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Posts Tagged ‘Promoting Green’

You Can Now Link to My Green Webinar: “How to Reduce Your Carbon & Hype Footprints”

Whether your company is a green marketing machine, or you simply want to green your marketing, my presentation from iLinc’s inaugural iGreen virtual conference is for you.

green-footYou’ll learn the four ways you can reduce the carbon footprint of your marketing efforts while becoming an ambassador for green:

  1. Digital vs. Digits: Reducing ink and paper consumption with a digital strategy.
  2. Buying Carbon Offsets: Offset the carbon your advertising efforts are creating with simple carbon offset purchases.
  3. Greening Your Website: FREE and easy ways to carbon-optimize the operation of your website while becoming a proponent of online carbon offset organizations.
  4. Tap Social Media for Marketing & Distribution: Strategies on how to use YouTube, Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts, Facebook, etc. for free video marketing distribution.

green-stoolPart II of the presentation covers how to reduce your hype footprint and avoid the pitfalls of greenwashing, even if it’s inadvertent. I’ll show you the three-legged stool test we use for the greening of our clients and their messaging.

We look at several greenwashing case studies, including the Canadian Fur Council, Nestle Waters, and the “Clean Coal” industry. Plus we highlight folks who are doing it right, including Mini Cooper, Kohler Toilets, and MTV.

Again, here’s the link: “How to Reduce Your Carbon and Hype Footrpints” from the iGreen Virtual Conference.

Please let me know if you have any questions from the webinar, and of course, feel free to share it with your world.

Starbucks Cups are NOT Recyclable ?*!

(The following is a guest post from Shawn Hardy, one of our top designers at Park&Co.)

Needless to say at Park&Co we are always looking at different ways to be sustainable both socially and environmentally. So of course, we recycle. Easy right ? You’d think, but it was brought to our attention that many of us were recycling things that we thought were recyclable but were not – it’s not like we were recycling styrofoam, I’m talking about the different papers and plastics that can be assumed to be recyclable, but aren’t. I’ll admit I was guilty of assuming that if it is paper, plastic or glass it is recyclable. Long story short, I learned Starbucks cups are NOT recyclable!

starbucks-cupjpg2How could this be? A non recyclable paper cup. I couldn’t believe it so I did a little more digging. I visited Starbucks Shared Planet website and found out that they won’t have a recyclable cup until 2015.Peets Coffee implemented a recyclable cup in 2007. This is amazing to me that the r&d has already been done by other companies, and a giant like Starbucks can’t get this up and running for another 6 years.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy Starbucks and think highly of them as a company.  They pay their employees very well, are known for providing very good low cost health insurance, even for part time employees, and pledge to buy their coffee from Ethical Sources (i.e. not giant coffee farms that elbow out local farmers who grow the highest quality beans).

In the end I am disappointed that  Starbucks won’t take the extra steps to deliver us a recyclable cup, and annoyed that the only thing that I can put in the recycling bin is the cap to my coffee cup. The cardboard sleeve is not even recyclable.

So what can we do? We can join the campaign and request that Starbucks steps up their effort by clicking here. I did, it was simple and only took a minute. You can also post the widget below on your blog or website, I also did this for my personal blog.

Take a second and join the campaign.  After all, we aren’t asking for Starbucks to change the world, we just want to be able to toss the cup into the recycling bin and feel good about not trashing the environment.

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Download Your Earth Hour to Earth Day Challenge Calendar and Start Saving the Planet 5 Minutes at a Time.

eh2ed-calendar1As you know by now, I’ve taken the CoolPeopleCare.org Earth Hour to Earth Day Challenge.  In fact, I’ve written two posts that make it easy for everyone to participate. Each provides 26 things you can do every day in five minutes or less at your home and/or office to complete the challenge.  I wanted to make it even easier with your own downloadable EH2ED calendar, which includes all of the links from the posts.  Just check-off each day as you complete one of these easy green tasks.  You can even mix them up if you like.  And of course, please let me know of any five minute activities that I missed.

Download your calendar from this link: parkhowellcom-eh2ed-challenge-calendar

And please feel free to retweet it with your Twitter world. Thank you.


TweetIt from HubSpot

My 10 Favorite Ways to Save the World in Under Five Minutes

new-day-revolutionFrom the guys* who brought you the CoolPeopleCare.org site that makes sustainability easy, comes their first book “New Day Revolution, How to Save the World in 24 Hours.” It’s a fun, quick read. What I like most about it are the 100+ easy tips to living a greener, more stress free life.  Do one thing a day and you can make a big difference over time.

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.

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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.

TweetIt from HubSpot

GE’s “Scarecrow” Spot Shows they Have a Brain as Super Bowl’s Only Green Advertiser

General Electric stepped up as the only green advertiser for the ’09 Super Bowl. GE had two spots. The one I particularly liked featured their version of the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz singing, “If I Only Had a Brain,” while dancing atop power lines that makeup their “Smart Grid.”

Nice website goes with the campaign.

smart-grid

Well done, GE.