Well, they are, and they aren’t. Depending on the computer that you have, you might find that you can recycle the majority of its parts. Other models, however, are more difficult to recycle. E-waste, in fact, has become a serious concern. According to the United Nations, the world pitches between 20 and 50 million tons of electronic waste every year.

Before you start thinking of your laptop as the world’s savior from pollution, dig into the facts to find out what percentage of your computer is truly recyclable.

Does Your Battery’s Life Go On and On and On…?

Like most other rechargeable batteries, your laptop’s power source is recyclable. That means its life will go on and on, without leaking dangerous chemicals into a landfill. In fact, many states have established laws that require people to recycle their nickel cadmium, lead, and small, sealed lead acid batteries.

Want more good news? It’s extremely easy to recycle your laptop’s old battery. Call2Recycle has drop off locations throughout North America, and they don’t charge anything for the service. Just take your battery to the nearest drop off location, say so long, and wait to meet up with your old battery in another life.

Are Motherboards Kind to Mother Earth?

A good motherboard is essential to your laptop’s performance. But, what happens when the motherboard goes kaput? Motherboards contain precious metals, such as gold and copper, which refiners are more than happy to take off your hands. The question, though, is whether they will bother refining the rest of your motherboard’s materials.

Ideally, the recycler would salvage every piece of recyclable material in the motherboard. The reality, though, is that a lot of companies don’t do that. Instead, they crush the motherboard into smithereens, and then use a magnet to pull the valuable metals out. Some even melt the whole thing down (plastic, metal, and all), so that they can skim precious metals from the goop.

This essentially means that motherboards are highly recyclable. Whether or not they get recycled depends on you and the recycler you choose.

Ashes to Ashes, Plastic to Plastic

You might have purchased your current laptop because of its performance and price. Chances are, though, that you were somewhat swayed by its sense of style. A cool looking computer will hold your attention better than an ugly one.

Today’s laptop chassis are made from a variety of materials, including metals and plastics. Can you recycle them? Again, that largely depends on what type of product you have.

Metal chassis are almost always recyclable. If yours is made of aluminum, then you can just drop it off at any recycling plant. Alloys are often a little more complicated, so find an electronics recycler that will know the proper method for your specific type of metal.

It’s a little harder to determine whether plastic laptop chassis are recyclable. Apple and Dell use recyclable plastics, but that doesn’t mean that all manufacturers do. (Apple and Dell will also use old chassis to refurbish damaged computers). If you’re worried about your impact on the environment, then find out whether you can recycle the chassis before you make your next purchase.

The Future: Nothing but Green Fields and Blue Streams

It’s okay to get angry when you think about computer parts filling a landfill. Use that anger as motivation to let laptop manufacturers know you want a better option. In addition to putting your money where your conscience is by purchasing green laptops, you can encourage companies to build laptops that use 100% recyclable parts.

Impossible, you say? You’re obviously not a graduate student at Stanford University. A group of students there recently build a fully recyclable laptop. They call it the Bloom laptop.

Not only is the Bloom made of 100% recyclable parts, but the average user can take it apart in two minutes. That allows them to remove certain parts without chucking the whole computer. It’s very modular, so users can customize it to suit their specific needs.

You can learn more about the Bloom by watching this YouTube video. In it, Aaron Engle-Hall, the project’s manager, also explains that it is difficult to recycle many computer parts because they use so many different types of materials.

When you have plastics and various metals soldered together, it becomes nearly impossible to separate them for recycling. Engle-Hall’s team solved that problem, and they won the 2010 October Autodesk Inventor of the Month award for their efforts.

Recycle Your Entire Laptop Today

Of course, it will be years before the Bloom, or something like it, hits retail store shelves. In the meantime, you can recycle your entire laptop by passing it on to someone else. As long as your laptop still works, someone could use it.
Sure, it might not have the latest video processor and the speakers sound like the world’s grubbiest Grateful Dead bootleg, but there are plenty of people who would love to use it.

After removing all of your personal information from the laptop, you can donate it to your local thrift store. Organizations such as Computers with Causes and Recycles.org can also help you keep landfills less full and improve someone’s life by giving your old laptop to someone in need.

CONCLUSION

Even if your laptop has completely died, you can still find creative ways to use its individual components. Artists have made jewelry out of computer memory, keys, and circuit boards. You could even turn those old parts into new Christmas tree ornaments.

Get creative, and find unique ways to recycle parts so that they don’t end up in a landfill.

Image Credits:

http://www.battery-locator.com/images/COMPAQ-Presario-R3000-Battery.jpg

http://news.discovery.com/tech/2010/07/06/recycled-computer-278×225.jpg

Genetically modified organisms have been at the center of a lot of stormy debates for the past few decades. On the one hand, advocates say the genetic modification is one of the best ways to fight world hunger. As the human population is expected to reach seven billion this decade, malnutrition is a growing global problem.

However, transgenic crops and livestock are not the new Green Revolution. Industrialized farming has resulted in decreased biodiversity, increased use of pesticides, climate change, and polluted water supplies. The introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops will hardly alleviate these problems, and are more likely, according to some activists, to exacerbate them. In addition, GM crops are owned and patented by those who created them, like agri-tech giant Monsanto (once voted the most evil corporation in the world), who enforce their patents through legal action against any farmer they suspect of ‘biopiracy’.

Currently, the USDA and FDA does not require GM foods to be labeled. This list has been put together in the hopes that it will help concerned consumers avoid hidden GMOs.

Maize (Corn)

Image Source



Corn, soybeans, and cotton are the top three GM crops. Monsanto has two transgenic maize breeds: one of which has DNA from a pesticidal bacteria spliced into it, which makes it resistant to pests, and another that is resistant to the herbicide Roundup, a trademarked Monsanto brand. The herbicide-resistant plants allow farmers to spray their entire fields with Roundup without adversely affecting their crops. (And encouraging the growth of superweeds, but who’s keeping track?)

Nearly all of the corn grown in the US is genetically modified: in 2009, transgenic corn accounted for 86% of the total US crop, and 26% of all corn grown worldwide. Corn is used in a huge variety of products: aside from the obvious offenders like corn flakes, polenta, grits, and meal, corn is used to make a variety of starches and sugars that appear in processed food. GM corn is also used as livestock feed.
Roundup Ready crops have been found to contain residues of the deadly herbicide. Few studies have been done on the toxicity of GM maize, and concerned consumers are forced to wonder why the FDA is gambling with our health on untested crops. 


Soy

Image Source

Worldwide, soybeans are the most prevalent GM crop. 77% of the worldwide soy crop is genetically modified. In the US, the rate is closer to 91%.
Soy is found in almost every processed food, under various guises including: hydrogenated oils, lecithin, emulsifiers, tocopherol (a vitamin E supplement) and proteins. In addition, soy products are prevalent in more obvious forms like tofu, soy sauce, tempeh, and soy milk. This is bad news for those with a soy allergy, one of the most common food-based allergies.

Two different studies by biologists in the Russian Academy of Science, Alexey Surov and Irina Ermakova, showed that GM soy had some scary side effects on mammals, including low birth rates, high infant death rates, retarded growth, delayed sexual maturity, and high rates of sterility. In Surov’s study, there was even a high incidence of congenital birth defects among subsequent generations, all of whom were fed on a diet high in GM soy. 
 


Cotton

Image Source

Surprisingly, the third most prevalent GM crop in the world isn’t another grain, it’s cotton. Nearly half of all cotton grown worldwide is genetically engineered to be pest resistant. India has nearly 10 million hectares (about 38,600 square miles, slightly larger than the state of Maine) devoted to growing GM cotton.

Navdanya, an organization created by Dr. Vandana Shiva, carried out a study that showed Monsanto’s GM cotton crops degraded soil health, killing off endemic microbes and decreasing the overall fertility of the soil. In addition, and despite being engineered to resist pests, farmers have been forced to resort to heavy spraying after insects bred resistance to the BT strains spliced into GM cotton’s genetic structure.

Papaya

Image Source


 

Another rising GM crop, increasing numbers of GM papaya have been planted in response to the Papaya Ringspot Virus, which nearly halted Hawaiian papaya production in the 90’s. Since then, GM papayas account for about three quarters of Hawaii’s papaya crop. This is despite the fact that the papayas contain a known allergen. The EPA and FDA granted the allergen (a string of amino acids, to be precise, from the original ringspot virus) an “an exemption from the requirement of tolerance”, which translates to, in the words of Joe Cumin of the Institute of Science In Society, an exemption “ from safety assessment, based on the belief that the material was safe for consumption by humans and animals.”

Based on the success of the Hawaiian crop, several countries in SE Asia have been developing their own versions of transgenic papayas. None have yet been approved for unregulated growing or human consumption, but that hasn’t stopped them from cross contaminating orchards in Thailand. Just something to keep in mind the next time you order a smoothie. 


Canola

Image Source

Canola is a cultivar of the badly named rapeseed, grown principally in the US and Canada, which between them produce between 7 and 10 million tons of seed per year. The plant is grown principally for its oil, which is used for cooking and in other products such as newspaper inks, candles, industrial lubricants, and biofuels. The grist, a byproduct from oil production, is used as animal feed, particularly for pigs.

In the last few years, it has also become a weed. Last year, researchers in North Dakota found feral canola plants growing on roadsides and in ditches, sometimes far from any planted fields, where such an escape might be explained as an accident. As much as 86% of the plants tested were genetically modified. Moreover, some of the plants had interbred, resulting in plants with “stacked traits”.

The feral plants prove that GMOs are capable of competing in the wild. What happens when crops are modified to become hardier, or more resistant to drought or cold temperatures? Invasive and introduced species are already one of the leading causes of extinctions. Plants will inevitably escape their fields.

Monsanto’s response was typically blasé: after pooh-poohing the implications of their escaped plants interbreeding in the wild, they said, “It has never been Monsanto policy nor will it be to exercise patent rights where trace amounts of our patented seeds or traits are present in a farmer’s fields as a result of inadvertent means.”

Really? We beg to differ. 


Sugar Beets

Image Source

Sugar beets, as their name suggests, contain high levels of sucrose and are grown principally for sugar production. About 45% of the world’s sugar originates from their white, lumpy roots.

Monsanto introduced their patented herbicide-resistant sugar beets to the market in 2006, and by 2008, RoundupReady sugar beets accounted for 95% of the American crop. In January of 2008, a group including the Center for Food Safety, Organic Seed Alliance, Sierra Club, and High Mowing Seeds jointly filed suit against the USDA, claiming that the agency had deregulated production of the GMOs without exploring potential environmental impacts. In August of 2010, the judge found in favor of the plaintiffs, and effectively banned production of new plants.

The problem with this plan was that within four short years, Monsanto had killed off almost all competition, becoming the main supplier in the US by a long shot. The USDA defied the judge’s decision, and as of February of this year, is allowing farmers to plant the GM beets.

Alfalfa

Image Source

Alalfa is grown around the world, mostly as forage for dairy cows. It’s also used as bee pasture, and the shoots are consumed as table vegetables. Unlike most fodder plants, alfalfa is a perennial, and can provide a perpetual grazing ground for years. As a nitrogen-fixing plant, alfalfa can be used as a cover crop or as green manure on fields.

In 2005, Monsanto introduced its herbicide-resistant GM alfalfa. It was planted for two years before The Center for Food Safety and Geertson Seed Farm filed a lawsuit against the corporate giant. A judge ordered an injunction to keep farmers from planting the GM alfalfa, until the USDA issued a full Environmental Impact Statement. The Supreme Court later overturned the ban in favor of Monsanto, but the USDA was still forced to research the full possible effects of the GM crop before. More importantly, the judges agreed that cross-contamination of GM crops was a serious issue affecting farmers and consumers. 


Golden Rice

Image Source

Golden Rice is the poster child for the GM foods movement. Created by a Ingo Potrykus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Peter Beyer of the University of Freiburg in Germany, Golden Rice is a cultivar of white Asian rice, modified to have more vitamin A. It was designed and is marketed as a humanitarian tool, created to combat vitamin A deficiencies in developing countries.

Except it doesn’t. For one thing, the current amount of vitamin A in Golden Rice will not actually alleviate the widespread deficiency that’s endemic to poverty-stricken areas. Secondly, as activist Vandana Shiva points out: “The reason there is vitamin A deficiency in India, in spite of the rich biodiversity and an indigenous knowledge base in India, is because the Green Revolution technologies wiped out biodiversity by converting mixed cropping systems to monocultures of wheat and rice, and by spreading the use of herbicides which destroy field greens.”

Malnutrition is not just a matter of food: it’s a problem with roots in poverty, lack of education, and social unrest. Genetic modification of crops is not the answer. 
 


Salmon

Image Source

Remember the rumor that KFC’s name change was spawned by their use of mutant Frankenstein chickens? While that may have just been an urban legend, transgenic livestock is definitely on its way to supermarket shelves.

The closest to getting approval is the AquaAdvantage® salmon, which has been genetically engineered to grow to market size in half the time it normally takes. Recently, the company behind the GM salmon applied to the USDA for the fish to be deregulated, making them available for commercial farming. The company, the Massachussets-based AquaBounty, has guaranteed that there is minimal chances of the fish escaping into the wild, and — because the fish are effectively sterile — almost none of them interbreeding with wild salmon populations.

Consumer groups, animal welfare organizations, environmentalists, and lawmakers have already formed a coalition to fight against the genetically engineered fish, citing concerns for consumers’ health, the environment, and wild salmon populations. There are currently two bipartisan bills being introduced in Congress. Senator Patty Murray, a democrat from Washington state who is cosponsoring the bill, said, “I do not want to see FDA rush through a rule that can undermine our economy and this important resource for Washington state – and actually for the world – without very thoughtful, smart decisions.” 


Pigs

Image Source

The genetics of livestock and other animals have already been altered in efforts to produce organs for human transplants. More recently, Canadian scientists have created a more environmentally friendly pig.

The Enviropigs, as they’ve come to be called, have had DNA from mice and E. coli bacteria spliced into their genes. The animals produce less polluting phosphorus in their manure, which makes it safer to use as a fertilizer. Phosphorus is responsible for creating algal blooms that create vast “dead zones” in bodies of water that are void of life.

However, it’s not the pig’s genetics that’s the real problem, here. It’s commercial hog farming. Raising thousands of animals in small spaces is never going to be environmentally friendly, Enviropigs are just another example of biotechnology trying to fix the symptoms instead of the cause.

Andrew Kimbrell, the director of the Center for Food Safety, summed it up nicely: “It’s a completely novel cell invasion technology where we are crossing the boundaries of nature as no other generation has before. And the question is whether that is safe, whether that is something that we should be doing ethically, those are very serious questions that we as a society need to be asking.”

In a blow to environmentalists, California voted down a ban on single-use plastic grocery and pharmacy bags starting in 2012, followed by convenience and liquor store bags in 2013. The move would have stopped Californians from using roughly 19 billion bags per year. From the CS Monitor:

The plastics industry is working hard to defeat the measure. “This bill is bad for the economy and bad for the environment,” says Keith Christman, managing director of plastic markets at the American Chemistry Council (ACC), which is heading the opposition.

The loss-of-jobs complaint is offset by the opportunity for small companies to create reusable bags, says Environmental Defense Fund senior analyst Wade Crowfoot. Christman counters that the majority of reusable bags are already made more cheaply elsewhere, whereas plastic bags are made in the US.

I have no sympathy for the industry on this one. According to this source, plastic bags make up 10% of the debris that washes up on the US coastline. They kill 200 different kinds of species, thanks to ingestion and suffocation. They use oil: One estimate says China will save 37 million barrels of oil a year by banning free plastic bags. Another, by the Australian government, says that “The amount of petroleum used to make a plastic bag would drive a car about 11 metres.” Polyethylene, from which the bags are produced, is a suspected carcinogen. Too boot, plastic bags are terribly inefficient to recycle.

That’s a heck of an impact for a product that’s easy to replace with a reusable alternative. Still, California lawmakers concluded the ban would infringe on personal choice (ABC):

California lawmakers rejected a bill late Tuesday night that would have made the state the first in the nation to ban all plastic shopping bags. Opponents of the bill argued that the ban went too far to regulate personal choice. Republicans and some Democrats opposed the bill, saying it would have added an extra financial burden on consumers and businesses already facing tough times.

Keith Christman of the American Chemistry Council said that more than 500 organizations and companies were against the ban. He said groups were concerned about the cost the ban on plastic bags would put on working families, specifically $1 billion per year to buy paper bags.

I’m not sure these guys give a flying squirrel about the working poor, but nice rhetoric, I guess. This reminds me of something I heard on a David Cross comedy routine: “Americans have a long and proud history of voting against their own best interests.” Here we go again.

President Obama will sign a new homebuyer tax credit extension today. The tax credit will now run until September 30 for those who already have a home under contract. It doesn’t apply to people who are still shopping for homes. The New York Times has more:

Congress has sent President Obama a plan to give home buyers an extra three months to qualify for up t0 $8,000 in federal tax credits. Buyers who already have signed contracts will now have until Sept. 30 to complete their purchases. Under the current terms, buyers had until April 30 to get a signed sales contract and until June 30 to complete the sale. The House approved the measure on Tuesday. Legislation in the Senate was approved Wednesday night by unanimous consent.

What will the power plants of the future look like? The same old coal chuggers, but with carbon sequestration units attached? Pebble bed nuclear reactors? Acres of windmill generators?

Mantra Energy has something different in mind. Their patented technology, electro-reduction of carbon dioxide (ERC), allows factories to capture carbon dioxide. Once captured, the carbon combines with water to produce chemicals that energy plants can sell for profit.

If Mantra succeeds, the energy industry will go hybrid in more than one way.

Currently, factories can produce formate and formic acid using Mantra technology, but the company has more chemicals on the horizon. By innovating a vertical market, Mantra hopes to make carbon capture pay off in a new way.

We spoke with John Russell, Mantra’s VP of Technology Evaluation, to learn more about Mantra’s technology, how big energy companies will scale carbon capture, and what the competition looks like in the evolving carbon capture space.

BP: I’ve read that carbon capture sequestration (CCS) actually increases the cost of energy from a power plant. Could you tell me a little bit about that?

The first answer is yes, carbon dioxide is a major cost of CCS. The numbers from IEA (International Energy Association) and some of the major European engineering firms indicate that utilities will have to make massive capital investments to meet the needs of CCS, because a lot of power goes into it. Operating costs will be up, and they estimate that the cost of power to consumers will go up by 30%.

We don’t expect the cost of carbon capture to be a large part of our ERC system. ERC is not carbon capture, it is a different technology. Mantra is developing new technology in which it expects to capture CO2 at minimal cost. We are predicting for ourselves, for our own technology, that carbon capture will be a modest cost.

Image: adamsofen/Flickr

BP: Who are you ultimately planning on selling most of your ERC systems to?

That’s a fairly profound question. The answer comes in bits of pieces.

Initially, our ERC systems will go into demonstration projects, into smaller projects. These will be installed around the world as our technology gets known and as carbon reduction, carbon recycling, starts to bite.

These customers are going to be looking to the future. They’re not interested specifically in a demonstration, but in where that demonstration can end up. They’re going to be looking to build an ERC plant incrementally. They are in the process of arranging government support and internal finance, looking at what competitors are doing. As we see it, each demo will mark the very high probability of a future large sale.

The small commercial systems will follow. These are, say, 100 tons/day of formic acid production. These small commercial systems will provide the proof of the practicality and the economics of ERC. They will be designed to impress the general public, and government regulators, and customers will see that return on their investment.

This is very very very different from CCS, which is literally money down the hole.

Now, we move on to the large systems, a little further into the future. We expect to be building systems of 500 tons a day and larger as customers demand.

The decisionmaking process at this point gets political and economic.

Major emitters, we’re talking about the major emitters around the world, will emit depending on complex factors, like the regulatory climate that they see upcoming. They have to read the political climate and where it’s going.

They will be looking at the availability of federal subsidies and where they’re going. Governments will, I think, everywhere they’re serious, put wheels under it by arranging a subsidy of some sort. And they’ll also be calculating, company by company, what sort of economic return they can receive for themselves using the ERC system. They’ll also be looking over their shoulders at the pioneers, and asking themselves how they fare.

Once you get out that far, there are going to be very few companies and very few industries in the world that are going to be outside the market for Mantra’s ERC. Anywhere you’ve got a major emitter, it’s hard to imagine they’re not going to be under the kind of political and growing economic pressure that you already see in places like Europe. I think the industry leaders, the people to first adopt our technology, however, will tend to be found in the EU and the US.

Image: rady one/Flickr

BP: Since, ultimately, the volume of units that you sell has a lot to do with what governments and regulators want, are you doing anything to build connections with governments?

We’re a very small company. We’re a very new company. We don’t have those sorts of high level contacts today. We clearly understand that.

The way we’re going around that is to develop relationships with major companies who have those sorts of talents (Ed.: Mantra has already developed a relationship with 3M).

Think of the big companies in the US. They don’t get out of bed in the morning without thinking “how are we with Washington today?” We will work with companies like that.

BP: What makes you better than the competition?

Look at what’s been happening recently. The cost of energy has gone up the last two years. Most companies who have been thinking about this are already long down the road of saving energy and becoming more efficient. There are either only minor efficiencies left to get, or more efficiency will come to them at greater and greater cost.

Now, in terms of direct competition, the most obvious competitor we’ve got is CCS. Compared to ERC, we are profitable as compared to costly. We put out valuable products, CCS doesn’t. ERC is safe and immediately controllable; CCS, eh, there are questions about that.

ERC can be started small, really small, whereas CCS, logically, it has to be done big. By European projections, CCS costs a billion dollars and above—well above. Probably a billion and a half above based on what the EU is projecting. That’s a pricey first step.

ERC is an established industrial process. It’s based on electrochemistry. There’s nothing unknown about electrochemistry, other then of course the details of what we do. You can go out, get authorization for it, and build a plant today.

For CCS, there isn’t a legal and regulatory structure written for it, as far as I understand, anywhere in the world today. They’re working towards it, and it’s still open there are questions.

There are some parts of the world, and I name India and Scotland here, that are convinced that CCS is not practical.

There are other examples of carbon recycling. Maybe the best known one today would be Calera. It’s an interesting technology, but as far as I can see, it’s fixed. It makes one product.

The ERC system is capable of development. Because it’s an electrochemical basis, more can be done with it. Eventually, we’ll make a number of products. It’s a more broadly capable platform, if you will. We forecast that we’ll be more broadly profitable in the long run.

BP: The concept of energy companies selling a lot of chemicals on the side is new to me. Are setting up a new market model?

It’s new. If you go to the standard power plant, the standard utility, you’ll find big piles of coal and they make power. They sell electrical energy. They pretty well universally stick to their knitting. They’ve got no reason to do other complex things. They focus.

Now, there’s a real revolution having to go on here. It is on each of the major emitters, like power utilities. They now have to think beyond their core business, and they have to think about what they’re going to do with regards to CO2. They can either pay a massive amount of money into a project like CCS, or they can look for some other way to do it.

If they’re offered an approach that is more economical, that meets their requirement of doing something about emissions and also makes them money, we feel that they’ll be attracted to that. That puts them into a chemicals industry, into producing formic acid.

We will try to make it as painless as possible for them by arranging off-take licenses. They’ll make chemicals, but they don’t have to have a sales group go out and sell them. They don’t have to worry about what the market’s doing today in terms of what they’re making. There’s a group arriving at the door to take it away for them and paying them a fixed price.

But it is a new business model, if you will.

BP: That’s certainly an interesting proposition.

It’s an interesting idea. If you look down into it, my concept of the revolution that’s happening is that the last big shift in the handling of money was back in the 16th century, when we discovered double-entry bookkeeping. I believe it was a monk who discovered that. Today, we’ve always had two columns. Now we’ve got a third column. It reads carbon.

That’s a big shift in the way we think about things. When the board meets in mega-industry, it’s no longer simply how much, what return. The question attached to it is what emissions, and what do we do about it?

Learn more about Mantra Energy at their website, MantraEnergy.com.

The Kelley Blue Book has released this year’s list of top 10 green cars. Each of the cars that KBB chose for its list have “fuel economy and CO2 emissions superior to the bulk of vehicles in its class.” This isn’t a list of overall most efficient cars, but a diverse list of the most efficient cars in several classes. Also, each car must “provide all the safety, creature comforts and driving enjoyment that would make it pleasant to own.”

Here’s the list:

10. 2010 Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid (22 mpg; that’s 6 mpg more than a conventional SUV of its size)

9. 2010 Toyota Highlander Hybrid (26 mpg)

8. 2010 BMW 335d (27 mpg)

7. 2010 Honda Fit (31 mpg)

6. 2010 Ford Escape Hybrid (32 mpg)

5. 2010 MINI Cooper (32 mpg)

4. 2010 Volkswagen Golf TDI (34 mpg)

3. 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid (39 mpg)

2. 2010 Honda Insight (41 mpg)

1. 2010 Toyota Prius (50 mpg)

Read more here.

This relatively new behavior has some big corporations in a tizzy. Putting authentically nontoxic products on the market takes a lot of time and money. Those factors don’t cozy up with short-term gains, so many big companies are turning to greenwashing for a quick fix. They lure conscious consumers into a false sense of eco-security with leafy ads and green soundbytes. When it comes to backing up their claims, however, these companies prefer chicanery over hard facts.

We dug up 25 of the products most prone to greenwashing attempts. If you see these “green” products on the shelves, take heed. That green tint may have more to do with dollars than chlorophyll.

25. Air Travel

What airlines lack in leg room, they make up for in windbag rhetoric. EasyJet continues with their brazen claims that traveling on an easyJet plane is better for the environment than driving a hybrid car. And the makers of Airbus have been marketing themselves as a green industry leader, with advertisements showing jets filled with natural landscapes and flying in clear blue skies.

In 2005, British Airways boldly moved to offset its emissions. The project failed after BA admitted to offsetting a shaming total of 3,000 tons of emissions–less than 0.01% of its 27 million tons of emissions in that same two-year window, and substantially less than the carbon dispersed by a single day of the BA carrier flights between London and New York.

24. Toys

Image: Non-Toxic Tots

Parents are willing to spend more on items that they feel will keep lead paint and cadmium out of their child’s toy box. Widespread toy recalls in Europe and the U.S. have also pushed toymakers into greening their operations.

Toy giant Toys ‘R’ Us recently tried to cash in on increased awareness thing without actually detoxing their toys. They invited customers to buy Toys ‘R’ Us-branded reusable shopping bags. They also changed their signature “R” to include a recycle symbol.

While this may keep a plastic bag or two out of the landfill, a store-branded reusable bag isn’t what parents are looking for. They want toys that won’t poison their kids, harm the workers making them, or further damage the planet.

23. Software

IT spending isn’t what it was 10 years ago. As a result, many software vendors are trying on a coat of green to bolster their reputations. Big companies like Microsoft and Oracle are releasing products to help oil, gas, and utilities companies cut power usage and estimate emissions.

Last year, Microsoft added some minor power-saving features to its new Windows 7, including a low-light setting for your monitor. At the same time, the company pushed users to buy a new computer to run Windows 7. It didn’t hurt that it’s hard to install Windows 7 on your existing machine. No wonder Windows 7 didn’t win Microsoft any green awards.

22. Meat

Lots of companies advertise their meat as “wholesome,” “premium quality,” and “all natural.” Despite these labels, they source their meat from factory farms, feed their animals genetically modified (GMO) corn, and inject them with saltwater for a plumping effect.

Tyson, for example, got busted for slapping an “all natural” label on its chickens, even though they’re treated with antibiotics and fed GMO corn.

Hormel, meanwhile, has reduced more than 5 million pounds of packaging from its products and promotes “all natural ingredients” in its Natural Choice deli meats. But Hormel is not doing the real ecological work by reducing the enormous environmental footprint of the factory farms where its meat is sourced.

21. Personal Care and Beauty

Image: Eliazar/Flickr

Natural shampoos and conditioners are a multi-million dollar market, but just how “natural” are they? Can they hold up to their claims for being good for your lovely locks and for the planet?

Take Clairol’s Herbal Essences. It has claimed a “truly organic experience” in the past. But lauryl sulfate, propylene glycol and D&C red no. 33 aren’t really that organic. For most women, it takes a little more than dermatitis-causing synthetic fragrances to generate shouts of “Yes! Yes! Yes!” while lathering up in a steamy shower.

20. Home Appliances

Image: Stuart Spivack/Flickr

Today, most EnergyStar-rated appliances actually will save you money and carbon. But that doesn’t stop manufacturers from blowing a little more hot air into your dishwasher and dryer. As with many greenwashing campaigns, the suspicion occurs in the omission.

In a recent campaign, GE claimed that they can reduce a family’s energy use and greenhouse gas emissions through GE technologies and household appliances. For some reason, GE didn’t share how much their appliances contribute to reducing monthly energy costs per home, or how many of their appliances are needed to see a measurable reduction. And while the image of a tree hugging a house in their commercial plays into a consumer’s eco-conscience, that tree isn’t saying if GE’s manufacturing operations are helping to deliver a carbon-neutralized appliance to your home.

19. Breakfast Cereals

The breakfast industry’s vocabulary includes flakes, tigers, loops, and leprechauns. Smoke and mirrors fit well into that kind of habitat. Cereal boxes are tattooed with claims of vitamins, antioxidants and fiber. But those Vitamin C-packed berries may also contain pesticide residue. Cereal maker Kraft, for example, produces a Natural Advantage line of cereal that includes “antioxidants” and “natural fiber.” Yet the company uses genetically modified corn, potatoes, and soy in its morning treats, as well as milk products from rBGH (growth hormone)-treated cows.

18. Tampons and Sanitary Pads

Tampons without applicators, like those sold by o.b., claim to save up to one pound of landfill waste per woman, per year by foregoing applicators. But they don’t mention the tons of herbicides, insecticides, fertilizers, fungicides, and other chemicals used to produce cotton crops in the United States. Sorry o.b., but there is nothing green about chemicals that cause cancer, birth defects or wildlife toxicity. Factor in the applicator, and you have all those bloated landfills, too.

Sanitary pads and many brand-name tampon applicators contain petroleum-based plastics that are not biodegradable. These generally end up in the landfill. How’s that for a monthly contribution?

17. Dairy

Dairy products fall victim to the “all-natural” curse. Those “natural” products may not contain pesticides, but the cows behind them may well dine on pesticide-laden, genetically modified crud for feed.

One of the most famous cases of dairy greenwashing involves Dean Foods, the country’s largest dairy company. It pulled green bait-and-switch with its Silk and Horizon-brand products. Dean downgraded several well-established Horizon products from organic to “natural,” an unregulated, relatively meaningless term. Dean didn’t inform major retailers of the switch. Instead, like a green ninja, they stealthily removed the word “organic” from the packaging without making any other changes, prompting national retailers like Target, to mislabel non-organic dairy products as organic. Habituated consumers continued to pay extra for products that used to be organic.

16. Fur

Image by F. Bjørnstad

In a bold new ad campaign, the Fur Council of Canada (FCC) invites each of us to be environmental activists by—wait for it—buying more fur. The FCC is hoping that you will buy into their feel-good image that the fur industry is a vital part of the livelihood of rural families and an environmental protector. Somehow, you can make an “ecological choice in harmony with nature” by wearing an animal taken from the local ecosystem on your epidermis. Just put on blinders when you pass the fur farm where the animal was probably raised.

15. Hotels

Image: Lisa Brewster/Flickr

New York environmentalist Jay Westerveld first coined the term greenwashing after discovering some disingenuous hotel cost-cutting methods in 1986. The hotel industry had a common practice of placing green placards in each room to promote the reuse of towels. This would purportedly help the hotel save water and to consequently “save the environment.” Westerveld found that despite their promises, little effort had been put toward recycling by these offending hotels.

The trend is bigger than just towels. If you are an eco-tourist willing to pay for environmentally responsible accommodations, you may not be getting what you paid for. A recent independent study by TerraChoice Environmental Marketing found that 99% of all products and hotel services that are being labeled as “green” (by hotels themselves) do not live up to their claims. These so-called eco-hotels promise carbon-neutral practices and investment in carbon offsets. In reality, they only offset a fraction of their overall energy usage. Most hotels are looking for easy, inexpensive ways to add some green cred to their name, but do not pass that savings on to their guests, or reinvest in advancing their green practices often enough.

14. Household Cleaning Products

After groceries, household products are what most Americans are willing to pay a little more for if they’re both family-friendly and environmentally safe. Some manufacturers want to meet consumers halfway by selling products that are about 50% green.

Clorox, for example, is using common greenwashing images of a leafy forest to cash in on the green revolution and to promote their Green Works Cleaning Wipes. They advertise the wipes as being biodegradable, but what about the chemicals in the wipes, how well do they break down in the environment? And the plastic container that these wipes are packaged in is definitely not biodegradable.

13. Snacks

The claim of “all natural” enters the ring once again with snacks. Take Cheetos. They hope you’ll forget their signature day-glo orange puffs in favor of a high-fat, low-nutrient “natural” alternative containing high-fructose corn syrup, oil, and corn from genetically modified sources.

Then there’s Sunchips, which emphasizes its connection with its namesake by claiming that Sunchips from California are made with solar energy. The claim doesn’t mention, however, how much of the manufacturing energy used to the make the chips is offset by solar.

Sunchips and Cheetos parent company PepsiCo is indeed making slow inroads towards more sustainable snack production, but for now, the company’s greenwashing exceeds its implementation.

12. Disposable Diapers

Landfills are stuffed with disposable diapers. But that doesn’t prevent disposable diaper companies from trying out a good greenwash.

Huggies’ Pure and Natural line goes invites consumers to discover the “pure bliss of a diaper that includes gentle, natural materials.” But parents may be too sleep-deprived to see what’s lurking beyond the leaves and smiling baby on the package. Although organic cotton is “included” in the outer cover, the actual organic content remains a mystery. Also, Kimberly Clark won’t reveal whether the cotton is certified organic. For inexplicable reasons, the diapers also don’t include organic cotton on the inside surface of the diaper, which actually touches the baby’s skin. And while we are at it, what are the inner lining and core materials sourced from?

Huggies also wraps their Pure and Natural line in packaging boasting a laughable content of 20% post-consumer materials. True eco-companies are going big by using 100% and using unbleached cotton in their baby products. Huggies also does not sell a single biodegradable diaper.

Huggies might be the one dropping a load with these “pure and natural” diapers.

11. Paper Products

Image: D Sharon Pruitt/Flickr

What we once called “paper plates,” and avoided due to the fact that they were single use and going into the landfill, are now being promoted as green alternatives by some companies. GreenGlobe calls its land-fillers “eco-friendly biodegradable tableware.” GG’s website smacks of all things good and green in this world: their logo is green, their name is green, and their homepage images are of green mountains, fields and a few rainbows for good measure. Even if their products are as green as they say they are, the point remains that these plates are still single-use, disposable items just like those old, flimsy paper plates that left you wearing your meal on your lap.

10. Pet Food

Image: Purrs and Paws of A.R.A.S./Flickr

Shoppers buying organics for themselves are looking to feed Fido some of the same. But it’s not just the eco-minded consumer seeking out natural pet foods. Many mainstream consumers went searching after pets were left sick and dying from kibble manufactured in China. The pet food tested positive for both melamine and cyanuric acid, which was later found out to have been added as cost-saving bulking agents.

Some companies are responding to that demand with a coat of green sheen. Iams, for example, tests on animals. Many also promote their pet foods with meaningless claims of being “all-natural” and “healthy” while incorporating feed-lot meats and genetically modified grain. Buyer beware.

9. Laundry Detergents

Image: Elmada/Flickr

How often have you seen images of freshly washed clothes waving in the sunshine, or a mountain stream following past pristine forests in a detergent commercial? Purex Mountain Breeze commercials feature just that, but also contain endocrine-disrupting synthetic fragrances and chemical ingredients like Benzenesulfonic acid, C10-C16-alkyl derivatives and Alcohols, C12-16, and ethoxylated (Isureth-4).

The Tide brand takes a different approach to greenwashing. Tide High Efficiency (HE) detergent is a highly concentrated cleanser that lives in a smaller bottle than the rest of P&G’s detergents. The bottle contains less plastic, and the liquid contains less water, making HE a relatively eco-sound choice. You’d think P&G would do the same with all of its other detergents, but it doesn’t. In fact, P&G’s Ariel washing power and liquid detergent is one P&G product that is banned in the USA due its historically high phosphorus (brightener) content. This detergent also contains benzene-based brighteners, which are classified as “toxic to not harmful” (i.e. they can be toxic) to fish, algae and crustaceans.

P&G continues to attempt a “green perception shift” with PUR, its global brand of water filter, through unproven statements about how their PUR products actually create safer drinking water sources and “help the environment.” So why isn’t P&G making at least one 100% biodegradable detergent as part of their commitment to clean water?

8. Mattresses

Image: Evil Erin/Flickr

The mattress industry is filled with confusing terms like “eco-friendly,” “natural” and “organic.” One company even claims that on their mattresses, you “sleep closer to nature.” Yet the production history of most mattresses is less about counting sheep and more like the Silence of the Lambs.

Chemical-free mattresses might be a pipe dream, since the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission instituted the national open-flame mattress flammability standard that went into effect in 2007. By law, you have to sleep on something flame retardant. Most companies accomplish this with chemicals, though some use rayon-based fiber pads as a flame barrier.

The chemistry doesn’t end there. Some companies use cotton, soy and bamboo-based faoms in their “green” mattress lines. Cotton, however, is the world’s most pesticide-intensive crop. It also requires heavy irrigation, taxing local water supplies. Textiles such as rayon and bamboo, while created from renewable resources, are pulped and imbued with hazardous chemicals that include caustic soda and sulphuric acid. The process impacts the sensitive regions where these trees and grasses are harvested, not to mention the workers exposed to those substances.

7. Biofuel

Image: Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz

The pursuit of alternative fuel choices is a priority for countries worldwide. Until then, we have pat-on-back fuels like ethanol to waste our time and money on. Ethanol truly sucks, but it goes with the American corn subsidies like peanut butter and jelly, which is why it is being promoted over other higher-yielding and truly sustainable fuel sources.

6. Cars

Image: Ecohuddle

You’ve seen the ads. Cars parked in green, foresty settings, as though they grew from the forest floor. SUVs rolling down a country road as fields of happy sunflowers crane their slender necks for a better view.

GM one example of a company that is proud to be green(washed). Its “Gas-friendly to Gas-free” campaign features a 2010 Yukon Denali Hybrid that tops out at a meager 21 mpg. Moreover, super-efficient vehicles represent a small percentage of GM’s yearly production, while they still engage heavily in the production of gas-guzzling cars and trucks. GM’s green marketing fails to note that the company currently produces fifty-one models that get less than 30 mpg, including thirty-five that get less than 20 mpg.

5. Gas

Energy companies are some of the worst offenders in the green sheen game. BP’s redesigned logo is one notorious example. The green stylized flower suggests that BP is a company that is both environmentally friendly and responsible.

Sadly, the only thing green about BP is their BS. Even as they claim to be concerned about emissions—they speak frequently about their efforts to develop “clean energy” sources–they continue to pull out of renewable research, even their own previous investments in renewable energy.

4. Soft Drinks

Soft drink production uses an enormous amount of water, and leaves behind tons of waste. Coca-Cola knows this. Its new “going-green” features stylish green cans and highlights the company’s water conservation efforts. Coca Cola has partnered with WWF to preserve seven of the world’s major rivers. It is also helping conservation projects in water-stressed areas throughout the world. Oddly, Coca Cola fails to mention is how these sensitive water sources became stressed in the first place. Hint: it rhymes with “joke.”

It takes about 2.5 liters of water to produce just one liter of product at Coke’s bottling plants. Coca-Cola sells 1.5 billion beverages a day in over 200 countries. In 2006, Coca-Cola and its bottlers used 80 billion gallons (290 billion liters) of water to produce beverages — equivalent to one-fifth of the daily water usage of the U.S. Approximately 40% of that went into producing their popular drinks like Coke, Sprite and Fanta, while the other 60% was consumed by the firm’s supply chain and the production of ingredients, including the water-intensive process of growing sugar and corn for corn syrup.

We haven’t begun to mention the ungodly amounts of plastic waste the company’s plastic bottles produce. Try harder, Coke.

3. Bottled Water

More than 9 billion gallons of water made it into little plastic bottles in 2007, dousing providers with almost $12 billion in revenues. Industry giants like Nestlé and Fiji, are lining up for a fresh coat of green to stay in the eco-minded dollar game. Nestlé’s repeated claims that “bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world” have garnered complaints filed under the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards by the Friends of the Earth Canada, the Polaris Institute and Ecojustice.

FIJI water, the most-imported brand in America, deserves a Shady Water Company award. For one, the island of Fiji’s military junta protects the brand at the expense of Fijian citizens. Most people in Fiji don’t have safe drinking water, thanks to FIJI’s habit of exporting it. Typhoid outbreaks are common on the island. The company uses plastic made in Chinese diesel-powered plants to produce its thick rectangular bottles.

Yet Americans–including celebrities and Barack Obama–continue to guzzle the stuff, thanks in part to pretty packaging and a $5 million “Fiji Green” marketing campaign.

Um, FIJI and Nestle? Your plastic is showing.

2. Clothes

Image: VisitSweden/Flickr

We could write a book about greenwashing in the clothing industry, but we’ll stick with three prominent examples:

1. Back in 2002, Cargill, the world’s biggest producer of corn, announced a revolutionary new fleece material made from corn sugar, not the traditional petroleum. The catch: Cargill, which produces genetically modified corn, makes the fleece out of its own frankenfood crops. No wonder it touted the new fleece as a “green” alternative—it had money written all over it. Organic clothing retailer Patagonia violently pulled out of a partnership with Cargill after finding out about its affinity with woven mutant corn.

2. In an unrelated clothing coup last year, the FTC charged bamboo clothing manufacturers with making false green claims. The manufacturers advertised their rayon clothing as “bamboo fiber” clothing (rayon consists of fibers processed with toxic carbon disulfide. It is bamboo fiber’s drug-addled step-cousin). They also made suspicious claims about manufacturing their clothing “using an environmentally friendly process that retains the natural antimicrobial properties of the bamboo plant and (being) biodegradable,” according to the FTC.

3. Also in 2009, Banana Republic launched an “It’s Easy Being Green” promotion that requires using their reusable bag to get 10 percent off your purchases. Reusable shopping bags are green, yes? Not always so, and especially not when Banana Republic is manufacturing thousands of bags made from conventional cotton that takes tons of pesticides to produce. BR also required consumers to buy a new bag to be part of the promotion, denying smart eco-minded shoppers who brought their own.

1. Coal

The term “clean coal” is more of a collective guilt assuager than an environmental fact. Coal is not sustainable. The burning of coal emits millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. Yet it’s abundant, the infrastructure is there, and energy companies continue to profit off it, painting pastoral scenes on their smokestacks for good measure.

Fact is, there’s nothing clean or “new” about coal. Continuing to promote coal as a clean energy source is contemptible when you compare it with wind, solar, water, and hydrogen power methods. Coal needs to be put out pasture–maybe one of those sunny pastures featured in GM’s greenwashed SUV ads.

Cash for Caulkers, a new government incentive program, will offer homeowners a 50% rebate on weatherization projects. CNNMoney has more on the program:

The program contains two parts: money for homeowners for efficiency projects, and money for companies in the renewable energy and efficiency space. The plan will likely create a new program where private contractors conduct home energy audits, buy the necessary gear and install it. Big-ticket items like air conditioners, heating systems, washing machines, refrigerators, windows and insulation would likely be covered.

The $4 billion from the original bill has funded about $40 billion in loans, said the staffer on the Senate Energy Committee. Meanwhile, firms are hoping for another $4 billion in loan guarantees, since they have another $40 billion worth of projects that need funding.

Energy-efficient homes help reduce aggregate national energy use. Ideally, we won’t import as much fuel, contribute to a reduction in carbon, and have more money in our pockets every month. Contractors will experience a temporary surge in business.

But I’m dubious. Here are my reasons:

1) When the government drives consumer purchasing incentives, they don’t always work. Did Cash for Clunkers work? Not really, seen this way. Could the government be putting its budget into something more effective and efficient than this, or benefit populations in more dire need?

2) If loans aren’t being offered, how will consumers come up with thousands of dollars in cash to pay their half? Most people don’t have a few thousand to contribute to weatherization, unless they were planning it anyway.

3) It’s easy to commit fraud under the catch-all phrase “weatherization.” Contractors can go in and say anything is weatherization, even if it doesn’t fit the government’s criteria. So can homeowners.

4) It would be more effective to weatherize commercial and government buildings, too. This was something Bill Clinton proposed, but it didn’t go through. If Cash for Caulker’s main focus is to reduce carbon emissions, are homeowners really the best group to target? If CforC’s main focus is to stimulate the economy, how much stimulus will really occur long-term, since not every homeowner will sign up, and contractors will only experience a temporary surge in business?

I hope that the Cash for Caulkers experiment works. I can see it working well in a government with slightly higher tax rates, like Canada, because you know where the funds are coming from. But Obama keeps adding to our massive debt without coming up with a clear-cut public plan to address it.

He plans raise taxes on the wealthy, the very same population who most likely have the cash sitting around to invest in weatherization projects. Is he making Main Street-friendly moves like Cash for Caulkers now, so that he can reassure people that the government helped them out when tax hike time comes?

In the past, it was easy. Corporations made money. Nonprofits helped the world. If a corporation wanted to help the world, it would donate to a nonprofit, or set up its own foundation.

That model is changing. Social ventures, a new kind of for- and nonprofit hybrid, are easing their way into the business world. From Good Capital, a socially responsible investment firm, to Google.org, which dedicates resources to helping urgent world problems, social ventures are proliferating throughout the country.

According to Andrew Greenblatt, NYU professor and Director of Products and Innovation at Criterion Ventures, the current generation of graduating college students will ensure that this trend becomes a fundamental part of our economy. To help today’s entrepreneurs navigate the confusing world of establishing a social enterprise, Greenblatt helps run Criterion’s Structure Labs, the country’s only one-day workshop on launching a social venture.

Business Pundit caught up with Greenblatt to discuss setting up hybrid ventures, where the movement is going, and how it will change the economy.

BP: Can you tell me more about the history behind Structure Labs? How did you guys come up with the idea?

AG: Criterion Ventures is a consultancy that launches social ventures, specifically with an eye towards things that have broader social impact. We also launch our own ideas. We identify some kind of need in society, find a sustainable way to address that need, and then launch a venture around it. We’re social entrepreneurs for hire.

Through this work, we’ve found out more about the problems faced by social entrepreneurs. Legal structures are an issue that came up over and over again. You’re either a for-profit, and your goal is to maximize profit. Or you’re a nonprofit charity, and your goal is to maximize making a better world.

Now we have all these blended, multiple bottom-line ventures coming together. Legal structures haven’t kept up. If you just want to maximize profit, there’s one structure. If you want to go out and have people give you money and use that money to do good in the world, there’s a different structure.

When you want to start blending your purposes, it becomes harder. So we created this 5-hour workshop that helps people understand what their options are, and what the advantages and disadvantages of all the options are. It’s fun and engaging. People can take their own projects to the workshop and work with their own real-life We got a grant from the Packard foundation, and that helped us create this, and now we are going around the country and offering the workshop, and that is really cool.

BP: What is a multiple bottom line?

AG: A single bottom line is profit. A second bottom line takes into account other stakeholders in the company. That could be the workers, so people could say that Costco cares about its workers, gives them health benefits, etc.

It could be their community, it could be their suppliers. For example, Ben and Jerry’s would hit cream crises (an oversupply of cream made prices collapse). When one of those cycles hit, and the price of cream went below the cost of maintaining the farms, then Ben & Jerry’s continued to pay the previous year’s to support the family famers.

The third bottom line is the environment. For example, is our carbon footprint growing or shrinking? Are we putting more toxic waste into the world, or less? That kind of stuff.

One beautiful thing about free-market capitalism is that there’s a really simple universal measure of success, and that’s profitability. When you start to add these other things–What does it mean to take good care of your workers? What does it mean to take good care of the environment and the community?–everything becomes squishier.

BP: If I want to launch a social venture, what are three of the most important things I should know, from a legal structure perspective, before I start?

AG: It depends on the social structure. If you want to start a foundation, because your Aunt Tilly died and left you $20 million to give away to save the pelicans, those 3 things you’re worried about are very different than if you’re trying to sell bednets in Africa. So the casual phrase of “social ventures” makes it hard for me to answer that question.

I can give you a broader answer, however. There are probably the three pieces of advice I would give to anyone.

Most people think, so this is my mission, that’s my job, and it’s my lawyer’s job to think about the structure. There are two problems with that strategy. The first is that unfortunately, some lawyers are better than others. The second is that people limit their own vision before they ever meet with their lawyer, because of their false assumptions.

And they go meet with their lawyer with their now-limited vision, and the lawyer says “yeah, I can do that.” Now, if they had a broader vision, then the lawyer would still say “yeah, I can do that.” But they’ve already clipped their own wings (when they limit their vision).

The second thing is that the legal structures have ramifications through different phases of your organization’s life. What your legal structure is will matter when you raise money, so lots of people start there, deciding on a legal structure based on whether they want donations or venture capital.

Some people go a little further. They think of their revenue streams, they think “how am I going to sustain this?” That might influence whether they’re going to be a for- or nonprofit. That’s usually as far as people tend to think.

The next thing that’s going to matter is how are you going to grow? You can franchise your operation, you can license out your intellectual property, or you can just grow. What your legal structure is will impact what options are available to you.

Then, there are issues about how you interact with your market. Being a nonprofit sends a certain message to your customers and your vendors. Being a for-profit sends a different message and allows you to interact with them in different ways.

The last thing that people don’t think about–that we have as the second thing you need to think about in our workshop–is your exit strategy. Someday you will exit this venture. If it means that God comes and takes you to heaven, I assure you, someday you will leave this venture.

Thinking through how you want that exit to be is crucial to how you set up your venture. If you think look, if this is wildly successful, and can sell someday, and I want to capture some of that money and retire, ok…well if you start a nonprofit, you can’t sell it.

So if you’re thinking 20 years from now, you’re retiring and selling this baby off, and you’re starting a nonprofit, we have some talking to do. Things like that.

BP: Let’s look at social ventures as an emerging economic movement. Where would you say we are right now on the timeline of that movement? Where are we going?

AG: Infancy. Elements of this have been around for a while. The idea that you can have sustainable ventures that encourage justice in the world is not new. You know, the YMCA’s been around for a long time. But as a movement, as people identifying it as a unique strategy and getting it moving, that’s pretty new.

It’s hard to choose a moment when this began. We didn’t have a Stonewall (Ed.: or any other major event to mark when this began). But it’s not more than 50 years ago that people started talking about being social entrepreneurs. It’s new.

When I was in law school, nobody knew about this. The fact that a few of us were graduating and wanted to go out and make a difference in the world was viewed as weird. This was 1990-3.

I went back to school to speak at Harvard about a year ago. Someone came from the business school to watch me speak, and we went out for drinks afterwards. He said that the largest student club at the Harvard business school today is the private equity club. The second largest club is the social venture club.

The world has changed rapidly, and it’s picking up speed. Students today are way ahead of where we were as students. That’s going to impact this world bigger, faster, stronger for a long while to come.

If you’re a recruiter for the mainstream economy, and you go to the business school today, you’ll be confronted with the fact that one of the biggest groups is the social entrepreneurs group. If you’re Rape and Pillage Inc., you’re going to have trouble recruiting talent.

I’ll give you one other example. There is a new corporate form out there. It’s called L3C, the low-profit limited liability company. It’s kind of an LLC, but also a new corporate form.

It was created in Vermont less than two years ago. It’s now available in 5-6 states. Just that there is a new corporate form says something, and the fact that it’s being picked up by other states so quickly is saying there’s a real hunger for this.

I think that this is a very young movement, and it is rapidly gaining speed. Economic forces will continue to push that. I think it will snowball faster and faster.

BP: How do you see this movement of social ventures changing the economy?

AG: In response to this? That’s a really complicated question. I’ll give it a shot.

I think more and more of the entrepreneurial energy will move in this direction. Most entrepreneurs start in their twenties. They usually really hit their stride in their forties, but they start in their twenties. And entrepreneurs in their 20s are doing this.

So, 20 years from now, this is what entrepreneurship is going to be. Currently, venture money is moving in this direction. Later on, expansion money is going to have to follow. As so many ventures mature, buyout money will move in this direction, too.

That’s already happening with certain consumer brands. Odwalla was bought. Danone yogurt bought Stonyfield Farms because that’s the part of the yogurt market that’s growing. You can still by Dannon yogurt, but it’s the part of the company that’s shrinking. You’re already seeing it begin to happen. It will happen more and more.

The dominant view now is a shareholder ROI economy. Things that can make money for investors get done. If you look at the trillions of dollars of investments that happen in America every year, the majority are driven by ROI for the investor. They fuel the bottom line.

That’s going to shift slowly to the multiple bottom lines. Ultimately, it will be more profitable to do that. Companies that don’t give a crap about anyone else will become less profitable. People won’t want to work there, won’t want to shop there. It will hurt your bottom line to be that company.

Today that’s not true, but you could make the argument that we’re starting to see it. For example, you can look at Costco versus Wal-Mart, and their stock price over the last 10 years or so. The recession may have changed this, but over last 10 years or so, Costco’s perfomrance has continuously been better than Wal-Mart in terms of P/E ratios. That’s partially because people view Wal-Mart’s relentless strategy of single bottom line as a detriment to them. Costco, which treats their workers better, cares about other stakeholders, etc., is viewed as the smarter long-term play.

If you look at who’s graduating from the top business schools today, that’s the talent pool that’s going to answer that question. But I don’t really know what’s going to happen.

We’re still trying to figure all that out.

BP: Anything else you’d like to share?

AG: Some people think that some of these ideas are good business, and they would have survived anyway, and that by painting it with some sort of social gloss is just decoration.

For example, Wal-Mart is way ahead of every other large retailer on the environmental front. They’re pushing their vendors, for example, to reduce packaging.

Pushing is the wrong word. They’re saying if you want to be on our shelves, you have to get rid of that excess packaging. It’s that simple. If you want to be in their stores—20% of the market or whatever—you’ve got to reduce packaging.

Some people are looking at that and thinking well, great, they’re protecting the environment. From Wal-Mart’s perspective, not doing it means more packaging in their trucks and less shelf space.

Yes, it’s good for the environment, but it’s good for the bottom line. They’re doing all kinds of cutting-edge energy management. They use very high-efficient lighting, and it’s off when it should be off, and all kinds of stuff. Again, why waste money?

Some people will say to the extent that any of this matters in business, only the stuff that goes to the first bottom line anyway gets picked up. So Costco will say we give good health benefits, train our workers better, and pay higher wages because it’s cheaper than having high turnover, and because our customers, when they ask where something is in the store, expect the right answer. Having someone who just started yesterday isn’t going to help that.

Some of that stuff that gets shed, is just stuff that costs money. It will help that first bottom line. That’s what some people will say who are watching all of this happen. Because clearly things are happening. You’re watching all this and can’t pretend that this is nothing. They’ll think that’s what’s happening.

I think they’re half right. The things that help the first bottom line are the things that will be picked up fastest and go quickest into the market.

But I think that the mindset of the public is changing generationally. That will have deeper impacts over time that we’re just starting to see. For example, if you want to hire the best and the brightest out of the best schools, you have to offer them more than just a high salary. There will be a generational shift that will go deeper than just “it makes sense to turn the lights out when nobody’s in the store.”

*

Andrew Greenblatt is the Director of Products and Innovation at Criterion Ventures. He is an entrepreneur, lawyer, professor, and social venture expert. Find out more about Andrew and Criterion here.

Images: Steffen’s blog, Harvard Social Enterprise Club, Yarek Waszul

We emphasize value-added activities that will increase perception of your company and help marketing efforts. Use these tips in conjunction with energy-saving efforts that lower operating costs.

1. Go renewable–and let everyone know

Renewable energy bolsters public perception of a company. It marks you as a responsible, conscientious, caring organization. Harness this perception to attract more customers and increase your market share.

Whole Foods, for example, has established a “Green Mission” that includes offsetting all of its energy consumption with wind energy credits. As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency named Whole Foods its Green Power Partner of the Year in 2006 and 2007. A slew of good publicity followed.

Other large corporations, including FedEx, Wal-Mart, Costco, and Safeway also have renewable energy programs.

2. Market to guilt

Image: Stuff Young Jewish Adults Like

Humans, specifically Americans, generate most of the CO2 emissions that contribute to global warming. This sordid fact weighs on the public conscience, compelling consumers to seek out products and services green enough to assuage their guilt. Offering ways to mitigate enviro-guilt draws more customers to your company, which ultimately can boost your bottom line.

For example, the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) recently became the first airport in the country to offer carbon offset kiosks. With a simple swipe of a credit card, customers contribute to reforestation and biofuels, assuaging their sense of guilt about boarding a fuel-hungry, CO2-emitting jet. The program certainly differentiates SFO from other nearby airports, potentially boosting perception to the point of attracting more fliers.

Oil- and gas company BP is another example. It touts itself as one of the first oil companies to “take precautionary action to address climate change.”

Company officials emphasize that BP has made efforts to reduce emissions at its extraction operations, innovated a new type of gas that emits fewer toxins, and invested in clean technology research.

Does that absolve BP from the fact that it makes money by mining oil? No, but by emphasizing its efforts to mitigate the damage, BP is tacitly admitting that although it’s a bad guy, it wants to do good by the environment. In other words, it is appealing to consumer guilt.

Note: Some might label BP’s efforts as greenwashing. Regardless, it is using the tried-and-true tactic of addressing consumer guilt to clean its image.

3. Green your logo

Speaking of greenwashing, we make this point with a caveat: If you green your logo, please do something to back it up. Run your organization off renewable energy. Weatherize your building. Donate to eco-wise nonprofits. Sell green products. Otherwise, you risk being seen as a greenwasher.

Back to whipping boy BP. It’s an oil company, but its logo–a green flower-like symbol–evokes feelings of green. Does BP’s green logo and website design make the oil company look more environmentally friendly? On a subconscious level, it does.

If I didn’t know what BP was, and saw its logo for the first time, my first impression would be of a pretty green flower. Logo-wise, it looks much greener than, say, Chevron, whose red-and-blue logo evokes more patriotic feelings on first impression. Design counts.

4. Donate to Earthy causes

Reserve a portion of your profits for a nonprofit that works to restore the planet, like 1% For the Planet. Or make monthly/annual donations to an organization that preserves and restores nature. Making a financial commitment will show the general public that you put your money where your mouth is. Make sure that you publicize your donations well.

5. Sell eco-minded products

Image: Zazzle/Eco Girl

Nobody was buying canvas bags in the 1980s. Now, almost every grocery store sells lines of reusable shopping bags at the checkout counter.

People want to go green–and they’ll spend money to do it. Address that need with new products and services. They can complement your current offerings, or represent a deviation from your traditional wares. If you’re a service, develop a new brand that addresses the needs of people in the burgeoning green industry. Or market to people who want to feel more green.

Read up on what other bloggers have to say at BlogActionDay.org.