Happy New Year, and by the way…what’s next for socially responsible companies?

Sometimes it seems like the world is on fire. The politics of the USA, the politics of the world, Ebola, elections, wars, hunger, pain, suffering, sadness, gun violence in the US, the Monsanto monster, drought, floods, homelessness, mental illness, cruelty to animals, fraud, deceit, and I could go on for a long time but you get my drift here. Hopeless? I don’t think so. All of these and more imbalances exist and yet, there is an opposing force(s) working to neutralize them. It is made up of dedicated people, organizations, institutions, professionals and the like. Most powerfully, it is made up of you and I.

OK the “I” part. I guess that’s me. The man in the mirror, the hombre. What answers do I have? Good question! I try to do my part, my politics are balanced (at least I think so), I get a flu vaccine each year, I vote, I meditate for world peace, I once started a group in Central Florida to fight world hunger, I try to inspire others, make people laugh, give them hope, hug them, let them know they are not alone. I grow an organic garden in big giant pots on our back patio, I love animals, got a dog from Humane Society last year (best decision I ever made, I think). I promote gun safety and gun education, try to be honest in all my endeavors, and conduct my business with the highest principals I can attain, knowing that there is always room for improvement.

Business? What does that have to do with it? I am in the manufacturing business. It is part of who I am. Our small, family owned company, Soothing Touch, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, creates various skin care products for the natural industry, massage and spa industries, massage schools, consumers, and anyone else who wants, what we think, are very good, effective skin care products at good prices. My point is, our company gets a chance to participate in all of the above ways to change as well. We do our best to take care of our employees, provide them with a nice, safe workplace, with lots of support and some fun to go with it. Manufacturing can be tough work and it usually is but if you are singing with a little dancing in your day, well, it’s just more fun, trust me on that.

We work hard to be among the ranks of the growing number of socially responsible companies, but it seems every time we look at things, we find more we can do. We cut down on waste every chance we get. It is amazing how much gets thrown away if we are not careful. What can we reuse that for, is a common question.

In the past year or so we have introduced ten retail products that carry the USDA Organic seal. We are proud of that. We have introduced four Ayurvedic body lotions that aren’t organic but are completely free of petroleum by-products whatsoever. All the ingredients are plant-based with a paraben free/ petroleum free preservative system. We are committed to organics and know that is a good start to our contributions to the planet, the organic industry, the small family farmers, ourselves, and to our customers. After all, what goes onto the skin goes into the body. Have you thought about that lately? What are the ingredients in your favorite product you put on your skin every day?

Our latest massage lotion, Ayurveda Massage Lotion, is also completely free of any petroleum by-products, parabens, phthalates, PEG, TEA, formaldehyde releasing agents, and propylene glycol. It is one of the first of its kind in the massage industry.

As a company we are cruelty free, work hard to keep GMOs out of our products and we are also vegan except in a handful of topical pain relief balms and gels that contain beeswax.

There is so much opportunity in business to make changes, improvements, and contributions.

With all we have done, we know there is so much more we can do to get better, to improve people’s lives, to make a difference, to affect change, to create the change we want to be as individuals.

I also know that what we do in business, how we make a living, is an extension of what we do and who we are in our individual lives. At least it should be in my opinion.

The cool thing about the concepts here is that it does not matter what business you are in. You can make a difference every day. If you sell cars, do it honestly with passion; if you work as a school teacher, educate yourself and teach well; if you answer phones, do it with integrity and good service in mind. Each and everyone one of these service touch people’s lives and that is exactly the point where the difference is made. That difference can literally change our lives.

So I guess my point is, even with all the challenges around us every day, we can make a difference. We can commit to higher ideals. We can be positive in our outlook. We can be better people and better companies. We can affect global change by focusing in our small, little lives and remember to allow the great multipliers of the universe do their thing ( 1 x unknown = unknown and unlimited). One thing leads to another, to another, to another…

I am grateful for all that I have received on this planet and commit to making a difference one breath at a time, one person at a time, one customer at a time. If we join together, we can truly move mountains or anything else we want to accomplish. I look forward to meeting you along the way!

Gurukirn Khalsa is co-owner and sales manager of Soothing Touch, a family-owned massage lubricant and body care manufacturer located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Organics is a big passion of his, he has been growing various organic vegetables since college, and now he is bringing that passion into Soothing Touch as they transition to more and more organic ingredients. He believes that small organic farming is the answer to many of today’s health and environmental challenges. His family is most important to him, and he has a beautiful wife, 4 grown children and 7 incredible grandkids. 

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A test for your bike IQ.

You know it. You love it. The bicycle is a clean machine in a carbon-fueled world. Here is a quiz to test your transportation IQ.

Q: On average, the annual operating cost of a car is $8,220. How much does it cost per year to maintain a bike?

A) $308

B) $3,020

C) $20

Answer: According to a 2009 report published by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the annual maintenance cost of a bike is $308. Cyclists can lower that amount by joining a bike co-op and learning to repair their own machines.

Test more of your bike IQ:

Pedals vs. Pumps

Bikeways vs. Highways

Federal Transportation Funding

Read more: Japhy Dhungana rode his bike from Los Angeles to the tip of South America. Can you guess why he named his bicycle Bucephalus?

Sierra is the magazine of the Sierra Club. Our motto: Explore, Enjoy, and Protect the Planet. Follow Sierra magazine on Twitter.

Image: moriza

The post How Much Does a Cycle Centric Lifestyle Cost? appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnWhat fuels our desire to combine food and business.

It was only a matter of time before a small-town Airstream food truck opportunity that involved tacos crossed my path. No, really.

Over a sunny, Saturday morning coffee in Salida, Colorado this weekend, the conversation was going a little something like this:

“We need someone to get the Airstream taco truck going. We already have the Airstream and the space. You ladies in?” Annie, a go-getter, mountain biking bad ass asked us hopefully, in the kind of voice that you know someone is trying to insist on something really hard.

My friend Megan and I looked at each other. We both have jobs, and love our urban friends and living spaces, but I could see the wheels turning in her head thinking about all it would take to make this a possibility. How often are you propositioned with opening a food venture in a small town that several of your friends live in? Not every day.

Let me back up a little.

Food is a constant theme between a close group of friends of mine. New Years was devoted to the overconsumption of tacos in Baja, Mexico, the following winter months sharing recipes and the warmer spring days catching up over outdoor weekend brunches.

We’re spread out, two of us in Portland and others in Colorado. The geographic distance between us has lead to plenty of emails, group texts (often with food photos) and Skype chats, the former being exactly how I first found out about the Airstream.

“I have an idea to run by you,” my friend Beda kicked off one weekend call.

“Yes…” I responded, knowing fully well that anytime Beda has an idea it’s going to be a good one.

“So we’re thinking of starting a taco truck in Salida, because there’s no good place to get a burrito! And it would be in an Airstream,” she continued.

At this point we launched into the logistics of running a food establishment – logistics that neither of us have any experience in – and whether or not it was possible.

“And then you could move down here and run it!” she said.

I laughed and we left things at that.

Flash forward to five months later when myself and my fellow Portland foodie urbanite – yes, we eat sea salt with everything – Megan were drinking coffee with the Salida crew that we had come to visit.

“So, that food truck… we need someone to run it. We already have the wine tasting room and the distillery on board, and the space is right next to the new bike shop. You could serve locally roasted coffee, and breakfast burritos to all the skiers in the winter. You ladies want to move down here and take on the project?” Annie was all over this.

Wine, bikes and tacos? My heart skipped a beat.

These are all things that have become ubiquitous with urban food hot spots, you can barely walk five blocks in Portland, San Francisco or Brooklyn without coming across an off-the-cuff food operation, be it a food truck, a waffle window or a refurbished storage container that sells local food. But rural Colorado where there’s a good mix of mountain bikers, cowboys, river guides and four wheel truck drivers, is something different. On the other hand, isn’t this where free range local beef and real artisan goat cheese is just down the road? Good food abounds even if it’s not drizzled in truffle oil (although if you’re ever in Salida, be sure to try the truffle oil fries at The Fritz).

Can’t you envision an Airstream parked here serving up homemade tacos and burritos?

What is it about a food venture that is so appealing?

“You should open a restaurant!” is a common phrase heard at dinner parties when someone cooks a delicious meal, and who hasn’t had romantic visions of starting a brewery where you can serve local food and craft beer? Grab coffee at a quaint cafe with art on the walls and local bands playing at night while you’re on vacation and you’ll soon find yourself thinking, “we should have something like that here,” as soon as you return home.

Food is primal, and providing our communities with a chance to enjoy it is appealing. Seductive even.

There is of course the reality, and at the back of my mind I always hear my mother saying, “you don’t want to run a restaurant, you need balance.” Mothers like to give that kind of advice, especially if they know you well. There is no denying that a job in the food industry is a stressful and time consuming one. But it’s also rewarding.

Making food is making sustenance, and turning it into an art in the process. It’s about providing people with a place to eat, but also a place to appreciate good food and the community around them, all things that even those of us sitting around drinking coffee and discussing the potential business venture, without any restaurant or food truck management experience under our belts, are passionate about.

I am by no means trying to over-romanticize the everyday logistics that go into such a project, or even say that I would be willing to commit to it.

Run a restaurant and you need to put food on the table. Every. Single. Day. Or at least every single day you commit to being open. You also have to do fun jobs like inventory, permitting and clean-up. But at the end of the day, you’re still running a business that’s all about food. Shouldn’t everything we do in life be a labor of love? And what requires more love than good food?

We may not all launch a restaurant, but plenty of people out there are passionate about what they eat and drink and pursuing successful business ventures, from baking to support nonprofits, to hosting local farm-to-table tours, to roasting specialty coffee and delivering it on a bike. There is a reward in giving back to a community that you can’t put a dollar value to, and what better way to do so than through food and drink?

It might be a stretch to say “change the world one food truck at a time” but if in doing so we are creating a better conversation around food, what’s to say that this isn’t the tipping point? We all need to eat, and if we can have affordable and equitable access to a healthy product, the faster we can influence a path to positive change in the realm of food politics.

Airstream taco truck in Salida, Colorado? Who knows. But the seed has been planted, and at the very least, it’s fun to dream.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s weekly column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, discovering what’s new and different in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

Images: Anna Brones

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The best of EcoSalon’s stories this week.

We adore all our readers, but some of them simply blow us away – like Shannon Galpin, founder of Mountain2Mountain who is  working to empower women in Afghanistan and beyond.

Did you know the remarkable story behind Burt’s Bees – the good and the bad?

If you’ve been watching HBO’s Game of Thrones, you’ll know that Daenerys Targaryen is one tough cookie. In the words of the actress who plays her, Emilia Clarke, “she’s an incredibly strong and powerful woman who doesn’t come into her own until much later on.” (So keep watching!)

Being a foodie is all too often equated with being a snob – and Anna Brones is keen to point out that it’s not all heaps of succulent decadence. Sometimes, simple really is best (as long as it tastes good, of course).

Finally, how many times have you checked Facebook today? Or while you were reading this article? Do you think you have an addiction? If so, try a few of our 20 things to do instead of browsing through your Facebook updates.

The post Friday 5: The Other People Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

Advocating for women, one story at a time.

Today we’re celebrating International Women’s Day, a day that has been observed since the early 1900s. In Afghanistan, Cambodia and Zambia, and several other countries, it’s an official holiday and around the world thousands of events are held to inspire women and celebrate achievements.

It’s a day for honoring the women around us – our mothers, our grandmothers, our daughters, our sisters, our friends – and those farther from us- the single mother that lives across the street, the school teacher that fights so that her female students learn to read, the girl on the other side of the globe that dreams of being a doctor. Today is a day for celebrating all women, but also remembering that advocating for them is a daily affair.

We devote a lot of our content to highlighting the successes and struggles of women around the globe. Here are our top 11 to get you thinking about what it means to be a woman, what it means to advocate for women and what a future with strong, empowered women around the globe will look like.

8 Women-Run Businesses

These female-led businesses are leaders in their industries and bringing change to the communities around them in a variety of ways.

Female Journalists Report from the Frontlines

Journalism is an industry largely dominated by men. Here are 10 female journalists and their compelling stories from Louisiana to Libya.

The Story of Stuff: A Conversation With Annie Leonard

Annie Leonard is an inspiration to men and women alike, and has dedicated her life to telling the stories that will help us build a clean, green, healthy, safe community for everyone.

Women Learn How to Fail At Work in Grade School

Want to empower women? Start with girls. What they learn at an early age has a significant impact on how they perform and succeed later in life.

Parents Opting for Abortion or Adoption in Light of Economy

Women who are having abortions and placing their children up for adoption aren’t who we think they are. They’re mothers.

5 Stories of Girls Pushing Boundaries and Effecting Change

These five examples prove that change begins with the next generation, and these girls are doing it.

6 Funny and Intelligent Women That Make Us Laugh and Think

Tina Fey, Molly Ivins, Mindy Kaling; this list of female writers is one that inspires us and moves us to speak out more.

Women Investing in Change for Other Women

Women don’t always put their economic power to drive social change. Imagine if they did.

Sexual Assault Victims Speak Out to Empower Themselves

Speaking out about sexual assault lessens the stigma, empowers victims and can encourage more women to come forward.

Sexting and Cyberbullying has Harsher Consequences for Girls

Technology has given us new ways to communicate, and with it exacerbated the messages of mass media.

3 Issues Women Around the World Confront in Common

No matter where we’re born or where we live, as women we all confront confidence, victim-blaming, and strength in some way or another.

Image: mckaysavage

The post Celebrate International Women’s Day With 11 Stories About and Inspired By Women appeared first on EcoSalon.

The top stories of the week at EcoSalon.

In a week in which the world said goodbye to the incredible Marie Colvin, we look at ten remarkable stories penned by female journalists.

An astounding amount of American money is being spent on foreign conflicts. What else could be done with it? These 11 world-changing causes would be a great start.

Original thinking is hard, so if you’re feeling in need of inspiration, check out these 40 best quotes on innovation.

Female-founded, women-run businesses are on the rise. Check out these 8 remarkable companies run by women.

Finally, when it comes to blazing a trail, who better than Jack Kerouac? Scott Adelson takes a personal look at the legacy of one of America’s most famous literary journeys.

The post The Friday 5: Trailblazing Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

A look at 10 powerful men who have grown to become better people who in turn, better our lives.

We continue to seek leaders among movers and shakers capable of making a difference. Who is out there, we ask, in these bleak times to govern, protect and prosper? Here is a look at some men who have proven able to rise to challenging tasks, become better people with stances of substance, and capable of changing our world in a myriad number of positive ways.

1. Steve Jobs

We can’t help but think of Apple founder Steve Jobs, the single most important figure to date to spring from Silicon Valley, who leaves behind an enormous legacy after losing his battle with pancreatic cancer at 56. Likened to titans Ford and Edison by The Globe and Mail, he lives on in downloaded songs, finger swipes and sleek white headphones – “a man whose vision ended up disrupting almost every creative and commercial industry on Earth” thereby changing the earth as we know it. While cynics have said there is a special place in hell for technology peddlers who insure gadgets are readily replaced, Jobs gave us the convenience factor which made it easier to do what we do most: cyber speak.

It appeared everything he touched turned to gold, from the Macintosh and mouse to the iPad and Pixar. True, he changed the world with his visionary acumen but also the world changed him as he confronted his mortality, telling a graduating class of Stanford University grads that the notion of dying was the biggest catapult in following his heart. “It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

He also cited his firing from Apple at age 30 after taking the company from a fledgling computer brainstorm built in a garage to a $2 billion giant with over 4,000 employees as the best thing that ever happened to him. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. ”

2. Louis Rossetto

The co-founder of  Wired Magazine  has been called a Fair Trade Willie Wonka for his success of adapting Silicon Valley start up tools to the chocolate industry. Rossetto became the first investor and then CEO of TCHO, launched in 2005 on the premise that chocolate should be measured by flavor and not percentage of cacao content, using the Flavor Wheel approach established by NASA contractor Timothy Childs and chocolate industry veteran Karl Bittong.

Shifting the focus to taste and flavor labs and cutting out notorious slave labor practices on plantations in the Ivory Coast and elsewhere, TCHO collaborates with growers and co-ops in cacao-producing countries like Peru, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic, teaching growers how to improve methods and secure better prices. “It’s the lowest-cost, most-efficient technology to get the job done,” Rossetto says about the labs, adding it’s not unlike grape growing in Napa Valley where growers can either sell commodity table grapes or get top dollar for premium wine grapes for really good wineries.

The producers now sell from 75 cents up to $8 and margins, boasting big customers like Whole Foods and Starbucks. Across the globe, the chocolate is sold at famous restaurants like Mario Batali’s chain and at Paul Young in London and Fresh and Fresh in Japan. It’s also sold on its website. In 2010, sales were up eight percent across the spectrum and expected to reach double-digit millions and beyond by 2012. First revenues for TCHO started below $1 million in 2009 and tripled last year – demonstrating that fair trade and organic is viable if well supported by believers. Rossetto got friends and family to invest. Today, TCHO produces 10 to 20 tons of chocolate every few weeks from its factory in the heart of San Francisco.

3. Blake Mycoskie

Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes was a kid kicking around in Argentina when the light went off – footwear is a basic need like water and air, and many are without the coverage to protect their feet from harsh environs. He not only launched a fashion movement (the new must-have uniform of school girls) but a charitable movement – distributing over 600,000 pairs of new shoes in 2010 to kids in need through giving partners around the globe.

What changed in him in 2006? Prior to that he demonstrated an entrepreneurial spirit starting five businesses before TOMS including a national campus laundry service. Most visionaries see a  hole needing filling, but with TOMS, he changed the way much of the industry sees its role – the ability not to just churn out profits but also to help children around the world. As a result, others are following suit with programs like the Good Shoe Project introduced by Payless ShoeSource and World Vision and the Shoes2Spare project.

The bottom line for the man behind the little shoe that could? Stuff doesn’t make you happy. “When I started distributing shoes in Ethiopia, South Africa, and South America, I saw that the people had so little, yet seemed to worry so much less than my friends and family back home,” he says. “Instead of stressing over gadgets, they were talking around the campfire.”

 4. Michael Moore

Clearly not everyone’s cup of tea –  Michael Moore can rub audiences and subjects the wrong way with his overwrought hubris, and that is entirely the point. But as he ages, he is learning to be a less obnoxious man of the people, something that has overshadowed supporters and detractors alike as his provocations drew attention away from the filmmaker with a focus on the film character. As one of his fellow filmmakers sees it: “Moore is a genius, who created an entire genre of documentary film making using the reflexive mode, and I view him as a pamphleteer, say a modern Thomas Paine, who says provocative things that aren’t always meant to be taken literally.”

Not the academic ilk of a Kevin Burns nor the inconspicuous diplomacy of Michael Apted, Moore has changed in the way he doesn’t so much get in your face and slap it silly but continues to rock the boat like no other documentary film maker, not exposing tainted meat and animal cruelty as much as exposing our inexcusable apathy in accepting corporate crime, insurance fraud, imperialism via drummed up invasions and tolerance of school bullies.

Is it any wonder he joined protesters staging Occupy Wall Street? Coming to their aid, he said “What you see here, and what you’re seeing across the country, are millions of people who’ve had it.” Moore promised to donate proceeds from his book, Here Comes Trouble, to their effort and to deliver wi-fi to the park and to other demonstrations being held across the nation. “I’ll do what I can do,” he offered, “because these bankers overplayed their hand. They were already rich, but filthy rich wasn’t enough. They are trying to turn our democracy from a democracy into a kleptocracy.”

The Flint native and so-called poster boy for the working class does boast nearly 900,000 Twitter followers who have been stirred and shaken by his bawdy cocktails like Stupid White Men and Fahrenheit 911. And while critics have tried to expose Moore as a hypocrite for owning a million-dollar apartment or sending his child to private school,  Moore remains a bigger than life figure who gets us to think.

 5. Dr. Mehmet Oz

“Who is the new great and powerful Oz?” asked the New York Post about the heart surgeon in scrubs who has taken over Oprah’s time slot and the health-bound viewing audience by storm. Described as a genuine medical folk hero in the making by turning genital warts and controversial diets like HCG into entertainment, the TV doc goes further than Dr. Phil by bypassing tabloid tactics in favor of a bare bones anatomy lecture. Like most successful physicians, he started out wanting a good career without fame, but has become the ear for a world obsessed with dieting, aging, longevity and stress, spending 40 minutes answering studio audience questions which many other arrogant doctors would dismiss out of hand or tell patients they don’t need to know the answers.

“Folks are desperate to have a relationship with their healer,” he says. “Marcus Welby is dead today, and they want a regular doctor who they can have a dialogue with and get truthful answers from. I reach a whole lot of people this way.”

As close to a regular guy as a rock star TV celeb can get, he lives in New Jersey with his wife and four kids and considers himself a hermit who shaves rarely, plays basketball with friends and meditates.  One of his assets is his listening skills – which shouldn’t be undermined as most of us are starved for listeners to our complaints and concerns. A big sign of his ability to change us – patients quoting his advice when visiting their own internists. If Dr. Oz thinks something is kosher, then it probably is kosher.

6. Douglas Holtz-Eakins

Who doesn’t love a conservative who changes his course when needed? Among the new directions in the sails of the conservative economist, praising the once debunked American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 as a stimulus that operated exactly as intended, growing the economy and spawning millions of jobs. The former Congressional Budget Office director and former chief economic advisor to Sen John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, pledged in August to throw support behind the bill.

Meantime, while the Tea Party elements insist global warming is a science fiction concept, Holtz-Eakin is now working with the New Hampshire-based Clean Air-Cool planet, addressing the economic benefits of addressing the very real issue. One proposal that entices him is tax-swapping, imposing a levy on carbon emissions while eliminating the payroll tax.

“We have watched with foreboding as powerful forces in the Republican Party want to close down this debate and reject the idea that this is a problem that needs to be solved,” says Brooks Yeager of the climate policy advocacy group. “Our interest in working with someone like Douglas, who has enormous credibility in conservative ranks and economists and agrees with our fundamental position that needs to be solved, is that he is exceptionally well positioned to reopen this debate.”

7. John Stewart

First, he changed his name from John Leibowitz, then he changed his game from his breakthrough comedy role on The Larry Sanders show to the serious business of changing mainstream media. The Daily Show with John Stewart is highly respected for its moxie in telling it like it is while everyone else tiptoes through the tulips and kisses the backsides of corporate sponsors. Or, as aptly put by Hub Brown of the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University: “The stock-in-trade of The Daily Show is hypocrisy exposing hypocrisy and nobody else has the guts to do it. They really know how to crystallize an issue on all sides, see the silliness everywhere.” A prime example was second guessing the war in Iraq while mainstream press was towing the line of national leaders. Stewart decided to take them to task, lampooning Bush policies.

The Comedy Central staple has scored nine consecutive Emmy awards  validating that yes, perhaps the industry has a liberal slant, but also that the truth hurts less than we think when it comes to bashing the Tea Party or even criticizing our leaders, including President Obama’s failure to make inroads with a ridiculously stubborn congress. “Conditions are what they are and Obama is president,” says the host. “You are judged by how well you negotiate those conditions, not by how excusable the shitty end result is based on that it’s difficult.”

 8. Brad Pitt

While some of our moms refuse to forgive him for what he did to Jen, Pitt has revamped his image from willing victim of a home wrecker to determined home repairer in New Orleans. There has been much banter of him there switching to politics, as he rubs shoulders with Nancy Pelosi and the Chief on the New Orleans Housing Project while his better half works for UNICEF.

It’s an accepted fact no one wields more clout than celebs like Pitt who have huge followings among all age groups and tremendous visibility. While Dave Eggers’ poignant prose draws attention to the flood aftermath in Zeitoun, Pitt is allegedly considered a great mayoral candidate of the city – but it is one of many causes he embraces which led Newsweek Magazine to list him as one of 15 People Who Make America Great. Among his contributions is shedding light on neglected causes in Africa as cameras follow him wherever he and his extended family travel. This was the thinking when he and Jolie say they sold the first picture of their daughter, Shiloh, to People magazine for a reported $4million saying all proceeds would go to charity.

“Knowing that someone was going to hound us for that first photo — and was going to profit immensely for doing it — I just couldn’t live with it,” Pitt told the magazine. “We were able to turn that around and collect millions for people who are really going to need it.” Now as he makes the round to plug his film Moneyball, interviews on NPR and elsewhere highlight the intellectual Pitt – whose sensitivity emerges in the film, just as it did in Benjamin Button illustrating old dogs can learn new tricks at any time.

9. Warren Buffett

Read his lips: Yes, new taxes!!! And please let my rich friends step up to the plate. Billionaire Buffett- who inspired Obama’s millionaires’ tax – challenged owner of Fox News Rupert Murdoch to make his own federal tax returns public, after admitting he pays a lower rate than his secretary and the government should stop coddling the super rich “as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species.” A recent CBS news poll showed most Americans agree with Buffett including many who have taken to those Wall Street protests. Militant conservatives are up in arms about it – no doubt viewing Buffett more of a trader than hero, but hero he is for more ways than one.

His stock went way up when joining forces with Bill Gates to urge the wealthy to join the campaign Giving Pledge and to give away at least half of their fortunes during their lifetimes or after their deaths. The 80-year-old Berkshire Hathaway CEO who wants to work past age 100 is famous for maintaining a frugal lifestyle – living in the same home he bought in Omaha in 1958. But his change has come in the way of being much more bold and out there, so to speak, despite how he might be viewed by fellow rich guys and their heirs. As a philanthropist he has set the bar and in seeking more revenues to fund programs, he shows not all billionaires are out for personal gain.

 10. Van Jones

There were such high hopes when Jones became the top green man in the White House – only succumbing to a malicious Tea Party campaign and resigning. “It has been a tough couple of years,” Jones  confessed. “We went from hope to heartbreak in about a minute…We have the wrong theory of the presidency.”

So he is a changed man for the better in terms of seeing bureaucracy only muddles progress. He is now the leading evangelist of the American Dream Movement in partnership with his own organization, Rebuild the Dream – something he told Alternet was for real progressives in 2012 with the goal to train a million new leaders.

“We’re just glad that the volcano is starting to erupt,” he shares. ” We just want to fight. And there are some pre-existing grassroots assets that need to be re-aligned or redeployed; we’re trying to do that here.” The plan calls for house meetings (with real leadership) as well as protests, networking leaders online and locating dream candidates.  Jones sees his new mission as a social battle like no other in history.

“This is thrilling stuff! The dream-killers on Wall Street — who are so disgusting and so despicable; they are ingrates who are sitting up there laughing at us. I mean, every other bloc of capital that has this much weight, they try to do something to make you like them. Even the polluters, they say, ‘We’ll get clean coal.’ They try to do something. But these people on Wall Street – they just don’t care. So it’s just going to be an epic battle now between the worst people in America, the most selfish people in America, and the most selfless. And that’s going to be amazing.”

Images: Acaben; TCHO; Kwaku Alston; Shankbone; Nayrb7; Atlantic; The jointsstaff; Giving; Tedizen; Americanprogressaction, gadgetdude

The post 10 Men With the Capacity to Change the World appeared first on EcoSalon.

ExclusiveLast month, we began a series of articles looking at progressive issues in the world of equity investment. Our first piece, VCs, Angels and Investing in Women: What Are They Not Thinking?, explored the female business community’s relationship with those groups that play such a major role in driving our economy and business values. What follows is the second article in the series. It focuses on entrepreneurial investment in clean tech and green business.

At the opening of what would become the legendarily (and to some, notoriously) “pro-business” 1980s, President Ronald Reagan took clear and immediate steps to show his commitment to supply-side capitalism. He weakened and busted unions, initiated an unprecedented deregulation movement, and changed tax law to favor corporate interests. He was the champion of “trickle down” economics and, depending whether one sees the man as heroic or demonic, his legacy casts a bright light or dark shadow on us to this day.

In the shadow department, Reagan took an extremely dim view of alternative energy and the budding green movement, in general. This was in part evidenced by his halving the Solar Institute’s budget from 1980 to 1982 and, in 1986, symbolically removing solar panels from the White House.

The panels were clearly a symbolic gesture in the first place. President Jimmy Carter had placed them on the Pennsylvania Avenue mansion in 1979 as a display of American ingenuity and to send a message to that we, as a nation, were committed to exploring environmentally friendly ways to wean ourselves off foreign oil (a national addiction that continues to grip us 30 years later and would, less than a year after the panels went up, play a key role in Carter losing the Presidency). At the installation ceremony, Carter said: “No one can ever embargo the sun or interrupt its delivery to us.”

What was Ronald Reagan saying to the entrepreneurial community when he ripped those solar panels from the roof of the White House – and, through his policies, the nascent alternative energy industry up by its delicate new roots? How did this figure into a free market proposition? Was it a really pro-business? Or simply pro-existing-business?

Better Late than Never

Thirteen years after Ronald Reagan took office, Nancy Floyd got into the green-energy investment business. It was 1993 and it was, as she puts it, “a lonely game.”

Floyd had the chops: In 1982, she founded NFC Energy Corporation, one of the country’s first wind development firms. There she put together more than $30 million in projects and three years later sold the company for a 25-fold return on the original investment. Then, in 1985, she helped found PacTel Spectrum Services which was sold to IBM in 1987.

Yet despite the financial gravitas of the messenger (and a few others like her), the question in the early 1990s remained: when it came to raising green funds, were investors ready to listen?

“At the time, the only market driver was the deregulation of utilities,” remembers Floyd. “There were really no other players or considerations. And though the political winds had changed [with the entrance of the Clinton Administration], our crisis memories are short. OPEC, gas lines, all of it had had been forgotten. Gas was cheap, consumers were apathetic, and the climate crisis was anything but mainstream. Right now, only 50 percent of people believe that [global warming] is real. You can imagine what it was like 20 years ago.”

But Floyd and her small community set out to educate investors as to the possibilities. It was a forward-thinking proposition, but some saw the opportunity (read: a looming crisis) and a discussion around clean tech and “doable” alternative energy began to take shape. This discussion was broad based, and included both environmentalist concerns as well as ROI to be realized by dealing with national and global energy challenges.

Slowly, things began to change, and as we entered the new millennium, says Floyd, forces subtle and less so had brought some hard realities to consumer (and thus investor) consciousness. From Al Gore to Osama bin Laden, climate and cultural realizations had exposed a powerful new marketplace. For investors, an opportunity for “doing well by doing good” had arrived.

“We were [by 2004] and continue to be at a true inflection point,” says Floyd. “Globally, the status quo is untenable. It’s not a spot crisis any more. Big issues have to be resolved and they represent [market] drivers that will play out over decades. It’s not a matter of politics or tree hugging. This is about national and consumer requirements, and business – not on an ideological level, but on a bottom line level.”

Indeed, green investing seems to have come of age. According to Cleantech Group, 13 percent of all venture capital dollars are now going green – making it the largest sector in VC. Comparing just the last quarter of 2010 to the first quarter of this year, investments in clean-tech deals were up 26 percent (54 percent over the same time period last year). Since January, green companies have raised $1.1 billion, and a accompanying surge in green technology jobs appears to be in the wings. Not bad for a down economy – if it wasn’t clear just a few years ago, it’s clear now: this once “progressive” investment arena has achieved lift-off.

For her part, Floyd is no longer a lone wolf. She is founder and Managing Director of Nth Power, a “nothing else but” green tech venture capital firm focused on “energy technology, materials and other related businesses.” The San Francisco-based group currently manages $420 million that’s invested in 58 companies, including “market leaders” in renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal, etc.), energy efficiency, smart grid, clean transportation and green buildings.

And while her efforts clearly target the “doing good” part of the equation, “doing well” for her investors remains paramount. “Our investors are big pensions and corporations,” she points out. “’While we’re differentiated as clean tech, consciousness is a small issue. What they want from us is to look at teams, strategies and execution plans. What’s important is money. And it can be made in clean tech.”

The Game Board – Clean Tech and Double Bottom Line

To understand today’s robust, green equity-investment community, it helps to understand two primary investment angles – “clean tech” and “double bottom line.”

Floyd’s Nth Power is a VC firm dedicated to clean tech. “It” believes that “the way society values and uses energy is in the midst of a significant transformation will lead to the widespread adoption of energy technologies and the creation of new companies led by a new breed of energy entrepreneurs. With the growing consumer demand for reliable, digital quality power, questions regarding the viability (and price volatility) of coal, oil and other fossil fuels, and the growing threat of global climate change, the opportunity for technology innovation in the energy sector has never been greater.”

Quite a mission/vision/pitch. But the bottom line is that there are clean tech markets to be tapped and mastered. Aside from those market leaders mentioned earlier, these also include biofuel, conservation, recycling and waste reduction, sustainable agriculture and manufacturing, and much more.

The other camp, or investment approach, is the much-discussed double bottom line (or triple or quadruple or whatever the case may be). This view says that one should measure the pay off of investments in more than one way: hence the – at least – “double.” Cash return on equity remains the driver, of course. But another measurement might be, say, job creation, or literacy or poverty alleviation – or an environmentally positive impact. (We’ll further explore the broader benefits of double bottom line investing in an upcoming article in this series.)

A perfect example of such a VC firm is DBL Investors, which was created from the spin-off of the Bay Area Equity Fund I from JPMorgan in January 2008. The group’s double bottom line strategy is “to invest in companies with the potential do deliver top-tier venture capital returns while working with [its] companies to enable social, environmental and economic improvement in the regions in which they operate.”

One of the firm’s two Managing Partners is Nancy Pfund. Formerly a Managing Director at JP Morgan, her financial background and focus on wealth creation is matched by her commitment to outcomes such as eliminating poverty. She explains her firm’s relationship with green investing: “Our second bottom line is having a positive impact on the communities where our companies end up doing business. That can be a positive environmental impact, and that can be by creating jobs though clean tech. Many of our companies do many positive things, not just one.”

Her partner, Cynthia Ringo, is formerly a Managing Director of VantagePoint Venture Partners. “We play in the venture capital space, which is of course driven by innovation,” she says. “Any venture capitalist is looking for disruptive companies that will displace incumbents and generate wealth. We also happen to be looking at poverty alleviation – sort of giving a lifeline to people. Clean tech is fantastic at that.”

As it was for Floyd, 2004 was an important transition time for Pfund and Ringo’s double bottom line approach. “Our target was $75 million,” says Pfund. “It took us a few years to do it but we did close in 2004. We had lots and lots of investors, including banks, pension funds, foundations, etc. At that time, clean tech was not what it is today, so we didn’t focus our marketing on that, per se, but we did focus on a broader double bottom line. In the end, though, 60 percent of the fund went toward clean tech.”

Says Ringo: “Clean tech is perhaps the most obvious way to accomplish our mission, because we will not take a reduction in a financial return in order to accomplish a social goal, and this concept is well understood in this sector. The business factors related to clean tech are very strong.”

Raising their second fund in 2008 was even tougher, given the economic environment. “But we just had our final close,” says Pfund. “It was for about $140 million, so we almost doubled the size from the first time around. Part of that is because our focus is now on the Western United States and not just Northern California and the other part is out strong track record. But, still, 50 percent of this fund will be green focused.”

The reasons for success in clean tech investment are increasingly consumer driven, and they’re not just about climate change. “Where’s that consumer pull coming from?” asks Ringo. “Maybe it’s because people want to reduce the amount of money that they’re spending on their utilities or on transportation. Maybe they are concerned about the health impact of certain types of products. Looking back [prior to the changes of the early ‘00s], there was not a lot of consumer pull and those that were making demands were called tree-huggers and other derogatory names like that. It was a much smaller demographic than it is today. Now, if you speak to a panel of mothers who range in age from 25 to 45, how high do you think their concerns around issues of health for their family go? Very.”

Where Angels Come to Play

Whether the focus is in pure clean tech or double bottom line, angel investors are, of course, also in the green mix. By definition, however, these have traditionally been individual players in arena, gathering their own contacts and research to make smart decisions. But one group, Northwest Energy Angels, is taking a pooled intelligence approach to mining these rich opportunities.

The Seattle-based non-profit is a membership organization of private investors that only funds clean tech entrepreneurs. They believe that through such investment they can find “the intersection of our desire to make successful angel investments, our personal values and the world we want to leave our children.” The group is comprised of “seasoned angel investors and venture capitalists, as well as new angels learning by participating in a cooperative and supportive environment” that place “a high value on sustainability, the ecosystems that support life on earth and social responsibility.”

Kiki Tidwell is a leading clean tech angel investor who sits on the Northwest Energy Angels board of directors. Last July, she was admitted to the Kauffman Fellows Program, “a highly sought-after two-year program dedicated exclusively to the world of venture capital and the cultivation of new high-technology, high-growth, high-impact companies.”

Her background leaves little question as to why she’s sought out that clean tech sweet spot where making a profit meets making a difference.

“I was in computers back in 1982, teaching people how to use the first mini-computers,” she recalls. “I was right there during the start up of that industry and to me clean tech has the same vibe. We don’t know what will be the next Microsoft but there will be huge winners. On the philanthropy side, I’ve seen how renewable energy and our tremendous natural resources can have a major impact, especially in rural economic development. (Tidwell has lived in Idaho since 1981 and is the president of the Tidwell Idaho Foundation, as well as Idaho Land & Pine, Inc.)

“When I was serving on the board of the Idaho Community Foundation – the Governor’s Council on Families and Children – I saw these tiny farm communities struggling to meet their social service needs and keep their farms going year round, even when the cost of irrigation pumping runs into the millions. Approaches using geothermal, solar, wind and biomass resources are going to be critical to these farm communities.”

Tidwell says angels face a different investment proposition than VC investors. “I think one of the main differences is that because it’s our own money we [angels] are investing, we have the luxury as to invest in the one out of a hundred opportunities that looks good to us. And we don’t have to deploy capital in a ten-year timeframe. That said, the venture capitalist has resources devoted to understanding some of the issues, as well as more time to devote to helping companies post-investment.”

The point of her group, then, is to deal with some of these issues by promoting clean tech and educating angels around some of the science and business issues that are in play.

“By banding together, we can share a lot of information,” she says. “We have speakers who come in to address specific technologies. We have discussion groups between investors about issues in our portfolio companies. We have presenting companies giving us pitches once a month.”

A Leg Up

Whether it’s clean tech or double bottom line investing, VC or angel money, what was once a cutting edge approach to equity investment is now not only big business – it’s big politics and policy, too.

“It’s a very complex sector,” says Floyd. “There are so many considerations given the policy and regulatory overlay. Federally and globally there are a multitude of regulations to be aware of and, of course, there’s a whole world of incentives out there.”

Mastering these polices, regulations and incentives thus becomes a major value-add for groups like Nth Power and DBL. For green investors, working with the likes of Floyd, Pfund and Ringo is like having the combination of a good agent who knows the people you should know, and a good financial specialist who knows how to work every regulation and incentive detail to your monetary advantage.

DBL realized this early on during their first play. “It started with the first fund and actually morphed into a big idea,” says DBL’s Pfund. “We had to think of what’s in it for a company to site in a low-income neighborhood. And so we thought, well, when you go into these targeted economic zones like Richmond or parts of Oakland [California] you can get benefits in terms of tax treatment or low interest loans or even grants at times. We saw that worked very well, so we kind of layered on other ways to navigate that public/private sector interface to the benefit of both parties.”

This approach is particularly important in the green sector. “You are being watched by everyone from the local chapter of the Sierra Club to the mayor to the governor, and they can either help or hurt your business,” explains Pfund. “Reaching out and embracing that is part of what we advocate; we have been able to show how that’s beneficial and companies end up doing it themselves once they get off the ground.”

Shifting Winds

It’s no secret that this thriving arena has been the beneficiary of a type of affirmative action in recent years, with government playing a helpful role and, in some ways, simply getting out of the way. As the nation has warmed to the notion that Washington and State Capital USA do have roles to play in encouraging clean tech and environmental protection, the flames of this investment community are stoked.

Conversely, as seen during the ’80s, a lack of attention and accompanying incentives can allow those flames to all but die out. And it’s also no secret that there’s clearly a different political climate now than there was just two years ago when Barack Obama took office – and, incidentally, replaced the solar panels on the White House.

Yes, enter the Tea Party and science-deniers and the success of campaigns well-financed by a Supreme Court-loosed, corporate political-giving system that’s hostile to those potentially “disruptive” entrepreneurs that DBL’s Ringo speaks about. Add to that a growing public intolerance for government subsidies – at least for those that are on the agenda of media savvy interests – and, well, what’s a well-meaning, robust-but-still-requiring-incentives investment community to do?

“The pitch of the entire discussion [around green tech and the development of green-friendly business] has to change,” says Pfund. “We have to ask, what’s the subject matter that we’re speaking and thinking about when it comes to green investing? Certainly it’s very political and we get huge questions about the role of the Tea Party or the Republican Congress on a lot of the programs that are subsidizing clean tech. And those are good questions that are not easy to answer, so you have to develop a plan B. Clean tech is cleaner and getting cheaper, but it’s not as cheap as coal and natural gas. We just aren’t there yet, so that’s not the story.

“It gets back to this notion of connectedness,” she says. “I made a speech at Stanford [University] recently on large-scale solar in the deserts and [Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan] George Schultz was in the audience. He more or less said ‘I agree with you but you should ditch the environmental argument and just focus on energy security and our over-dependence on foreign oil.’ He’s not alone in saying that.

“Some Republicans, and some Democrats for that matter, hate the clean tech argument. They like the energy security argument, so he is saying face facts. The Republicans are a potent political force, so we need to speak their language. You do whatever you can to get it sold. And you don’t want to be pigeonholed into saying that this makes sense only from a global warming point of view and have people not want to talk to you. You don’t want to sabotage your argument by making it unnecessarily narrow.”

All told, it’s like any effective marketing strategy. You size up your audience and figure out what will be most appealing message. Says Tidwell, who is particularly interested in smart grid technology, about positioning: “This is not about tree hugging. This is about financial gain for investors, consumer benefit and energy security.”

The Color of Money

In the end, it might be counterintuitive to think mindsets that have been saddled with identifiers ranging from “progressive” (the most diplomatic) to “environmentalist wacko” (dismissive) could not only point to money-making propositions, but to the money making propositions that have the power to drive our economy and national security for decades to come.

Looking back, Ronald Reagan’s (and other “pro-business” leaders like him) commitment to existing enterprise at the expense of entrepreneurial activity was shortsighted on its surface. Forward-thinking government support, if not outright incentive is the cornerstone of what it means to be pro-business. 

For now, the Floyds, Pfunds, Ringos and Tidwells of the world go to sleep dreaming about two kinds of green.

“What I wake up thinking about is what any entrepreneur thinks about,” says Floyd. “The challenges faced by individual young companies.”

Image: quinn.anya

The post The Color of Money: VCs, Angels and Green Investing appeared first on EcoSalon.

Pop-ups fill more than just empty storefronts; they fill our need for discounts.

As far as winsome, widespread trends go, we just might pop till we drop. It started with those makeshift outlets for Halloween costumes and Christmas trinkets peddled in vacated storefronts that can’t possibly lease for what the landlord is asking. But these days, with more empty storefronts begging for a refill, we’re witnessing the rise of the highly respectable pop-up. It’s the hybrid vehicle of choice for inventive chefs, green fashionistas, artists and even compassionate educators, as seen from Brooklyn’s indie designer venues, L.A.’s vintage pop-ups all the way to Egypt’s Tahrir Square.

As reported in Good, the makeshift daycare for toddlers was set up by demonstrators to accommodate mothers wishing to join the historic protests amid the closing of schools in Cairo. Along with ordinary moms, some teachers were among the many professionals storming Tahrir, and the kids were kept at a safe distance and entertained with activities like painting or doing their own micro-marches around the square.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then the pop-up is the brainchild of a needy entrepreneurial spirit frustrated by banks, greedy landlords and bureaucracy – the father of convention. If a bunch of anti-war hippies could transform Yasgur’s Farm in rural New York into a weekend music festival venue, why can’t eager foodies in our cities strut their saute pans in makeshift cafes in empty storefronts or parked alongside a street fair? It’s all part of what EcoSalon has described as part of a foodie underground movement – which is stirring great excitement in L.A., NYC and San Francisco, where foodies feed.

Take the now-closed Mission Street Food pop-up feed house, housed until June in the unassuming Lung Shan Chinese take-out joint in San Francisco. Each week, a guest chef prepped top fair for diners in the Mission District, a veritable indie culinary ghetto known as the go-to place for innovative small plates and ethnic fusion. By infiltrating underused kitchens here and elsewhere in the Bay Area, young talented chefs can live out the fantasy without the risk of losing their coats.

It all sprung from the creative vision of chef Anthony Myint and his wife, Karen Leibowitz, who started out vending pork belly sandwiches from a taco truck before moving the operation into the Chinese restaurant. Myint also has opened Commonwealth, a progressive American high-end eatery which donates part of its tasting menu proceeds to charities. It serves as a charitable model in haute cuisine, perhaps the same way pop-ups serve as a business model in an economic downturn and beyond.

“I don’t think the pop up is specifically tied to the recession as much as it is to social media,” Myint explains, citing the advent of blogging as expedient advertisement. “Let’s say 20 years ago, if you had a pop up you couldn’t get any attention because you would basically be depending on word of mouth but now blogging has facilitated the trend with a lot of street food vendors using Twitter to get out their whereabouts to customers.”

Myint believes that people have segued into pop-ups as a culture, something that is perhaps here to stay for open-minded diners looking past what Myint terms the “white tablecloth experience.” In his case, the pop-up experiment has given way to a new eatery called Mission Chinese Foods, named in the top 100 Bay Area Restaurants by The San Francisco Chronicle.

“Business is overwhelming,” boasts Myint, whose other accolades include being named one of Chow.com’s 13 most influential people in the food world, Eater.com’s empire builder of the year for San Francisco, and Charitable Chef of the year by SF Weekly. It’s all a far way to travel since his days as line chef at Bar Tartine. His story demonstrates the brilliance and ingenuity lurking behind many pop-ups, which might first give off an impression of being transitory and unstable.

Such would seem the case with fashion reps hosting pop-up shops in various towns, such as A Current Affair, which hosted a pop-up marketplace in downtown Los Angeles delivering rare vintage garb from Halston, Lanvin, Comme des Garcons, YSL and Chanel for a $10 admission fee. Even EcoSalon got into the act last year, hosting EcoSalon Shops!, selling an array of sustainable garments produced by 20 emerging designers at a green venue  in Manhattan.

“Pop ups are a great way for small brands to have an audience with customers they might not have had,” explains EcoSalon Fashion Editor, Amy Dufault. “So far, I don’t know of any pop-ups enabling designers to have their own venues, but there are lots of designers within the community for events like these, where they can create solid relationships and continue in the vein of more pop-ups together.”

In this way, the temporary booths are not much different than the accessible parking lot flea market, where sellers can circumvent the red tape to market their wares – the same way East Village pop artists like Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring bypassed the exclusive agent and gallery system to take their graffiti art directly to the people in the streets. They put themselves on the map, earned recognition and ended up in the major leagues with high priced sales and clout.

In fact, the pop up concept is an age-old way of doing business by carpet and tea traders, milkmen and flower growers pushing carts long before we relied on small business loans, rent control and foreign fuel to put food on our tables. Pop up power to the people? It might just be the new modus operandi of generations tired of banking on the traditional route to visibility and viability. As with everything, it will be up to consumers to decide if the temporary movement gets a firm footing in the marketplace.

Images:  Charleston’s Thedigitel; Good; A Current Affair; KQED; Museyon

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In a former life, I worked at an agency and I can remember the day we celebrated landing Starbucks as a client. The young-at-heart caffeine king had some hip and clever style, which got our creative department’s juices flowing, and they were based in Seattle – a bonus for quick runs from SF to a city that was a pretty cool place to suffer business trips. Most important, though, was Starbucks’ relatively positive reputation. Though all agreed that the coffee monster was a local-corner-coffee-shop killer, clients with an earth-and-employee-friendly rep were few and far between.

I also remember the first time I arrived on-site at the company’s headquarters. Behind the well-designed doors, past the state-of-the-art eco-office interior, and inside the elegant, glassy and awesomely coffeed conference rooms, our kick-off meeting was (drum roll) … just like any other. It was about time and money and effective communication and, you know what? It occurred to me that that was just fine. That’s what a corporation is supposed to have meetings about, and despite a recent and inane court ruling, they – excuse me – it is not human and it should not be expected to display human qualities. I mean, the people were nice and all, but the purpose of our being there couldn’t have been clearer: It was time to do business.

That said, the Starbucks story – and the fact that as we speak the company is so frantically trying figure out what to do about its damn paper cups – is a pretty good one.

Here’s the deal with the cups: About 3 billion of the more than 200 billion paper cups that end up in U.S. dumps each year are from Starbucks. This is a bad thing and the company has been flailing around for years now trying to figure out what to do about it. Reports Triple Pundit, Starbucks says “disposing of the cups is the top environmental concern of its customers. The angst over the problem has reached the highest levels of the company.”

Supposedly, eco-focused CEO Howard Schultz has promised that by 2012 all Starbucks cups will be recyclable.

They even had a really big meeting about it. Earlier this year, Starbucks hosted its second Cup Summit at MIT, hosting “municipalities, raw material suppliers, cup manufacturers, retail and beverage businesses, recyclers, NGOs, and academic experts together to drive the development of solutions that will make both paper and plastic cups more broadly recyclable.” Attendees even included competitors such as Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s.

This all fits in with the Starbucks’ green-and-all-around good-guy thing, says Fast Company, as “the company is pursuing more LEED certifications and working toward a goal of purchasing 100 percent fair-trade and Coffee and Farmer Equity-certified coffee by 2015.” Indeed, the Starbucks as standout corporate citizen story is well documented – and well marketed.

Now this shouldn’t translate into a non-critical or even a non-judgmental approach to the whole Starbucks phenomenon. Anti-union issues and the previously mentioned local-shop carnage aside, no matter how green a process and product, more stuff – and more stores – means just that, and no spin can erase that footprint. (See “Green? Perhaps. But iPads Don’t Grow on Trees.”) Says Fast Company: “Environmentally… Starbucks has bigger concerns than disposable cups. Its 8,832 company-owned stores and its international supply chain both affect resource use and climate change more than cups in the trash.”

On the other hand, I’m not calling into question the intentions of Schultz and his reportedly hopped-up-on-the-environment team. They do seem to be doing some good in a world where big business is more known for its trail of slime than caring about what is left in our dumps. Nevertheless, they are corporate folk and they represent a money-making team that’s busily trying to bounce back after their stock hit a “multi-year low” in 2008.

What’s good about all this is that a major corporate player knows the concerns of its customers and that it sees its competitive advantage, its winning formula, if you will, as pounding out a constant and consistently green drumbeat. Yes, the only establishment to ever make Cat Stevens seem corporate knows that a good many of us care about those cups and have a habit of buying into, literally, feeling better about our ourselves. (I’m partial to Triple Grande Lattes and my editor, I’m sure, has her own formula regarding the relationship between my word count and my caffeine intake.)

And it’s here where we note what famous criminal Willie Sutton supposedly told a reporter when asked why he robbed banks: “That’s where the money is.” In today’s marketing world, to a growing extent, green is where the money is.

So consider Starbucks a bit of gauge regarding one of our biggest hopes – the extent to which committing to the approach makes sound economic sense in terms of how it plays with consumers. This is not to say that the corporate world will ever see the light. In fact, it has no eyes to see. What it does have is a nose for coin. And Starbucks is following its nose. As a result, hopefully, they’ll figure out what to do with their damn cups.

Image: serendipitys

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