Business Blogs: Trends, tips, and real-life anecdotes from industry experts.

Being sustainable is something that everybody is doing, no matter where they are in life. Interesting article from MSNBC

Inmates of the minimum-security facility, 25 miles from Olympia, the state capital, raise bees, grow organic tomatoes and lettuce, compost 100 percent of food waste and even recycle shoe scraps that are made into playground turf.

“It reduces [...]

I met John Barboni following a rather powerful presentation on the societal impacts of consumption given by his colleague David O’Higgins and Jason Levine. Barboni and O’Higgins have formed an interesting partnership with architects Tom Abraham and Carl Stein, FAIA. …
Barboni is co-founder of elemental, a New York City-based collaborative where he and his partners [...]

Interesting article in the NYTimes:
Leave it to the Germans to combine livestock with lodging. In the last decade, hundreds of farms throughout Germany have transformed old barns and potato warehouses into heuhotels, or hay hotels, where guests spend the night on a bed of dried grass.
The eco-friendly hotels (no sheets to change) are cheap and [...]

·         How does environmental regulation affect your small businesses?
o    Additional taxes?
o    Ability to get loans? Credit?
o    Required compliance to unnecissary rules?
·         Are self governing goal setting more effective? How have you been able to get out in front of the economic or environmental climates by
o    Aligning with government initiatives?
o    Joining groups that develop strategies [...]

When I first started social venture labs, I drew inspiration from companies who were classic examples of triple bottom line organizations like Burt’s Bees and Life Is Good. The owners of these kinds of companies went from living out of their cars or without running water, to earning over several hundred million while including communities [...]

from The Environmental Leader…
The term “sustainability” peaked on blogs, boards and discussion groups after the February 25 telecast of The Oscars as Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” took home the Oscar for Documentary Feature. Nonetheless, “sustainability” has remained a persistent issue in the blogosphere, with buzz levels on this term up 169 percent in July 2007 versus [...]

A little while ago, I had the pleasure of a short interview with Jeff Shay, Engineering Manager and Environmental & Safety Officer at Rejuvenation. For those not familiar…

Rejuvenation began in 1977 as an architectural salvage shop in a derelict North Portland saloon. Jim Kelly, who still owns the privately held company, began the business with [...]

After I wrote the post on Plumpynut, I could not get the story out of my head. It was a classic example of a company meeting a need with the simplest of solutions - and yet I can not understand why some of the larger manufacturing operations are not getting into this game. They would [...]

Mondays just fail to register for me when I don’t hear the stopwatch on Sunday evenings. I saw this segment on Plumpynut for the second time on 60 Minutes. I’m glad this topic has come around again, and felt just as dumbfounded as to why this is such a difficult problem to solve this time [...]

Kroger Co. shareholders rejected five shareholder-sponsored proposals — all opposed by the board of directors — at the company’s annual meeting Thursday in Cincinnati.

Kroger Chairman and CEO David Dillon that the company was already following or moving toward many of the policies promoted by the proposals but that the company disagreed with the methods proposed.
Cincinnati-based [...]