Archive for February, 2008

Next week, The Element Agency will be represented at the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference (WIREC 2008) at the DC Convention Center.  The event is sponsored by the US government and is expected to be the largest renewable energy business conference ever in America.

The American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE), the leading U.S. renewable energy trade associations will host the Trade Show to be co-located with WIREC 2008.

Over 250 experts will talk about the latest technologies at the Business Conference.  We are talking wind, solar, hydro, ocean, geothermal, biomass, biofuels, and waste-to energy. Additional clean technologies will include hydrogen, fuel cells, batteries and other energy storage, electric transmission, smart grid, cogeneration systems, distributed generation, energy efficiency, green buildings, and many others related to renewable energy.

The exposition will feature over 300 renewable energy technology suppliers, systems integrators, financiers, professional services firms, end users, utility companies, energy companies, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, associations, government agencies, foreign governments and economic missions, and other exhibitors.

We let everyone know how WIREC 2008 went on MyGreenElement.com.  Have a good weekend.

By Stefan Deeran at The Element Agency in New York.

Once again, our West coast friends are ahead in the green game. Fourteen major corporations have formed the California Affiliates of the Green Power Group to increase their collective consumption of power from renewable sources.  The project is coordinated by the green think tank, World Resources Institute.

The partnership primarily helps the companies share expertise on how to best use green power.  But as an added value, they can now “sit down with policy-makers and suppliers to come up with innovative ways to deploy green power” says Alexander Perera, the director of WRI’s Green Power Market Development Group.

Perhaps you have heard of these firms?  Members are Advanced Micro Devices, Apple, BT Americas, Cisco Systems, eBay, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Intuit, Levi Strauss & Co., News Corp., Pactiv, Patagonia and Wal-Mart.

By Stefan Deeran at The Element Agency in New York.

By Rona Fried of SustainableBusiness.com, today’s guest blogger

The benefits of going green are finally bearing fruit. As the general economy suffers and we hear about nothing but pain day after day, on the other side of the coin, all we hear about from the green industry is growth.

We see this for ourselves each day as the number of jobs posted on our Green Dream Jobs service escalates. We started the service with the dawn of the Internet some 12 years ago and what a difference a decade makes!

Back then, there were a few green building and renewable energy jobs, some non-profit jobs and scattered jobs throughout the budding sustainability industry. Today, the landscape has completely changed with renewable energy companies, energy management companies, green building firms and a host of other kinds of companies and non-profits creating legions of jobs. Solar companies, for example, are hiring hundreds of employees each - Spire Solar added 100 employees last year alone.

In fact, we’re seeing jobs from brand new industries that didn’t exist only 10 years ago in fields like carbon trading and energy storage and management.

We’re even seeing legislation supporting the growth of green jobs - it was one of the few elements of the recently passed energy bill. Green businesses will no doubt be the job creation engine going forward.

Editors note: Rona Fried, Ph.D. is President of SustainableBusiness.com, which hosts Green Dream Jobs and a green investor newsletter, Progressive Investor.

The views expressed above are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent The Element Agency. If you are interested in penning guest posts for My Green Element, please email Stefan Deeran via stefan@theelementagency.com.

Coca-Cola wants to be in the same sustainability league as General Electric, Toyota and IBM. The company is set to launch a major sustainability marketing blitz, according to a report in this week’s AdAge. Coca-Cola’s campaign will highlight a holistic interpretation of sustainability that includes health and community endeavors alongside environmental efforts.

Coke’s current green work has focused on water conservation, better packaging, and carbon emissions reductions. To see the firm’s presentations, click here.

Coke’s own market research confirmed that it needed to share its green story. The catalyst, however, was customers simply picking up the phone and asking the company what it was doing.

“Our own consumers were saying, ‘Where are you in this [sustainability] space?’” a Coke spokesperson said. “Consumers let us know that by not talking about this, we were letting others define us as an uncaring company.”

This statement brings us to a broader point about getting companies to go green. Despite the ink that sustainability has been getting in the last few years, the majority of firms have never been asked about their environmental impact. Rather than calling your congressperson to regulate businesses, sometimes the best first step an individual can take is to just call the company in question. The reality is, too many firms don’t yet see the advantage in going green until they get that “wake up call” from their customers.

By Stefan Deeran at The Element Agency in New York

By Mike Newman of ReCellular Inc., today’s guest blogger

Cell phones are an unquestioned technological success story. 80% of American’s use one, and most have two or three old ones at home. All that success has bred a larger problem – what to do with the old ones? Nearly all the manufacturers, carriers and national retailers now offer free phone recycling programs. But the largest collector of used phones continues to be our desk drawers and basements.

ReCellular Inc. has pioneered the business of collecting old phones for reuse and recycling. We process more than 500,000 phones a month, collected from consumers across the country. Despite all our successes, that represents a tiny percentage of the number retired each month. It is estimated at 10 million or more; it is likely that only 1 million are collected each month. Thankfully, few actually are thrown into the garbage. Instead they accumulate in our homes and offices.

Despite the incredible amount of attention given of late to environmental issues in general, and the potential problems we face from e-waste disposal specifically, few people are self-motivated to take action and recycle their old phones. Even when presented with a free, postage-paid envelope, fewer than 5% of consumers participate. Similarly, few consumers are driven to equate the purchase of a refurbished phone as an environmentally-preferable action. If considered at all, it is primarily an economic decision. Many people jump at the chance to buy an inexpensive phone without having to sign a long contract.

Our challenge as a company – and as a society – is to figure out how to make the recycling of cell phones and other electronic waste as ingrained as paper or glass recycling. Increasingly, the means are simple and free. Education and changes in culture are the next steps towards solving this evolving environmental problem.

Editors note: Mike Newman is Vice President at ReCellular Inc. Learn more about his firm and the issues around e-waste recycling by clicking ReCellular.com and WirelessRecycling.com.

The views expressed above are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent The Element Agency. If you are interested in penning guest posts for My Green Element, please email Stefan Deeran via stefan@theelementagency.com.

According to a scathing new report by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, it has been a bad year thus far for Big Coal. Just 24 hours after Bush praised clean coal in his State of the Union address, the Department of Energy pulled the plug on the speculative FutureGen project, which would cost billions to build the first zero-emissions coal plant. Major banks like Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America agree that coal plants are a bad investment because CO2 is expected to be taxed via a Federal cap and trade system.

The craziest coal news comes from Kansas, however. Sunflower Electric is furious that Kansas has rejected its bid for a new plant, so they have run ads suggesting Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) supports Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Vladimir Putin, and Hugo Chavez. Sunflower has even bribed the state legislature by agreeing to donate $2.5 million for energy research to the Kansas State University, but only if the state approves the coal plants first.

Big Coal created a front group, called “Kansans for Affordable Energy” to spread propaganda on “clean coal.” Many thanks to DeSmog Blog, for revealing that of the $145,400 in total contributions for this group, $145,000 came from Peabody Energy and Sunflower Electric. Only $400 came from actual Kansans.

By Stefan Deeran at The Element Agency in New York

GreenerCars.org has just released its list of the best buys for 2008. The Honda Civic GX gets top marks for satisfying the Partial Zero-Emission Vehicle (PZEV) standard and getting 36 MPG on the highway. GreenerCars.org considers gas mileage as well as tailpipe emissions in its rankings (a translation of their emissions standards column is here).

The top score is 100 so clearly we have a ways to go on the road towards greener transport. In case you were wondering, the “meanest car” on the road is surprisingly the Volkswagan Touareg, which manages to get a worse score than the Hummer.

As you can see, Toyota and Honda dominate the green car market. So the Americans and Germans better get to work!

By Stefan Deeran at The Element Agency in New York

Solar, wind, biodiesal?  The coal industry is having none of that.

As public demand increases in the fight against global warming, coal producers see their future threatened by renewable energy.

Here are some of the spin efforts underway:

Chevron has produced a game called Energyville, in cahoots with The Economist magazine where players try to power a city with alternative energy, only to conclude that fossil fuels are necessary.

GE touts the patriotic aspects of coal in an “Ecomagination” ad currently featured as our Green Video. The clip shows “sexy” mining models harnessing an All-American fuel.

But the most aggressive effort has been developed by the cannily-named Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, a front group for the coal industry masquerading as a nonprofit supported by “150,000 community leaders.”  Perhaps you have seen their “clean coal” commercials during presidential debates.  Their new microsite, LearnAboutCoal.org, is particularly deceptive as it uses school children to push its message.

By Stefan Deeran at The Element Agency in New York

By Leah Edwards of Ecopreneurist.com, today’s guest blogger

We at Ecopreneurist.com received an email last week from an inventor in upstate New York, who has designed a green product that she wants to bring to market, and she would like some ideas of how she can raise money to manufacture and market the product.

I often recommend bootstrapping a company to make at least a very small start and prove to potential funders that you have what it takes to build a particular business, but this option would not work for this inventor, who has already invested her savings into developing the product and building a couple of prototypes.

And another option that is off the table is licensing: The inventor looked into licensing the product to a larger company, which would put up the money for both production and marketing and would then pay the inventor a licensing fee, presumably based on the volume of sales. The downside of the arrangement would be a loss of control over the production and marketing, as well as the fact that the company who is willing to license the product would have the production done in China. Because the inventor lives in upstate New York, where there is significant unemployment, the inventor wants to find some way to raise the money to manufacture the product in a factory within her community.

Here are my ideas for funding a green business:

• SBA loans
• Social-venture venture capital funds
• Friends-and-Family financing
• Partnering with a nonprofit organization

If you have had experience with any of these types of funding or if you know of resources particularly for businesses in New York, we’d love for you to comment on the original post here.

Editors note: Leah Edwards is an editor of Ecopreneurist.com and General Manager of Green Options Media. 

The views expressed above are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent The Element Agency. If you are interested in penning guest posts for My Green Element, please email Stefan Deeran via stefan@theelementagency.com.

According to Philips Electronics new 2007 Sustainability Report (independently verified using GRI standards), sales of green products shot up 33% last year to a tidy sum of $7.7 billion. Green Product sales now account for 20% of total Philips sales.

So what counts as a Philips Green Product? The firm has set up a flashy, consumer site called ASimpleSwitch.com to showcase their energy saving flatscreen TVs and CFL lightbulbs.  The site shows you how purchasing Philips products add up to measurable CO2 reductions.  One has to wonder, however whether the “ASimpleSwitch” green logo is evident at the point of sale in department stores.  Do people know they could be buying green when they wander through Best Buy?

Nevertheless, the Philips effort is persuasive and draws similarities to GE’s Ecomagination microsite.   Which site do you think is most effective in communicating green products?

By Stefan Deeran at The Element Agency in New York

A new documentary called Fields of Fuel has been energizing the crowd at Sundance.  Check out the trailer, currently featured as our Green Video.

By Stefan Deeran at The Element Agency in New York