Apr 24 2008

Earth Day - a different view

Here's a little different look at Earth Day. The Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital blog carried a lively post asking: Earth Day: Green Yawn? Madison Avenue has embraced Earth Day and is slapping green labels on everything from "Earth Month" candles offered by a beauty products company to - my favorite - potato chips cooked in a solar-powered factory.

"Every company is out there touting 'we're green' -- it's the new requirement for being a good corporate citizen," Allen Adamson, managing director of WPP Group's branding consultancy Landor Associates, said in a WSJ story. "The noise level is so high now," he says. "The first few people into it had some benefit. Now it's a cost of entry."

Yes, there's an awfully sloppy embrace of Earth Day by a lot of opportunistic companies but, then, there's also a lot of well-intentioned efforts by other corporations, institutions and just folks trying to make a green difference. We saw more than 1,300 PG&E employees and families join with employees from other companies and groups last Saturday to collect trash and plant trees at parks and beaches around northern California. Some of my neighbors in San Francisco launched a block clean-up.

Over the last ten years, the California State Parks Foundation's Earth Day Restoration and Cleanup event has engaged thousands of volunteers statewide at hundreds of state and community park locations. More than $3 million dollars has been raised to support the parks. That's a lot of green.

Posted by: Leonard Anderson | Comments (0) digg delicioussend to a friendprint entry

 

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Community , Environment , Partners

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  • This is being rather generous to Lutz. 1. The "Volt", in no small part, will be targeted as a product to people who care about energy and environmental issues. These people don't embrace Lutz' antideluvian concepts of rejecting science. How responsible is it for a GM executive to be rejecting the science? 2. As well, Lutz didn't exactly sound too enthusiastic about the Volt itself. 3. And, GM public communications has 'defended' Lutz in rather absurd ways. -A Siegel
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  • This article is right on - small businesses have a huge role to play in sustainability. Not only do they add up in aggregate, but many small businesses operate in industries that can have a significant environmental impact depending on the exact practices, like dry cleaners, auto repair shops, etc. Green is also starting to affect the bottom line more and more, customers are increasingly voting with their feet for more sustainable businesses as can be seen from the growth of sites like http://www.ecovian.com. This is also a huge opportunity for small businesses to leapfrog their bigger brothers by being more agile in adopting these measures. -Emily
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  • Great entry, Katie. Love the level of detail you managed to get in there! Probably won't be able to compete with coal and oil any time the next decade, but definitely a great technology to look into! Keep it up :) -Rune (Norway)
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