green business ideas

Business Meeting? Think Green by Meeting Online

jplatt — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:00:00 -0400

Every time you drive or fly to a meeting, or ask someone else to drive or fly to meet you, you're contributing to global warming.

One way you can reduce your impact on the environment (and save some of your company's rapidly disappearing monetary resources) is by meeting online. There are plenty of services offering teleconferencing or web conferencing, but ThinkGreenMeeting.com will not only save you some green, it will show you how much you are going green by meeting online.

TGM (as I call it) has a neat little online calculator where you can figure out how much carbon will be generated by the people driving or flying to an in-person meeting, and who much you will save by meating online instead. For example, according to their calculator, if five people were flying to a meeting, it would take 25 trees to offset that meeting's carbon footprint.

(Obviously, that's a generalization. The calculator doesn't take distance or other factors into account, but still, it's a nice illustration of a meeting's impact.)

The service offers flat, monthly fees based on how many people will be attending your meatings. If you need three "seats," the service starts at just $9.95 a month for unlimited meetings. And to get you started, the first month is free!

Give it a try. You may never fly again! (Now if I could just get my next family reunion to meet this way...)

Greener DVD Perfect for Business & Direct Mail

jplatt — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 06:00:00 -0500

Businesses use giveaway DVDs all the time to promote their products and services. But truth be told, everyone knows that a vast majority of these DVDs are going to end up in the garbage. What's a responsible marketer to do?

A company called CD Digital Card has a solution: their new Flex DVD Replication service. Their patent-pending new DVDs use half as much plastic as regular DVDs, and can be "flexed" to a pretty dramatic degree without breaking. The disks have the same data capacity as regular DVDs, but are "designed with an environmentally friendly chemical composition" (although they don't go into many details about what's actually different).

Since the disks weigh less and can be bent, they don't need as much protection, and can be mailed with less packaging, which is always good news for our landfills. It also reduces postage costs, which is good news for companies in tough economic times.

Until all data is digital, it's smart thinking like this that will make a difference.

New HP Laptop Uses 97% Less Packaging

jplatt — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 10:00:00 -0400

The last time I bought a computer it came with approximately 87 pounds of cardboard, plastic and Styrofoam packaging.

Okay, so maybe it wasn't quite that much. But buying a computer (or just about any piece of home electronics) can quickly teach you how important it is to reduce the amount of packaging that comes on the products we make, sell or buy. More packaing equals more waste, and more waste equals less trash. (Plus more packaging means more weight, and therefore costs, to deliver a product.)

HP and Walmart agree. The computer maker just won the giant retailer's Home Entertainment Design Challenge, which called for companies to reduce the environmental impact of their products. HP's new Pavilion dv6929 Entertainment Notebook embraces this ideal by using a whopping 97% less packaging. The laptop is shipped to stores in its own messenger bag, which itself is made from 100% recycled materials. The bag contains everything the buyer will need to use his or her new computer, and they get to take the entire package home with them when they buy it.

HP is shipping the laptops to Walmart inside the messenger bags, which protect them perfectly, with three computers and bags per shipping container.

Meanwhile, the packaging isn't the only thing green about this laptop. It features "aggressive power-management settings help reduce notebook power consumption" and comes with a free recycling option from HP. Nice.

The dv6929 isn't available online -- shipping it in a box would kind of defeat the purpose -- but it is available at select Walmart stores. Click here to find out if it's available in your area.

PC Power Management Tools Save Companies Money and Energy

jplatt — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0400

Ah, the power of the PC -- or should I say the power consumption of the PC?

The average PC uses somewhere in the range of 600kw hours of electricity per year -- more if it is left on 24/7, an error that all too many computer users make.

If just one computer uses that much energy, imagine the cost of an entire network of computers. A business could have a dozen, a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand PCs on-site. And boy do they have a combined impact on an organization's electricity bill.

Wondering what to do about this? Smart companies are installing programs that can help manage and control PC power usage throughout their networks. NightWatchman from 1E and Surveyor from Verdiem seem to be two of the most popular. Each program lets companies set building-wide policies that send PCs into standby mode when they are not being used and turn all PCs on and off at certain times of the day. Unsaved data is saved before shutdowns, so users never have anything to worry about.

1E says companies using its product can save $50 per PC per year which dramatically saving greenhouse gases. Verdiem says its product can save $20-$60 per PC per year. Both companies say their programs pay for themselves in a matter of months.

By the way, individual users don't need to wait for corporate policy to take control of their PC's power usage. You can easily change several simple settings in Windows which could cut your PC power usage as much as 50%. A great article at PC World tells you how.

Give these solutions a try. We'll all breathe just a little bit easier.

Learn How Wal-Mart is Greening its Truck Fleet

jplatt — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0400

Wal-Mart loves to go green if it will save the company green. The company has made several recent moves to reduce its environmental footprint while saving costs, and according to a recent Reuters article, Wal-Mart's trucking fleet leeds the way in these efforts.

Here's what they've done so far:

1. Trucks now carry less fuel. This keeps weight down, which makes the trucks more efficient.

2. They're using fuel-efficient tires. You can't go wrong there. (You can read more about fuel-efficient tires here.)

3. Wal-Mart has added controls that allow drivers to turn off cab engines while still keeping refrigeration systems running -- a major energy-saver. (Shorepower's Electrified Parking Spaces are another technology that helps cut down on use of diesel fuel when a vehicle is parked.)

In addition, Wal-Mart is looking to reduce the amount of packaging on its products by 5% over the next five years. Less packaging equals less weight and also means more product can fit in a truck, reducing the number of trucks needed.

All told, Wal-Mart expects these changes to save the company billions of dollars over the next five years alone.

And that, my friends, is a lot of green.

Save Money, Paper, Power -- Ditch the Fax Machine

jplatt — Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Did you know that fax machines are among the most energy-hogging devices in your office? It's true -- like copiers, fax machines tend to be on 24/7, much longer than they are actually used. While they run up your electric bill, they also use needless amounts of paper and toner, not to mention space.

But don't worry, the Internet has a solution: online faxing.

Quite a few online faxing services have popped up in recent years, offering anyone (individual or business) easy and inexpensive options to send and receive faxes directly from their computers or email systems. Using one of these services helps you to cut your energy costs, use less paper and toner, and keep smelly fax-machine fumes from filling up your office.

I have used FaxZero for months. Since I only need to send the occasional fax, it's a perfect, free solution, allowing me to send up to three pages at a time with no charge. (Ads appear on the recipient's cover page.) It's not perfect (I can't receive faxes with FaxZero), but for me, it does the trick.

For businesses with the need to both send and receive faxes, companies like eFax, fax.com and RapidFax all offer comparable levels of service and pricing. But one company -- MyFax -- stands out but actually giving companies an incentive to recycle their old fax machines. MyFax will give three months of free service to any company that donates a fax machine to one of several charitable or e-recycling organizations. (The offer expires May 31st.)

So go ahead and cut the fax umbilical cord. It's time we let that technology die and embrace the next generation.

Save Paper. Save Trees -- Try Digital Magazines

jplatt — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

We get a lot of magazines in the Platt household. We love every one of them, but boy do they pile up quickly. And man, do they use a lot of paper.

Which is why I recently gave Zinio a try. This new service (currently in beta version) delivers digital versions of more than 350 different consumer magazines. You can subscribe or buy individual issues -- including recent back issues -- which you can read online, download to your PC, or even read on your mobile device.

I started with a few free sample issues, and was quickly impressed. The digital versions are exactly the same as their printed counterparts, only paperless. They carry the exact same articles and artwork, in the same layouts, but with added navigation tools and the ability to increase the viewing size of any page up to 400%.

The online versions also come with an abundance of hyperlinks, making it easier to explore the web when a link is included in an article or advertisement. All in all, it's a pretty good experience.

I did have a few problems with the Zinio versions. For one thing, they exaclty reproduce the layout of the printed magazines. This required me to scroll up and down columns, and from one column to the next, in order to actually read any of the articles. That's too much for my poor carpal-tunnel addled wrists.

The Zinio versions are also priced the same as the printed magazines. Since the publishers don't incur printing or shipping costs, I would have expected the prices to be lower. Maybe that will come as Zinio hits some economies of scale.

Still, despite my reservations, Zinio magazines aren't printed on paper, and they aren't shipped from one corner of the globe to another. They don't include non-recyclable cologne inserts, and they don't come in annoying plastic polybags. Any magazines you buy are archived online, so you don't need to keep paper versions lying around, and there's nothing to recycle.

If you're a magazine junkie like me, but have been worrying about the environmental impact of your monthly fix, this could be the solution you've been looking for. Give it a try.