BuyinGREEN
This morning, just like yesterday morning, and the morning before that, an increasing number of people in the United States woke up, washed and styled themselves with Aveda and Body Shop products, prepared their organic breakfasts from Whole Food, Wild Oats, and Trader Joe's with Sub Zero and GE appliances, hopped in their Toyotas or Hondas and headed to work or school.
These new converts may not know it, but they are SeeinGreen!
The 10 companies referenced above topped the list of brands consumers most associated with green, in an age where green sells.
From major urban metropoli to the rural heartlands, here in the US, green products are literally jumping off the shelves. The Organic Trade Association, estimates that organically grown food production - just one of the sectors in the US funded by this new wave of green consumers - is increasing at a rate of 20% a year and is now a $6.4 billion industry.
In the US, we hold only 5% of the planet's 6 billion people a full 300 million people. And this 5% of the global population, according to a study by the Royal Bank of Scotland group, is spending enormous amounts of money - $8.7 trillion in 2005 alone! A full 2/5 of first world consumer spending! More than Eurozone and Japanese household spending put together!
This equates to billions spent each year in disposable income. How skilled this group is at SeeinGREEN, then, will go a long way towards defining how green our goods and services are in 2050 and beyond.
Browne-inGREEN
At the forefront of this green consumer movement are some intrepid pioneers risking life, sanity, and personal wealth to drive change. One such pioneer is Gay Browne, Director of Green Media Services, and founder of Greenopia - the Urban Dweller's Guide to Green Living™.
I first met Gay at an event she hosted for Wangari Matthai - the Nobel Prize winning Kenyan who endured beatings in a revolutionary campaign in Africa to simply plant trees. Climate champion Laurie David made the connection and introduced Wangari that night at Gay's Santa Barbara beach home.
Gay has now been studying for about a decade and half - teaching herself and those around her to SeeGREEN. From 1994-1997, beginning when today's 18 year olds were 4, Gay and her husband built one of the first green houses in their neighborhood. Her desire to have a clean, healthy living environment came from serious asthma growing up. As Gay had children, she began to expand her lens, until she was SeeinGREEN all around the house.
Gay and her dedicated team at Greenopia have now put out green guide books for San Francisco and Los Angeles - think of a 57 category, green consumer Zagatt's.
And while the Guides themselves are a fantastic resource, the opportunities they create for the next generation to get engaged - and actually paid - on green issues will do as much - if not more - than the guides themselves to create change.
Gay and Greenopia are literally teaching and enabling the next generation to SeeGREEN.
According to Gay, "my wish is that this guide--and this companion website--will inspire you to look for new ways to make your world healthier and happier."
Gen X-ZinGREEN
Of the 300 million + of us here in the US, nearly 25% fall within the ages of 18-34. That's a full 65 million strong - or one in every hundred global citizens.
And while they cannot yet touch their boomer parents in impact on the economy, 18-34 year olds already spend over $153 billion annually in disposable income. As these 65 million individuals (equal to all the residents of California, Michigan, and Texas put together) become parents and grandparents their influence on the consumer market will increase exponentially.
Simply put, this group's spending habits - forming now - will govern what we buy and what our children and their children will buy for the coming century - a good chunk of all the goods and services consumed form here to 2100.
And whether we are eating in, eating out, being beautiful, getting goods, caring for critters, seeing the world, sorting through services, greening our spaces, or getting around - this generation will create, run, work for, and depend on green businesses and industries.
Stephanie Hanford, Greenopia team member and former Project Manager at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in Geneva notes that, "This generation of consumers, particularly the younger ones, can and must set the bar higher when it comes to environmental considerations. Consumers will increasingly see green as logical. As green becomes mainstream, more and more people will vote with their dollars in favor of those companies with a real dedication to respecting the environment, ultimately shaping the way in which business is done. The work of Greenopia and others is so key, because it takes out the confusion and makes buying green easy."
ReInventinGREEN
At campuses across the country, GREEN has become a growing, evolving thing, and our ability and desire to define it - combining past concepts of environmental, sustainable, healthy, and hippy to measure and describe an evolving multi-trillion dollar consumer market around the globe - are turning GREEN into its own academic discipline
And just as they were and are on the cutting edge of campus climate neutral work, students from the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC, Santa Barbara are now on the cutting edge of defining and measuring consumer response to green products and green marketing. And this green marketing science is helping Greenopia play a central role in InvetinGreen.
Want to help them in the process of DefininGREEN?
Click here to participate in a survey designed by these researchers to help determine consumer shopping preferences for green products.
LegislatinGREEN
But once the science, marketing, and movement for green hit their tipping point - and we find out what green consumers want - what set of consumer laws and policies - or set of rules - will guide this Green growth?
Over in Europe, this new green lens has already been shaped and polished through extensive laws and policies - for example, holding businesses responsible for the impact of their products long after they leave the shelf.
Here in the United States, we are beginning to find out too.
At the federal level, programs like Energy Star are helping turn departments of stores like Sears, Costco, and Kmart into energy efficiency showplaces - a modern World's Fair in each local mall. The much vilified Energy Act of 2004 has helped transform car dealership showrooms into wings in the Emerald Palace, with green signs and banners, shiny new hybrids, and salespersons fluent in green.
But it is at the city and campus level where we are seeinGREEN growing under the very feet of students (in insulating, heat-holding floors, for example), as campuses, cities, and counties adopt progressive green consumer laws and policies.
This Fall and Winter, Greenopia will partner with the National Association of Envionrmental Law Societies, and groups of graduate and undergraduate students from New York, to research the emerging green business community in New York City. Students will conduct on the ground research on emerging green businesses while surveying efforts from around the nation and globe to see which cities have been most effective at LegislatinGREEN - then apply those lessons learned to make suggestions on how to GREENYC .
And we are looking for an intrepid group of pioneers to join us in helping NYC, then the country, then the world, until we are all SeeinGreen. Want to join us?
GREENing Black Friday
So, as you wake up this black Friday (so named because companies use this one day to get into the black financially), squint your eyes and see if you can see green as you walk from shop to shop.
And if you are making purchases in SF or LA, pick up the Greenopia guide and buy your friends and family healthy, sustainable, low-impact goods and services.
And if you are a student in or from the New York City area:
* Join the SeeinGREEN Team & Find Out More
* Join the SeeinGREEN Facebook Page
* Check out Greenopia
* Or shoot me an email at executivedirector@naels.org to get involved.
And together, before too long, we will have New York City and the world SeeinGREEN!