Dell is routinely at or near the top of the list for the “greenest” companies on several studies including this one from Greenpeace.

I had the opportunity today to host a Twitter Q&A (Has tag #DellSus) with Bruno Sarda, Director of Global Sustainability Operations, and he talked about the many initiatives that have made Dell one of the greenest and most sustainable companies on the planet.

Here are just three of the impressive sustainability programs we discussed.

• Dell’s Reconnect e-waste recycling initiative with Goodwill, which has created over 250 jobs and diverted more than 200,000 pounds of e-waste from landfills
• Their revolutionary mushroom packaging for Dell servers, made of 100% organic material (The packaging, not the servers)
• The Dell Social Innovation Challenge encourages and nurtures social innovator college students to help bring transformative ideas to pressing problems throughout the world.

Here are highlights from the Twitterview.

Q: What initially sparked your interest in corporate sustainability?

A: Our world needs help. Corporations are a huge force for change & am convinced sustainable business is better business.#DellSus

Q: @Dell is a leader in #sustainability. What is one thing Dell does that many companies forget in their initiatives?

A: @MichaelDell has inspired many of us at @Dell to drive positive change. Great to work for co that enables u to do ur best work.

Harness passion of stakeholders. We collaborate w/ suppliers, customers, competitors, academia, govt, civil society, etc.

Together we are stronger, faster & smarter. EICC, @TSCNews,@TheGreenGrid are good examples.

Q: What CSR achievements with Dell are you most proud of?

A:  Picking only one proud outcome is tough – we have many success stories in supply chain, ops, packaging, product, customers, etc.

Would say am proudest of our e-waste takeback & recycling leadership globally. The results are powerful!

Too many people still don’t know why or where to recycle used electronics. Need to improve collection rates.

Q: Your e-recycling leadership is seen in Reconnect consumer computer recycling. Why is @Goodwill a great partner in your e-waste initiative?

A.  @Goodwill is great partner b/c of our shared goal to create a positive impact on participating communities and environment.

Q. One recent accomplishment is Plant-a-Tree w/ 1/2 million+ trees planted! @carbonfundorg @ConservationFun. What can we expect next with Plant-a-Tree? 

A. @Dell customers are true heroes, we’re so grateful to them. They donated $2M+ to help reach this milestone. Our commitment to environmental conservation goes beyond Plant-a-Tree. You can expect more in the future.

Q: How does reuse play into Dell’s sustainability strategy?

A. Much of what is collected in takeback program can be and is reused – either in whole or in part.

Q: Overall, @Dell4Good refers to a lifecycle approach to sustainability. What does this mean exactly?

A: Means being aware of all the things you touch, and to look to reduce environmental impacts at every step.

We recently produced a short animated piece to illustrate what it means @Dell

Q: What patterns or trends are you noticing from you customers as it relates to sustainability?

A:  Seeing grt interest frm govt & corp customers to green their supply chain but also their operations. We help them w/ both.

Q: What green/sustainable efforts do Dell employees practice internally? 

A: Employees full of passion for #green. Many locations globally have green teams working locally. Inspiring!

Q: As a corporate leader in sustainability, how has@Dell4Good inspired responsible change in other corporations?

A: We collaborate openly w/ suppliers, customers & peers. We’ve seen our best practices adopted & we’ve adopted others’

Q: Can you talk a bit about the mushroom packaging@Dell4Good has employed recently? Why mushrooms?

A: Packaging innovation is always on our mind. How we got to mushrooms is a great story, check it out.

The best packaging protects your product while embellishing it and leaving the smallest possible footprint in the process.

Packaging matters to our customers big & small. We’ve innovated on many fronts with phenomenal results. 

 Q: What patterns or trends are you noticing from you customers as it relates to sustainability?

A: Seeing grt interest frm govt & corp customers to green their supply chain but also their operations. We help them w/ both.

Q: How does everyday consumer benefit from@Dell4Good sustainability initiatives?

A: Many ways! Consumers care most abt packaging & recycling, and we also help them save on energy use.

B2B customers care most abt energy efficiency to reduce carbon footprint & operational costs. 

Many products have biggest environmntl footprint during customer use. Important to design w/ that in mind.

We’ve achieved great progress helping all types of customers reduce their IT footprint as a result.

We used to focus most on what we were doing internally to be#green. Now, we focus most on how we help our customers do same

Q:  You’re also a professor @ASUgreen. What have ur students taught u about sustainability? Any of their ideas brought to @Dell4Good?

A: @ASUgreen students r full of great ideas. Definitely learning frm them. Many ASU entries in the Dell Challenge?

Q: What can we expect to see on@Dell‘s corporate sustainability report for 2012?

A: Continued transparency in a more attractive format that’ll make it easier to track our progress & understand our commitments.

If you missed our Twitterview today and have a question for Bruno, please ask it in the comment section below. I guarantee you’ll get an answer, and one you’ll probably like.

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Will your water rates rise like a gallon of ethanol at your corner Chevron?

Probably not.

And that’s why Americans seem to be apathetic about water conservation. Many experts argue that until we hit them in the wallet, they’ll keep wasting water.

So how do you get consumers’ attention about the pending water crisis that is barreling down on us like an Arizona haboob?

You get them to live and breathe it.

Companies and initiatives like American Standard’s Responsible Bathroom, Coca-Cola’s Global Water Stewardship, and The Great Lakes Brewing Company’s Triple Bottom Line are embracing water conservation with cause marketing that is helping to educate and change consumer behavior.

These companies underscore our core belief: an understanding learned from the nearly 14 years of running the Water – Use It Wisely conservation campaign:

“Technology alone will not save our water. You must start with behavior change.”

Click to see the show

Recently, our position on water conservation messaging was featured in Christine Birkner’s excellent article for the American Marketing Association magazine, Cause for Concern, as well as on AMA TV. Like most of the sustainability movement, companies and campaigns propelling cause marketing initiatives around water conservation are pioneers, and we need more heroes leading the charge.

“Water conservation has been billed as the most important environmental issue of the 21st century, yet few American consumers are altering their behaviors – and fewer companies are trying to motivate them to do so.”

Can you point to a corporate initiative that is championing water conservation in your community?

So here it is for you. It’s full of great stats and facts about greenwashing and what to look for. And it begs the question:

Are the companies accused of greenwashing doing it on purpose, or do they just NOT know how to communicate the real environmental impact of their products overselling their “greenness”?

Could it be that they have the best of intentions and are simply bungling their green marketing; their nefarious character created from naivet’e? I’m not ready to condemn all of them just yet, and that was my reason for not immediately posting the info graphic.

What do you think? Who are the biggest greenwashing offenders? Who are those that simply don’t get it? How can they do a better job with their stories of sustainability?

Created by: Marketing Degree

Warren Wilson College, Ashville, North Carolina

As a resource for masters degree programs points out, many of today’s students are concerned with ecological issues. This means colleges that focus on green innovations on their campuses and marketing those improvements are much more appealing to future students. To stay competitive some schools are taking going green beyond just recycling and are improving the design of their campuses and are incorporating undergraduate and masters degree programs covering areas like sustainability. Below are five colleges are really impressive in their efforts to a positive environmental impact:

1. Warren Wilson College, Ashville, North Carolina.

This college has been a leader in green campus innovation, and started making ecologically minded improvements to their school in the ‘80s, before going green was popular. For example, they were one of the first campuses to institute a campus recycling program and they serve cafeteria food that, for a large percentage, comes directly from their sustainable campus gardens. The garden gives ecology majors at the school a chance to see the impact of sustainable growing and eating first hand, and also saves billions of gallons of fossil fuel that is used to ship conventional food from faraway places.

2. University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point, Stevens Point, Wisconsin.

At this college, not only do they have a unique conservation program to educate the leaders of an ecologically sound future, they have a waste program that makes most campuses look far less efficient. In the dorms, they have recycling chutes to make disposing of recyclables very convenient. This campus also has an onsite composting program, where students, staff and faculty create re-usable and nutrient rich compost for their community. In addition, the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point was the first in the country to include a conservation program in the curriculum (1940s).

3. University of Maine, Orono, Maine.

The University of Main campus is pretty incredible in terms of green innovation. Not only do students, staff, faculty and visitors have free access to bicycles and a shuttle to encourage sustainable travel, but all of the buildings on campus also have to meet very rigid standards of “green-ness.” Each building has a paper recycling bin in every room, and all new buildings must meet LEED’s (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green certification standards. In addition, the campus employs a Sustainability Council, Sustainability Coordinator, and houses an “eco lead” in each dorm to ensure that recycling programs are being followed closely, and energy conservation is at its most efficient.

4. Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts.

Not only did Northeastern begin greening their campus earlier than most, but they have also continued to integrate sustainability and ecologically sound practices into their curriculum and school mission successfully for the past 20 years. Their composting program is very effective, and many courses include a sustainability component. They have reduced their carbon footprint immensely by installing new lighting and house the first college cafeteria to gain LEED Gold standard certification and three star green certification rating.

5. University of California – Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California.

Not only does the Sierra Club rank this campus in the top 10 in the nation for green innovation, but their faculty also produces award winning green research. This school also dedicates entire buildings to use by sustainability and community action student groups, such as the California Student Sustainability Coalition.

The colleges listed here are doing a wonderful service to the planet and their students. These campuses save resources while allowing students to see the innovation and creativity of the green movement taking place before their very eyes. Thus, these campuses are making a difference and inspiring the future of green innovation in their student body.

Guest post by Elaine Hirsch. She is kind of a jack-of-all-interests, from education to technology to public policy. She is currently working as a writer for various education-related sites and writing about all these things instead. Her work is often found in the Greener Ideal blog. 

That’s my obvious answer to Korey Baker’s question on LinkedIn today: “What attracts business owners to the idea of “going green”?

To give my position credence, just look at McDonald’s 2011 Sustainability Scorecard. Of their 13 stated goals in five areas, they only met one:

“Increase energy awareness and education across the System to continue to realize savings to the bottom line and benefits to the environment.”

While they’re making progress in other CSR areas, including sustainable supply chain, employee experience, nutrition & well being, and community, it’s no surprise that the big savings are in environmental responsibility.

As I mentioned in the American marketing Association article about the sustainability scorecard, McDonald’s wins by reducing operating costs, increasing net profits, and creating a story about their sustainability that they can share with the world.

That’s how you sell “green” to a company. What’s your answer?

It’s all about creative destruction, the fuel that propels free markets.

Author Tim Wu is a former tech writer from Silicon Valley who is a professor at Columbia Law School. This is an enlightening journey through the typical arch of American communications industries: From tinkering in the garage to a life-changing industry; from half-backed contraption to must-have production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single entity; from open to closed system.

Eventually, entrepreneurs and innovation smash apart the closed system, and the cycle starts anew.  Is SOPA the start of the natural constriction of the open web – the most verdant field for social innovators and communicators that we have know in our lifetime – and a natural continuation of the cycle? Will a resurgent AT&T eventually capture T-Mobile to expand their empire and once again monopolize telecommunications, another revolution in its cycle?

One of the interesting themes that threads throughout The Master Switch is the Marxist concept of ”Creative Destruction,” popularized and applied by Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter during the early to mid 1900′s. The free markets are based on creative destruction, the invention/birth, maturity and destruction of a product, service or industry, its demise caused by similar innovation that created it. Often, according to Wu, the inadvertent self-destruction of the successful endeavor that has reached the masses is at the hands of its creators whom go from risk-taking inventor to risk-adverse monolithic corporation or cartel that becomes vulnerable to individuals innovating. David falls Goliath.

“All knowledge and habit once acquired becomes as firmly rooted in ourselves as a railway embankment in the earth. The very nature of fixed habits of thinking, their energy-saving function, is founded upon the fact that they have become subconscious, that they yield their results automatically and are proof against criticism and even against contradiction by individual facts.”  - Schumpeter

As a green marketer, you are a storyteller for sustainability. You have the master switch; the megaphone to reach your customers and stakeholders. You are also the innovator and risk-taker fighting the good fight against the mindset of, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” I believe we are all still pioneering and learning how to make sustainability work. We must be the fearless inventors tinkering in our sustainability garages and continuing to challenge the status quo. We are at the very beginning of the cycle. It’s an exciting time, and one we are privileged to be part of.

Read The Master Switch and see how the rise and fall of these communication innovators and empires directly parallel the rise of green marketing and sustainability within our firms and the public conscious.

Can you share an example of creative destruction in your experience with green marketing and sustainability?

It’s not. It’s making fun of companies and brands that are eager to jump on the green bandwagon without doing their homework. Their green marketing shortcuts are laughable, diminishing the credibility of the entire green marketing industry.

At least Lorna Li of Green Marketing TV appreciates my humor. She recently invited me on her web TV show to discuss the art of green marketing.

The Art of Green Marketing for Sustainable Brands – Park Howell, Park & Co from Green Marketing TV on Vimeo.

In this interview we cover:

• Which companies tell their sustainability story well, without the hackneyed green marketing cliches
• Big brands that are failing the “got green?” test
• Successful examples of green marketing
• Egregious examples of green wash, in products that have no business calling themselves green
• Whether green marketing is really dead and if we should just give up

This revealing discussion with several real world green marketing examples, ought to help you better define your green marketing strategies and bring you closer to becoming a remarkable sustainable brand.

GoGreen Conference at the Phoenix Convention Center

Do you think you have your green brand and marketing figured out? Do you want to put it to the test? Join me as I moderate the workshop, Green Marketing & Branding: Creating Behavior Change during the inaugural GoGreen Conference at the Phoenix Convention Center this Tuesday, November 15.

GoGreen Conference Phoenix has a terrific lineup of speakers, including:

• Al Halvorsen, Senior Director of Environmental Sustainability, Frito-Lay North America
• Derrick Hall, CEO of the Arizona Diamondbacks
• Phoenix Mayor, Phil Gordon
• Kevin Tuerff, President, Enviromedia

There is no real donation involved – presenting something as a gift, grant or contribution – although the for-profit entity that hoodwinks you out of your items would like you to think so.

Inside Edition just aired this story on Bruce Binler, a Long Island, NY businessman who owns hundreds of clothing bins that masquerade as non-profit collection points. It is despicable that they can intercept your donated items for their own gain that would otherwise help put people back to work, as in the case of Goodwill of Central Arizona.

Since the for-profit collection bins have appeared in Arizona, Goodwill of Central Arizona has seen its volume of donated items drop by 40 percent, from 130 pounds-per-donor to approximately 72 pounds. With foresight, Goodwill has increased its number of donors; they’re just dropping off substantially fewer items per trip.

If Goodwill had not experienced the drop in per-donor volume, they could be serving 70,000 Arizonans, instead of the admirable 35,000 they currently serve, to help find jobs. Goodwill attributes much of this loss to for-profit bins.

More than 5,000 profit-seeking bins dot the vacant corners and parking lots of the Valley of the Sun, often illegally because they appear in the dead of night without the permission of the property owner. They are here to compete with legitimate non-profit organizations for your valuable castoffs. But unless these bins have a reputable nonprofit prominently displayed on them, like Goodwill, Valley Big Brothers and Big Sisters, St. Vincent De Paul, or the Salvation Army, you can bet your donated items are headed to a bulk buyer and sold out-of-state or overseas. Very little of the money from your once beloved items will remain in the local community to help put people back to work. It goes to men like Mr. Binler.

Donation bins, like this one from Campus California, have come under fire.

But he’s not alone. Other organizations, like Campus California, which has come under intense scrutiny in the Bay Area, are doling out 200 “cause-oriented” collection bins throughout Arizona.

It’s no wonder that competition for your resale items has gotten nasty. According to the Association of Resale Professionals, resale is a multi-billion dollar a year industry that has grown by seven percent each of the last two years.

Profits are driving unscrupulous marketeers to invade the historical retail domain of non-profits and pirate your items with the false promise that they will have a significant impact on an important social cause.

So the next time that collection bin slams shut on your donated items, think again where it actually might be headed and who is truly benefitting.

Great Lakes Brewing Company sources its ingredients locally to green its operations

But there’s hope and help for the Coal Burgers of the world. Entrepreneur Magazine, in its November issue, features an article on the five-step guide to marketing a green business called: Selling Green. They called me as a source for their piece the day after I wrote about Coal Burger, so the information was top-of-mind. Here are writer Matt Villano’s five steps to green marketing that he culled from his interviews with marketers and business owners across the country.

1. See What Your Customers Want – Do they even care if you’re green? Bardessono, a luxury hotel and spa in Yountville, CA, made this mistake.
2. Define What Green Means to You – Green has many nebulous meanings to consumers and proprietors alike. Ava Anderson does a nice job of explaining what being natural means in their non-toxic personal care items.
3. Connect the Dots – Answer consumers’ questions: Does it work? Is it good for my budget, my family, and our planet?
4. Practice What You Preach – Are you backing up your green position with sustainable actions that matter? Green Apple Cleaners in New York walk the talk.
5. Reinvest in the Community – The old think globally, act locally adage. Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland only sources its ingredients locally.

The article is filled with case studies that demonstrate each of the five steps to marketing yourself as green. However, I’d like to remind you that being green isn’t so much about your marketing as it is about your philosophy and action. Being sustainable should be a natural bi-product of how you approach your business with planetary efficiency and healthy products as your highest priorities. That’s when your green story starts to get really interesting.

Do you have a favorite company that is doing its green marketing well? Please let us know below.