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Cause: Eat, Drink, Be Merry, Do Good
Imagine a bar and restaurant that, like Newman’s Own, gives all of its profits to charity.Beer and benevolence, it’s been called. Drafts and donations. More fun, in any case, than salad dressing.That’s the idea behind Cause, a philanthropub (“a bar...
Patagonia helps to save….Patagonia
The more I learn about Patagonia Inc., the more impressed I am with the way that Yvon Chouinard and his colleagues run their business. The outdoor gear and clothing company supports what it calls the “silent sports” of climbing, skiing, snowboarding...
Green Business: Technology Takes on Food Waste
By now, you’ve surely heard about the environmental impact of food waste. But the scale of the problem is not as well known. In a recent report, the Natural Resources Defense Council came up with these admittedly inexact but eye-popping numbers:...
Deep Green Investing: A Closer Look
As you’ve no doubt heard, Bill McKibben and his allies at 350.org have launched a national campaign to persuade colleges, universities, churches, foundations and, yes, people like you and me, to stop investing in the fossil fuel industry. The...
How to Fail at Marketing Green Products: Clorox Green Works
This breathtakingly dumb digital ad campaign from Clorox Green Works runs the risk of insulting the consumers of its environmentally-friendly cleaning products while managing to ridicule millions of people who are trying to be more conscious about...
Are These Top Rated Businesses Really Sustainable? Maybe?
Canada’s oil sands: Sustainable?Here comes a new list of the “most sustainable corporations in the world,” and it’s a doozy.Two of the top five companies on the 2013 Global 100 list are oil and gas companies:3. Norway’s Statoil ASA4. Finland’s Neste...
The Plateau of the Electric Car
A Better Place battery switching stationI’m driving a Better Place Renault Fluence all-electric car from Tel Aviv to a kibbutz in the northern Negev, about a 60-mile trip. I can’t decide whether to keep my eyes on the road, on the GPS system to make...
Miya: Delivering Clean Drinking Water, at Scale
Over the years, I’ve heard and written about many efforts to provide clean drinking water to the world’s poor people–Procter & Gamble’s PUR, Unilever’s Pureit, Lifestraw from Vestergaard Frandsen and PackH20 from Greif. (See, for example,...
In Israel, Clean Tech is Not a New Thing
David Ben-Gurion, clean tech pioneerSounding more like a clean tech venture capitalist than a head of state, David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, once said that Israel requires “the study of desalination, massive utilization of...
Tires and the Second Chemical Revolution
"If we’ve made it once already, why should we make it again?”Alan Barton, the chief executive officer of Lehigh Technologies, is talking about tires, but his question could be asked about almost any product.In a world of limited resources and...
John Mackey, and the Paradox of Profits
I’m reading an advance copy of new book called Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business by John Mackey, the founder and co-Ceo of Whole Foods Market, and business school prof Raj Sisodia. It’s very good, with useful...
Who’s Responsible for Factory Conditions in Poor Countries?
Just who is responsible for the fire in a garment factory in Bangladesh that killed more than 100 workers in November?The factory owner? The government of Bangladesh? US and European brands and retailers who bought the clothes made there? Shoppers...
