 28 optional criteria" and groups them into Gold, Silver and Bronze ratings. All three ratings include meeting all required criteria. The optional criteria is used for differentiating Gold, Silver and Bronze. The categories of criteria are broad and include things like elimination/reduction of sensitive material, packaging, end of life, corporate responsibility, packaging and Energy Star. (The information seems to be submitted by the manufacturers.)

What I decided to do was look through all the laptops reported to have no environmentally sensitive materials (lead, cadmium, mercury, etc.) using the search by optional criteria. I also wanted a decent size laptop - 15" or greater. There weren't a lot of options. One was MacBook Pro, which are quite pricey. There were some Dell, Sony and Lenovo that were there mainly due to having an LED backlit screen. I settled on a Asus N50V. I'm quite happy with it.

Greening Your Office

If you need to go out and get some new supplies for the office, look for the TerraCycle products coming to OfficeMax. According to GreenBiz.com, the office supply store will begin stocking some of TerraCycle's products, such as the pencil holders made from Capri Sun pouches. The neat thing about TerraCycle is that they are repurposing (reusing) products rather than recycling them in the more common sense of melting them down and turning them into something else, which uses plenty of energy. Of course looking at their products makes it easy for the crafty to make some of the stuff themselves, but I don't think the company would be too upset about that.

More on Greening Supply Chain

We're back from another trip to Chicago where we saw a few Prius taxis, which is an idea that just simply makes financial sense given how much taxis stop and go. What also seems to be making sense for large companies like Clorox is introducing green products, like Green Works. I don't know how truly green it is given that it's a product made by Clorox, but people are buying it. In reading an article this morning about Clorox and their supply chain issues, this quote shows a good reason for the increase in green products: "From internal surveys, the company knows its customers will pay 10 to 15 percent more for greener products." Clearly it makes financial sense to sell a product that is more green. However, the article makes a point that getting the supplies to make the green products is a challenge. Clorox bought Burt's Bees not too long ago, and it has been having problems scaling up the business, which traditionally used many small suppliers. What this tells me is that there is plenty of opportunity for start ups to produce the raw and component materials for this boom in green products. Large consumer product companies like Clorox, GE, etc. need to get materials in large quantities in order to get their products to market. This means that either companies producing the raw materials now need to scale up (hopefully in a sustainable manner) or other start ups can enter the market and help fulfill the large companies' demand.

Green Product Design Conference

This might be of interest to a few people. In June Greenbiz.com is hosting a large product development conference focused on green design. It's two days (Th/F 6-12/13, 2008) of speakers, workshops and interactive sessions just up the road in Alexandria, VA. It's a bit pricey ($1799 before April 1), but you can get 15% off by using a code "greenbuzz".

Two particularly interesting sessions are:

• Panel discussion on: "The New Tools: Biomimicry, Cradle-to-Cradle, Green Chemistry" featuring Jason Pearson, Executive Director, GreenBlue; Biomimicry Guild; Dr. Cenan Ozmeral, GVP Functional Polymers, RBU, BASF
• Invited Panel from IDEO, Ziba, Frog and Tricycle

ps. I could have sworn that it was run or co-sponsored by the Product Development & Management Association (PDMA), but there is no mention of it on the conference website or the PDMA's website. And the "Green Gurus @ Play" is just like the PDMA's Gurus @ Play. But it should be a good event none-the-less.