Green Marketing

Sun's in

Let's take a break from fighting over how green the holidays should be and find a leading, globally known company with a strong environmental strategy that it is firmly committed to and that it communicates with great conviction.

What names come to mind?

No, not that one... that was a joke, right?

Fine, let me suggest one. Sun Microsystems. Sun offers lots of fascinating, well-substantiated content on a multitude of beautifully designed pages. A very quick tour:

The About Sun section of the company's Web site quickly takes you to the Corporate Responsibility pages and the Eco Responsibility page. The content offers the sort of business and environmental value convergence in a language that C-level persons love, including a quote from President and CEO, Jonathan Schwartz.

"It's more obvious each day that extreme efficiency is good for the environment and great for business. Customers want this same eco responsibility in their datacenters."

To find out more, you can go to Greening Our Business, where you can learn about the company's energy usage, carbon footprint, and more. Or to Products and Services, which tells you about product-related environmental goals and accomplishments, and points you directly to Sun hardware that plays well and green. They also have success stories from the company's customer reference program, building credibility for the validity of Sun's environmental and technical claims. And, once the Product Life Cycle approaches its natural end, Sun helps organizations recycle and dispose of hardware in a responsible manner.

But there's much more. Watch news from the launch of Sun's Eco Innovation Initiative and see what you think of the presentation by company executives, including VP of Eco Responsibility, Dave Douglas. You can also watch Douglas in a podcast conversation with Joel Makower.  Douglas' excellent blog provides further insight into green marketing, green IT, greenwashing, and related issues. Of course, it's a company blog and represents the corporation's view, but it offers lots of food for thought and sheds much sobering light on companies' ostensible green merits.

Think of other companies whose green story offers a similar mix of credibility, interest, and passion.

You can't? Why is that?

Don't worry, you still get to spend money even if you're celebrating a green holiday

Always a little behind, the New York Times glibly restates the conversation that pits a green vs. a conventional, consumption-heavy Christmas (or other preferred winter holiday).

Frivolity versus severity. Materialism versus sacrifice. Welcome to the “green” holidays.

The holidays have always been an emotionally combustible time for families, bringing together a sometimes volatile mix of siblings, crotchety grandparents, and ill-behaved children. But in recent years, a new figure has joined the celebration, to complicate the proceedings even further: the green evangelist of the family—the impassioned activist bent on eradicating the wasteful materialism of the holidays.

Otherwise known, at least to skeptical traditionalists, as the new Grinch.

The article goes on to discuss that the positions are not as clear-cut, but the unfortunate simplification, enforced by the illustration, has already taken root.

However, if you're interested in combining your environmental holiday beliefs with a little depressing excess, help is on the way. Barneys just mailed out a catalogue entitled "Have a Green Holiday" and presents the same theme on its website.

Gorgeous green gifts, fabulously fair-trade fashion, sensationally sustainable swag, orgasmic organic denim and cashmere, environmentally conscious tchotchkes of all descriptions + philanthropic gestures to warm the cockles of your heart.

The papers and printers used in the catalogue are said to be "certified to Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standards." Different leaf-shaped markers note items "supporting a particular charity" or that are "philanthropic." For example, "a portion of the proceeds from the sale" of each $805 Fendi shopping bag will be donated to Sustainable Harvest International. And "a portion of the proceeds from the sale" of each $3,110 Valextra laptop case will be given to The Climate Project. The actual amount of these "portions" is not defined for the reader. I would hope that savvy consumers expect more disclosure than that. Barneys shoppers spending healthy sums on these luxury items should really push the company to give them more than a green-laced lining to their holiday shopping. If you can afford these gifts, you are not that easily persuaded, are you?

By the way, if you're not familiar with the Forest Stewardship Council, consider a visit, including a review of their certification process for paper and printing and green building.

Build and understand a green PC. It's not that hard.

Bloggers and writers focusing on green-themed discussions (present party included) have a way of closing statements and blog entries with questions, some rhetorical, some less so. You don't want to overstate grim facts or ruin your workday thinking too much about the more depressing aspects of ecological change, such as mass extinctions. So you sometimes try to couch a hint in form of a question and hope the readers think along, but maybe the readers are simply irritated by that practice.

That's when it may be a good idea to get down to more basic, tangible concerns. ExtremeTech still features an interesting article by John Brandon about building a green PC, originally published by PC Magazine in March 2007. If you forgot or never knew how much power the different parts of a PC consume and how that consumption relates to global warming, or if you don't know what can go environmentally right and wrong in the manufacturing process of PC components, you have a neat primer here. The third section of that article gets around to hard drive storage. The writer chooses a hard drive from the Barracuda drive family made by our client, Seagate Technology.

I installed a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160GB SATA hard drive for two reasons. First, this single-platter drive uses less energy than a two-platter drive would. And second, SATA uses slightly less energy than IDE. The 7200.10 drive is lead-free, of course, and smaller, so it will leave less hazardous waste when it's thrown out. Next year, both Samsung and Seagate will introduce new drives with more power-saving features, cycling down faster when not in use. They'll be more energy-efficient, too. If you've got the money, upgrade your green PC with a better drive once they are released.

Seagate actually already released a hybrid drive, the Momentus 5400 PSD Hybrid, which combines solid-state storage with traditional disk platters and is said to reduce power utilization by 50 percent.

Even if you aren't interested in building your own green PC, you may want to know which the top three "energy offenders" in traditional PCs are, so you can make an informed purchasing decision.

By the way, if you want to pursue this avenue some more, one way to do so would be a Green Technology Online Expo offered by PC Mag. I find the concept intriguing, since convention centers, events, and the travel needed to get to or away from them have a huge resource impact (plus they take people away from their regular work and families for too often, too long). You can register and see what happens.

Will we fly again?

So, having received a gift certificate, I decided to try out the TerraPass method of carbon offsetting for recent flights to and from Florence, Italy. TerraPass delivers a smooth, sinless shopping experience. I'm still bothered by the self-congratulatory tone of much of the content on the company's pages and I have doubts about the validity of the "offset" concept. But it certainly appears verifiable that a traveler's purchase contributes to the generation of energy from renewable sources in order to balance out the use of conventional fuel.

A site visitor can select categories for offset consideration, including flight. A basic diagram explains how TerraPass works.

You can use a calculator to figure out how much environmental damage your flights caused and what it would cost to offset it with a TerraPass certificate. If you decide to purchase such a certificate, you can be on your way again shortly.

TerraPass does provide some disclosure in case you wonder where the money goes or how the flight calculator works. Calculations are based on assumptions that use protocols defined by the World Resources Institute, an environmental 'think tank'.

Especially around Florence and Pisa, one can easily see the layer of smog from airport and highway traffic, obscuring views and shrouding the hills. A group of influential business people in Siena is intent on expanding the small local airport at Ampugnano for tourist travel, with passive support from the mayor and vigorous resistance from many of the people who live in the area. I hope the expansion won't happen, but it has a good chance of success.

What are practical alternatives to flying for international travelers?