The latest Ecopinion survey from EcoAlign reports that consumers are still confused by the words and terms used to describe, and the selling of, energy efficiency. The study found that consumers generally have positive associations with terms like “energy efficiency, “energy conservation” and “clean energy.” However, consumer understanding for terms like “demand response” and “peak pricing” have remained the same or decreased since 2007.

• The Understanding Gap – It appears that increased media coverage of the tested terms has created favorable associations in consumer’s mind without increasing consumer understanding of the terms.
• The Language Gap – Although the terms tested favorably, the language used to articulate conservation and smart energy remain rooted in industry jargon based on regulatory, policy and operational modes of thinking. So although consumers favor the idea and intentions associated with energy conservation and smart energy, they do not understand the meaning of the terms themselves and have not “bought in” to them with their actions. There is clearly a need to bring a more educational and marketing focus to the conversation for greater awareness, understanding and engagement.
• The Commodity Gap – Two-thirds of Americans focused on either cost or value when considering the adoption of renewable energy. Chief marketing officers need to move from a commodity focus (cost) in their marketing to “value creation.”
• The Smart Grid Gap – Consumers believe the “smart grid” will provide environmental benefits, but little economic benefit for themselves. Given that almost two-thirds of Americans are “value buyers,” marketers need to make a compelling pitch for the individual financial savings in simple terms for the consumer.

“Compared to two years ago, consumers today have a greater understanding of the importance of conservation and clean energy but have not moved this awareness into action,” stated Andrea Fabbri, COO and Chief Marketing Officer. “The challenge for communications and marketing professionals is to make sustainability an economic value. This must start from engaging with consumers on a more deeply emotional level to transform beliefs into the values that shape consumer decisions. But it also has to be complemented by solutions that address the economic barriers.”

What does it all mean?

1. There is a need to move from cognitive awareness to beliefs that drive decisions. Green marketers need to connect with their consumers emotionally, targeting value-based segments.
2. Sustainability must become an economic value. To increase the relevance to consumers and speed of adoption, people need to more clearly see the economic value connected to sustainability, energy conservation and clean energy.
3. More offerings need to be available. The  market needs to provide more green products and sustainable offerings that make change possible, real and visible.
4. Offerings must become more visible. We need to toss out cold “engineer speak,” and use emotional, consumer-friendly communication that inspires, creates urgency, and articulates a positive vision for energy efficiency and conservation.
5. We need transitional offerings now. Timing is important and consumers need immediate niche solutions now, while more robust solutions that create greater green and economic value are developed for the masses. In short, we need action.

A copy of the full EcoPinion report is available at no charge by visiting EcoAlign’s website at www.ecoalign.com, or you can down load it here: Green Words Gone Wrong Report

CoolPeopleCare.org demonstrates easy ways you can save the world in five minutes or less.

BestGreenBlogs.com is the web’s largest directory of green and sustainable themed weblogs.

Ecopreneurist.com is part of Green Options Media, a network of environmentally-focused blogs covering a broad spectrum of information for making sustainable choices.

LazyEnvironmentalist.com offers easy, stylish and super convenient ways to green your lifestyle

RealClimate.org is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists.

TreeHugger.com Owned by Discovery, this site is a media outlet dedicated to driving sustainability mainstream.

Grist.org where news about green issues and sustainable living isn’t predictable, demoralizing, or dull.

GreenLivingIdeas.com provides ideas, tips, and information to help you improve the environmental sustainability of every aspect of your life: home energy, green building and remodeling, cars, food, waste recycling—and everything in between.

DoTheGreenThing.com is a not-for-profit public service that inspires people to lead a greener life, with the help of brilliant videos and inspiring stories etc. from creative people and community members around the world.

EcoGeek.org publishes up to ten stories daily about innovations that are saving the planet.

Celsias.com offers tools to help people combat climate change, and bring the green community, companies and organisations closer together.

TheNaturalStep.org is a non profit organization founded with the vision of creating a sustainable society.

TinyChoices.com is a colorful blog about all things green.

Conservation.org has a mission to conserve the Earth’s living heritage – our global biodiversity – and to demonstrate that human societies are able to live harmoniously with nature.

ExperienceBiOH.com Brought to you by the BiOH polyols business — a maker of soy-based ingredients for foam, The BiOH experience offers resources for you to learn and participate in helping communities and the environment.

TwilightEarth.com is dedicated to saving the the environment through schared news, deiscuss, advocacy and activism.

MoreEco.com offers a single entry point to some of the finest green online retailers whilst rewarding you for your ethical shopping habits and helping to reduce your carbon footprint.

EcoTrendSpotter.com provides readers and shoppers with the latest eco, organic, green products.

RecycleFund.com A site dedicated to easy and earth-friendly fundraising for your organization by recycling empty printer cartridges and cell phones.

HyperLocavore.ning.com Join hyperlocavore to find or start a yardshare in your town. CSAs and community gardens fill up fast. Food is expensive! Grow together!

Inhabit.com is a weblog devoted to the future of design, tracking the innovations in technology, practices and materials that are pushing architecture and home design towards a smarter and more sustainable future.

Green.com is a unique online world where people can safely gather, learn, and interact with each other.

Please feel free to share this poll with everyone you know to drive votes for your favorite green website.

You can start by signing up for Earth Hour to Earth Day Challenge on Twitter for your daily tip. And be sure to send a tweet or email each day letting your friends, family and followers know how you’re greening your lifestyle.

For each of the 26 days, take five minutes to do one of the following:

1. Follow Water – Use It Wisely on Twitter to receive your daily water-saving tip.
2. Change out three old fashion light bulbs in your home or office to compact flourescent lighting (CFL).
3. Give up your car and don’t drive it (or anyone else’s) for one full day.
4. Pick-up three re-usable shopping bags from your grocer and keep them handy in your car, and of course, use them instead of paper or plastic.
5. Take five minutes to properly set your thermostat with this easy guide from EnergyStar.
6. Learn how to increase your gas mileage, whether you own a hybrid or not.
7. Learn how to start a community garden for your neighborhood. You may end up growing more friendships than produce.
8. Take five minutes to play “Tip Tank” water conservation concentration game. Great for the entire family.
9. Wrap your water heater. Once you pick-up the insulating blanket, it doesn’t even take five minutes to install it. You’ll save energy and money.
10. Make five minutes to take your lunch to work.
11. Make sure your irrigation timer is set appropriately for spring and summer.
12. Wake up five minutes earlier every morning and put that time to use for a green project or thought.
13. Sign up for CoolPeopleCare.org’s daily email on easy things you can do to help the planet five minutes at a time.
14. Take Kohler’s 3-minute toilet quiz, and learn how you can get a FREE high-efficiency commode while raising funds for Habitat for Humanity.
15. Use your blog or website to offset 350 pounds of carbon by placing the Brighter Planet badge on your site.
16. Opt out of receiving wasteful yellow and white pages printed phone directories.
17. Donate/recycle your clothes and household items to Goodwill, and don’t forget to take five minutes to find a treasure in their stores.
18. Download this directory of 100+ websites all about green living for easy access, sharing and use in your daily life.
19. Take five minutes to learn how carbon offsetting works so that you can apply it in your personal life and promote it through your professional one.
20. Learn how NOT to be an energy sucking appliance vampire with this incredibly inventive 54-second video from DoTheGreenThing.com


Plug Out Boy feat. Green Monday from Green Thing on Vimeo.

21. Download the new iPhone app, GreenMeter, which helps you calculate your car’s carbon footprint relative to your commute and driving habits.
22. Learn the easiest, most convenient places to safely recylce hazardous materials in your neighborhood and commit to getting rid of the paint, insecticides and other harmful chemicals in your garage this weekend.
23. Quickly learn how to compost and re-use organic waste instead of filling up your garbage and our landfills.
24. Shorten your showers to five minutes or less and you’ll save thousands of gallons every month. Download 100+ other water-saving tips for easy reference.
25. Learn the 12 things you can do to reduce particulate pollution.
26. Throw an eco-friendly Earth Day party!

What are you going to do to make a difference for the Earth Hour to Earth Day Challenge? Please let me know by commenting below and/or sending me and your followers an email or tweet.

My Top 10 Favorite Tips:

1. Wake up earlier: Since I wake up at 4:59 a.m. practically every day, this one resonates with me. I get more meaningful things done between 5:23 and 7:19 a.m. than practically any other time during the day. They point out that getting up a few minutes earlier every day buys you as many as 50 extra hours per year. Just think of what you can do with 50 extra hours.
2. What’s that lever for? Personal pet peeve: Use your friggin’ blinker and relieve some stress in those drivers around you. Your blinker is the only human element on your car. It’s kind, considerate, and courteous, and it says, “Excuse me, pardon me, I’d love to get over, thank you very much.”
3. Trick your plate: The next time you renew your license plate, sign-up for a plate that supports a cause. You’ll be a rolling brand evangelist and your cause will raise some money.
4. Digital donations: We spend one-third of our lives at the office, so naturally it’s an environment where we can make a big impact. Start by donating those old computers, printers, cells phones and other electronics to schools and charities.
5. Personalize the mug: More than 44 billion paper cups are used each year for hot drinks. So pal around with your own coffee or tea mug and use and reuse it.
6. Just click it: *Sam and Stephen prove in their book that that you don’t have to do much to end up doing a lot. For example, they point to the Animal Rescue Site that enables you to provide a half a bowl of food to a needy pet with a simple click of your mouse.
7. Get fresh: Frozen food requires 10-times more energy to produce than fresh food. Chew on that for a bit.
8. Take the bag back: 500 billion plastic grocery bags are consumed worldwide annually. So either use canvas (some prefer hemp) shopping bags, or re-use your existing paper and plastic.
9. Change the bulb: If every American household changed their five most-used light fixtures to energy-saving incandescent bulbs, it’d be like taking 8,000,000 cars off the road saving $6,000,000,000 in energy costs. That’s a lot of 0’s!
10. An email a day helps keep global warming away: Ok, so I wrote that one. You can’t blame Sam and Stephen.  Fact is, though, I subscribe to their daily email on the handful of simple things that I can do, and the cool events happening on and offline around the country to help me save the planet five minutes at a time. I highly recommend it.

What tips can you add to the list to help save the planet in under five minutes? And don’t forget to get your own copy of New Day Revolution.

Plug Out Boy feat. Green Monday from Green Thing on Vimeo.

You can subscribe to DoTheGreenThing.com by clicking here: subscribe@dothegreenthing.com. Their emails are always fun, and the creative that comes with them is immensely inspirational.

They have yet to post the winners, and here are 10 of the top 50 that I found intriguing. Click here to see all Greener Gadget entries.

1. Fastronauts: Combating child obesity and batteries in landfills, these toys are powered by play.
2. BugPlugs: Turns off a connected device when not in use to avoid energy drain.
3. Bware Water Meter: Allows you to monitor your water usage by simply attaching to showerheads, faucets, etc.
4. ubicycle Public Bicycle Service System: Providing commuters with easy access to bicycles to promote non-polluting and healthier transportation.
5. Tweet-a-Watt Twittering Power Meter: The “Kill a Watt” monitors your daily energy usage and Tweets your results as a reminder to reduce your use, as well as for friendly competition among your followers.
6. VE09 Blister Radio: Made from PLA, a biodegradable, thermoplastic, aliphatic polyester derived from renewable resources such as cornstarch (in the U.S.) or sugarcanes.
7. CompostAll: a replacement for the home in-sink garbage disposal, which allows food waste to be composted instead of sent down the drain.
8. Recompute: Sustainable desktop computer housed in cardboard.
9. Solar Pot: Plants get nutritive elements from the sun. Solar Pot charges batteries through this same solar energy: It recycles batteries by use of natural energy.
10. Move Your Energy: A rocking shell chair with an LED lamp specially designed for reading that is powered by your motion.

AND THE WINNERS ARE…http://ff.im/-1hMsG

• Green
• Sustainability
• Energy Efficiency
• Eco-friendly
• Environmentally conscious

Please share this survey with your Twitter followers by copying this line in your window. I greatly appreciate your help with my survey.

Green marketer curious as to which environmental/green words resonate most with you. Please take short survey: http://tinyurl.com/8u76xl

Can reading the Green Bible be a bad thing?  The bible has been packaged for every imaginable demographic: from toddlers to teenagers to old folks with bad eyes to recovering addicts. So why does highlighting the environmental messages found in its pages border on blasphemy? Some in the religious community would have you think just that.

I, on the other hand, think that if you can find creative ways to get the good book into more hands, then half the battle is won.

The Green Bible is a new revised standard version of the original, and it’s clever publishing simply takes advantage of verses and passages that relate to being good stewards of the Earth.  Its green features include:

• Green-Letter Edition: Verses and passages that speak to God’s care for creation highlighted in green
• A green Bible index and personal study guide
• Printed on recycled paper, using soy-based ink with a cotton/linen cover
• Green subject Index that organizes verses by topic, including air, dust and pollution
• Contributions by Brian McLaren, Matthew Sleeth, N.T. Wright, Desmond Tutu and others.

From their website they state:

The Green Bible will equip and encourage people to see God’s vision for creation and help them engage in the work of healing and sustaining it. With over 1,000 references to the earth in the Bible, compared to 490 references to heaven and 530 references to love, the Bible carries a powerful message for the earth.

I found the “1,000 references to Earth” surprising and intriguing.

What might be giving the religious right some sweaty palms are the secular groups that are squarely behind The Green Bible, including the Sierra Club and the Humane Society. The evangelical community fears that Christians who focus on the environment as their stewardship distracts them from following the Bible literally.  However, in the past two years there has been a growing movement among evangelicals called Creation Care that supports the environment.

What are your thoughts?  Publishers have long reworked and published Bibles to attract followers from most all demographics.  Is publishing a green, environmentally friendly, and dare I say “energy efficient,” Bible a bad thing? Or does it simply invoke the most powerful voice of all asking us to get our act together now about global warming, pollution, population and our omnipresent carbon footprint?

A baseball bat!  That’d be easy.

The next day I went to work.  I felt like a mad scientist, or a beaver on steroids, as the lathe whirred and the bark flew. Before I knew it, I had my new hand-carved bat.  It was heavier than most, and the handle could’ve used a bigger knob on the end.  And I suppose I would’ve avoided a few splinters had I bothered to sand it, (but sanding just brought back bad memories).  Then my buddy Paul and I took it out for a swing.  Literally. I was hitting the crap out of the ball with my creation, probably because it was a good eight ounces heavier than anything in the city league and Paul was lobbying me softballs.

That night I took my new bat to our baseball game and asked coach Ressler to move me up in the line-up. Proudly, I showed him my secret weapon, the Parkville Slugger, and winked. He took a good, hard look, and with a twisted grin said, “You’re in.” In hindsight, I think he moved me into the clean-up spot to add to his lore as a coach that cultivated the most ridiculous stories about his players for later use as a crusty old codger on a barstool.  He knew what was coming. I stepped up to the plate and that pitcher blew three fastballs by me like Yankee great, Allie “Super Chief” Reynolds. The girth of that bat left my shoulder only AFTER to the thump of each ball reported from the catcher’s mitt.

Walking back to the dugout, it hit me. The equipment doesn’t make the player. You can’t carve yourself into being a big hitter. This is a concept that resonates with me today in my golf game, which brings me to my question: Can an electronics firm design their own eco-friendly logo, slap it on their “energy efficient” products, and sell it with a straight face?

That’s exactly what Fujitso has done.  Their website reads:

“This label gives a clear indication of a product’s green credentials, helping our customers make an informed and clear decision when purchasing and acting as immediate and visible proof of the fact that our products are designed with our far-reaching corporate goals on energy efficiency and sustainability.”

Their timing is pretty good.  The Consumer Electronics Association, which just released a study of consumer purchasing habits, indicates that 33 percent of consumers say they expect to make some type of green CE purchase within the next two years.

According to the study, price and features continue to be the primary purchase drivers for CE products, but green attributes will increasingly be a factor. In fact, 53 percent of consumers say they would be willing to pay some type of premium for televisions with green attributes.

Effectively communicating the green attributes of CE products continues to be an obstacle for manufacturers in particular. Though the study indicates high consumer awareness of logos like EPA’s ENERGY STAR^®, the absence of a single indicator for other “green” attributes leads to consumer confusion. The study finds consumers desire an easy way to determine if a product meets environmental standards, such as logos and descriptions printed on the product packaging.

Fujitso isn’t wasting anytime swinging their shiny new green bat.  They’ve already ranked 33 of their products with their Green IT logo. Granted, you’ve got to give them credit for not waiting around for the government or the Green Electronics Council to rate their products.  They’ve taken that job on themselves.  And even though they may be doing it with the best of intentions, it’s still hard to give much credence to a self-subscribed green labeling effort.  They’ve designed a nice logo and program behind it, but does their product step up to the plate?

This kind of hutzpah makes me want to go out to the garage and finish sanding the old Parkville Slugger.