Al Gore is Kinda Cute

I’ve always been a fan of older men. Today I fell for another one, Mr. Al Gore. Al (I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if I called him by his first name) came to DC to give a presentation for the We Campaign. Greenette sent me an invitation, so I clicked through, got my free ticket and headed off to DAR Constitution Hall yesterday along with my 3,699 best friends.

Al’s presentation was truly inspirational (click here for the transcript). With his slight southern accent and relaxed presence, I felt like he was talking directly to me about all the things I CAN do (even though I was waaay in the back). It’s always nice to hear what we CAN do versus things that cannot be done. It was also nice that there was a limited amount of politicking in the presentation (though there were some slightly crazy protesters outside).

Al’s concept was that the US move to use of entirely carbon-free fuel and electricity (bye bye petrochemicals and coal!) within TEN years. His inspiration: JFK’s similarly ambitious dedication to putting a man on the moon in ten years (we did it in just over 8). His arguments for why this is possible were quite compelling: the US has vast renewable resources including sunlight, wind, and geothermal. All of which can be tapped at a relatively low cost, particularly when compared to skyrocketing economic and environmental costs for oil and coal. His arguments for why we HAVE to do it were equally compelling: environment, economy (hello job creation!), national security (no more borrowing money from China to pay Saudi Arabia).

The one thing missing was behavioral change: all this is good, but we need to think about our own personal choices. How do we reduce demand for fuel/electricity? How do we drive less? How do we plan better?

Overall, great presentation Al. I’ll be sure to let my hubby know he has some competition.

T-shirt for your thoughts. . .

A reader recently approached The Green Workplace for some recruiting ideas.  We thought it would be a great opportunity to open a discussion that would benefit all of our readers.  The benefits don't stop there, however, we will give away 100% organic t-shirts for the best ideas you post to the discussion!

Question:  Our company has really strong environmental policies and is actively recruiting for a number of positions.  We really want to reach candidates who think Green.  Our company gives free bicycles to employees, recycles, uses organic materials in production, and the roof of our factory is covered in solar panels.  So far, these programs haven't really become the selling point for applicants that we anticipated.  Do you have any advice?

Answer:  Your current employee base is always going to be your most potent recruiting tool. Think of things they may choose to discuss about your company while at happy hour, at Thanksgiving dinner or while they are chatting with another parent while watching a Little League game. Are your green policies going to be among the headlines?  
Here are some other ideas that are likely to prompt personal testimony:

• Implement flexible schedules, like 4 day work weeks or part time work from home
  
• Inspire some teams to start desk sharing or working anywhere
  
• Consideration of video conference as an alternative to business trips
  
• Reduce quantity of office equipment by increase the ratio of employees to printers or removing select computer monitors
  

Readers:  Please let us know what you think!  Submit your ideas by posting your responses and send me an email with your mailing address, t-shirt selection and size if you wish to claim your 100% organic t-shirt.

Beautiful but Disturbing: Waste Art

Image above depicts 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours.

A colleague sent me to Chris Jordan's website, "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait." This site uses photography to show a specific number of something (such as number of plastic bottles used in the US every five minutes). The photography is beautiful, but the statistics it portrays are incredibly disturbing. Take a look and be astounded!

Energy Modeling... by an Energy Company

I'm not a huge fan of oil companies, but I am a big fan of scenario planning, a methodology for writing stories about business futures, first started by Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s. Peter Schwartz' The Long View is a fantastic read for those interested in more reading about this. I was reading Shell's latest thinking on oil production today and noticed they continue to use this scenario planning methodology. And when you think about it, who has more interest in thinking through the future of energy than a company that lives and dies by it? Here are two "futures" they describe on their website.

To help think about the future of energy, we have developed two scenarios that describe alternative ways it may develop. In the first scenario – called Scramble – policymakers pay little attention to more efficient energy use until supplies are tight. Likewise, greenhouse gas emissions are not seriously addressed until there are major climate shocks. In the second scenario – Blueprints – growing local actions begin to address the challenges of economic development, energy security and environmental pollution. A price is applied to a critical mass of emissions giving a huge stimulus to the development of clean energy technologies, such as carbon dioxide capture and
storage, and energy efficiency measures. The result is far lower carbon dioxide emissions.

Read more about Shell's Scramble and Blueprints scenarios here. I haven't gone through a fact-checked every statement, it is presented very well. Extremely thought provoking.

I'm Addicted to the Planet Green Game

I was putzing around on Starbuck's Corporate Social Responsibility website and found their Planet Green Game. It's fastastic! You pick an avatar and choose your own adventure, collecting green trivia points along the way. You can also go to a movie theater and view 7 movie shorts. Very interactive and very, very clever (maybe slightly addictive). http://www.planetgreengame.com/

Test your skills. What was your score?

NRDC Greening Advisor

The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has created a Greening Advisor site for small and medium sized companies interested in greening their organization.

"The Greening Advisor is a free and easily accessible resource that points the way towards cost savings and environmental responsibility,” said Frances Beinecke, president of NRDC. “With the Greening Advisor as a guide, greening a business or organization no longer needs to be a daunting task, but an achievable goal that can be integrated into every company’s mission."

The site takes the next step for companies interested in developing their own committments and strategies for the environment by creating "boiler plate" policy documents as well as tactical strategies for going green. For example, environmental language in contracts, environmental purchasing policy and the like. I may have to steal a few of these!

The UK-based Sunday Times puts together an annual list of the 'Best Companies to Work For'. For the first time, The Sunday Times has put together a 'Green List 2008', the newspaper's first competition to find companies that are striving to improve their environmental performance.

The Sunday Times say they launched this venture to reflect the changing mood in the business world, as today it is not enough simply to make a profit for shareholders. Companies have a wider responsibility to ensure that they minimise the environmental impact of what they do. Consumers, clients and peers expect it.

According to The Sunday Times, the 50 companies listed in the Green List 2008 are all pioneers — "enterprising, enlightened and fizzing with new ideas". They vary from Greencare H2O, a business employing just 50 people distributing watercoolers, to the banking giant HBOS, which has a staff of 74,000. The one thing that unites these diverse companies is the common sense of purpose about their corporate social responsibility.

Interestingly, 3 of the top 10 companies are construction and arichtectual firms: Carillion (2), Skanska UK (5) and MCM Architecture (9). For the full top 50 Green List 2008 list click here.

David Douglass with Sun Microsystems

I'm always scrolling around looking for what smart leaders are doing when it comes to corporate social sustainability. I was surprized and pleased to find out about David Douglass, Sun Microsystem's VP of Eco Responsibility. What impressed be most about David was not his position - OK, yes, he's the head green guru for a company of 30,000 people - but his blog. David share's his thoughts with the rest of the world on Sun's environment blog and he really tells it like it is. No candy coating, just real, hands in the dirt kind of stuff.



Check out a recent entry in his blog, "Black, White and Shades of Green." Here's an excerpt:

I've written before about the lack of magic answers, as much as we'd all love to find them. When you take any societal-scale process or product and think you've found a totally clean, side effect free, economically viable substitute for it, you're almost surely delusional. Any substitution will have other, new side effects, and we absolutely need to try to be accounting for them.

The Green Workplace Receives a 9.0!

I'm not familar with Blogged, but appartently it is a site that rates the quality of blogs across the internet. I just received the following email from their marketing department:

Dear Leigh Stringer,

Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it a 9.0 score out of (10) in the Society category of Blogged.com.This is quite an achievement!

We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style. After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 9.0 score.

http://www.blogged.com/directory/society

Congrats to our bloggers for a job well done! Keep it up.

Greenville, USA

Green technology is everywhere! A new virtual town "Greenville, USA" was created recently to demonstrate power of technology and energy efficiency.

The tool was created by the Technology CEO Council, a lobbying group made up of CEOs Michael Dell (Dell), Mark Hurd (HP), Samuel Palmisano (IBM), Paul Otellini (Intel), Joe Tucci (EMC), Mike Splinter (Applied Materials), and others.

The graphics are fairy simple, but there are several good nuggets of ways to leverage technology in your home or business. Some interesting tidbits:

• Use thin client - less heat is created by centralized hard drives
• No left hand turns with truck deliveries - minimizes time on the road and carbon emissions
• Consider the new ultra mobile PCs requiring 1/10 power required from first gen PCs
• Real time energy pricing
• Watt meter that measures all electrical devices in the home
• Use cell phone waiting lots at the airport - don't keep driving in circles!

Lots of good intel. We have the technology - now it's time to use it!

Social Responsibility and the Blogosphere

I found a fantastic article called Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability in the Blogosphere recently. Required reading for all green bloggers and written by Edelman and First&42nd, it dives into the many issues important to bloggers in general and how social issues fit into the big picture. They came to a number of conclusions, all of which are listed here:

• The majority of CSR and sustainability blog conversations focus on the environment.


• NGOs and companies alike have shown little interest in engaging the blogosphere on CSR issues.


• Traditional NGO campaigns addressing CSR topics do not register among blogs.


• The main CSR influencers in the blogosphere are individuals, not institutions.


• Bloggers are commenting on CSR and sustainability topics – they are not reporting new information.


• The main source of CSR and sustainability information for bloggers is the mainstream media (MSM).


• The blogosphere is open to any institutional voice ready to engage.
  

Fascinating. What caught my attention most was the fact that green blogs (as a whole) tend to take information and comment about it (similar to many political blogs) rather than report real news. Some of the best blogs are really taking on the reporter role: interviewing building owners, sharing new technologies via video and "taking on" companies that appear to be green washing or flashing green bling with no larger green strategy in mind.

The other interesting tidbit was the fact that companies and NGOs have not caught on to the power of these thousands of individual reporters and their networked relationship to each other. In some ways, having bloggers separate from companies makes their reporting more credible / third-party, but individual bloggers need really deep pockets to investigate issues that companies and NGOs are more easily able to address.

I can't tell exactly, but it looks like this article was written in late 2006. I feel confident that some of what they suggest has changed, but it's good intel regardless.

And if you don't have your own bamboo bicycle in DC...

I love being in a city that sets new standards for sustainability, not to mention quality of life: "DC SmartBike" will launch in the coming weeks. Washington is the first North American city to try this type of bike share. This isn't just lip service, I have already spotted stations going in at the busy Foggy Bottom and Gallery Place Metro Stations. I am hoping that the new Washington Nationals Ballpark thinks about signing up for one too!

The program is a lot like the car-sharing service in DC, Zipcar. You pay a $40 annual membership fee to access bikes stored at computerized racks around the city. To unlock the bike, you scan an access card. Unlike Zipcar, the bikes can only be used for up to three hours at a time (sad) and can be returned at any SmartBike station (much better than the Zipcar model that requires you to return to Point A after swinging by Point B). In the beginning at least, there won't be any hourly charges. So enjoy it while it lasts!

The DC program is starting small (10 stations/120 bikes) but the program easily could be expanded to more than 1,000 bikes at more than 100 stations within a year.

Check it Out in Business Week: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D90AE1G82.htm

Eco Fashion

I am a self-confessed fashion-junkie. The difficulty is that to indulge my fashion addition I often find myself compromising my green / ethical values.

The good news is though that eco-fashion is now really coming of age - which some of the most fashion-forward designs coming from small 'eco-friendly' labels from across the globe.

JC Report, a fashion newsletter to which I subscribed, this week wrote a very good article drawing attention to the key designers to look out for. Click here to take you to this article.

Happy reading / shopping!!

Win Big Money for Your Big Idea

The Sundance Channel and Lexus Hybrid Living are looking for "The Next Big Idea." The purpose of this contest is to find great ideas (in short film or photographic form) to help people live greenly.

The winner will receive a cash prize of $10,000 to help make their "Big Idea" a reality, as well as a home energy assessment by Current Energy.

Entries are due (online!) by May 20, 2008.

This contest kicks off season two of Sundance Channel's series "Big Ideas for a Small Planet." I highly recommend clicking around the Sundance site for a bit - lots of interesting and fun info available.

Too Busy for Blogs?

As you can see just from our blogroll, there are tons of great green blogs out there, ranging from green design to green living to just green-green. Sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming. Luckily, there are resources out there to help you cut through the information and see what others find the most interesting. I’m always pleased when I see a Green Workplace post on any of these!

• Architectural Record Selects: Green Blogs
• Architectural Record Selects: Practice Blogs
• GreenSource Selects: Blogs
• Sustain Newsladder
• Digg/Environment
• Hugg 2.0
• Best Green Blogs – list of blogs with description...you can also sign up for an RSS feed here!

Check out more bookmarking resources below.

Why green roofs matter

Many older cities have combined storm and sanitary sewers that overflow with even moderate rainfall. This overflow means raw sewage can end up in the local waterways. Our waterways provide not only habitat for a diverse range of flora and fauna, but they are often a potable water source for nearby communties as well. Yuck.

By increasing the pervious surface area of our densely built urban environments, we can reduce the amount of runoff and burden on the municipal infrastructure that struggles to handle the increasing runoff as development flourishes and severe weather events occur with greater frequency. The EPA has recently recognized that green infrastructure can be a more expedient and cost effective way to handle this urban problem when compared to digging up exisitng combined sewer lines and splitting them up: http://www.epa.gov/npdes/pubs/gi_action_strategy.pdf.

In addition to aleviating stormwater issues, green roofs can keep ambient temperatures lower through evapotranspiration, which translates to lower cooling loads for the buildings in our urban environments and keeps everyone's carbon footprint a little smaller.

If you're interested in learning more about the costs, benefits and implications of green roofs, there are places to go to learn from the experts. One such event is coming up soon in Baltimore April 30-May 2.

The details:
•1000+ green roof professionals
•Trade show with 75+ exhibitors showcasing green roof products and services
•World-wide experts on issues related to policy, design and research
•Opening Reception and Awards of Excellence Luncheon
•Green roof training courses
•Continuing Education Credits
•Baltimore green roof tours
•Bookstore of green roof books
Register at: http://www.greenroofs.org/

Fun Enviro-Resources

I’m always on the lookout for fun green resources. Here are a couple of blogs/sites to check out, as well as some entertaining short films to watch when you have a moment:

Blogs:

Ecorazzi: This blog combines my two favorite things: celebrity gossip and green!

True Green Confessions: People confess their guilty green misbehaviors. One of my personal favorites: “I think cork flooring is ugly.”

Groovy Green: Consolidated blog and magazine with info on climate change, gardening, green living, energy, etc. I particularly enjoy the entertainment section.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s site: Ok, so some of this is selling his projects like The 11th Hour, but it also offers info on global warming, fresh water, biodiversity, oceans, sustainability, etc.

Woody Harrelson’s site: The mission of Voice Yourself is “We believe all life on earth is sacred. VoiceYourself promotes and inspires individual action to create global momentum towards simple organic living and to restore balance and harmony to our planet.”

Short Films:

• “Earth to America”: Will Ferrell's impersonation of President Bush giving a talk on the environment.
• “Manhattan in January”: Jill Sobule's uplifting song about global warming.

Image Source: www.relocalize.net

The Average Woman

As you may have realized by now, I’m a bit of a fan of numbers and statistics. Women’s Health kindly helped me meet my geeky number quota with their “Average Woman” section in this month’s issue: "Green Days – Who isn’t going (enviro)mental?"

Here are some of the highlights:

• 3 in 4 Americans resolved to be greener this year
• 70% of women think pollution and global warming are bigger threats than terrorism (56% of men agree)
• 24% of women have read or watched An Inconvenient Truth (64% of those became more eco-active as a result)
• 70% of women have eco-guilt (feel bad about harming the planet)
• 25% of women dry their sheets on a clothesline (87% of those also hang out their undies to dry)
• Using a clothesline saves 1,079 kWh per year (about $85 at current prices)
• 17% of women say they were eco-activists before Leonardo DiCaprio was

Many apologies to all the folks who stopped by my desk to see the pretty ladies in the magazine – it’s going home today!

The UK - to have an eco-town makeover?

Today the UK government has revealed 15 locations which have been shortlisted as the first new towns in England in since the 1960s. 10 sites will be selected from this list to be built as new "eco-towns" by 2020 and will contribute to the government's plans to build 3 million new homes by the same year.

The eco-towns initiative has been designed to tackle the dual challenges of climate change and the need for more UK families to own their own home. However, they have come under fire on both these areas.

The UK government's sustainability agenda for eco-towns

Eco-towns are planned to be low-energy, carbon-neutral and built from recycled materials. Each development will be exemplary in one area of sustainability, such as energy production or waste disposal.

The argument against the sustainability agenda

The opposition has accused the government of "eco-spin rather than a genuine attempt to address the environmental nature of UK housing".

The UK government's house-building agenda for eco-towns

The UK is currently experiencing a housing shortage, especially in the affordable housing market. The largest eco-town will provide between 15,000 and 20,000 new homes and 30% to 40% of each eco-town will be allocated as affordable housing.

The argument against the house-building agenda

The opposition argue that because three-quarters of the housing we'll be living in by 2050 is already built, that unless you do something about the existing stock, putting up a few eco-towns amounts to a tiny fraction of the total housing we will require. There are also several shortlisted new towns that will require building on green field sites.

The opposition have also stressed the need to ensure inhabitants of new eco-towns do not have to commute in order to work. As if this happened, the sites would not be sustainable at all and would in fact give rise to extra carbon emissions in transportation. There are concerns among environmental campaigners that most of the proposed eco-towns will increase car pollution because they will not be big or diverse enough to sustain viable public transport.

For more information go to the UK Communities and Local Government Department website.

Map source: BBC News

Joel Stein Makes Me Laugh

I was reading Time Magazine the other night, and ran across a column on the sustainable movement by one of my favorite columnists, Joel Stein (or check his wiki page). The column “The Kitchen Stinks” was about composting and how stinky it is. Clearly Joel’s wife needs to get him a vermiculture composting bin!

Joel (I’m allowed to call him Joel because I have watched him on VH1’s I love the 80s) occasionally focuses his column on the ridiculousness of some aspects of the sustainable movement. For another funny perspective, check out his column on the local foods movement: “Extreme Eating”.

Hope you enjoy Joel’s columns as much as I do.