Green Business and environmentally friendly business – so called are sprouting up all over the place. Ted Mininni wrote an interesting article called Marketing a Green Business” that I read today. I loved his description of companies scrambling to find ways to help the environment and also to position their businesses to connect with like minded companies. My concern is with some of the latter.

I had an abusive message from someone recently complaining that I needed to do “real environmental things” and the way to “save the world” was to put his additive into petrol (gas) for cars and I should be pushing this on my website instead of what I was doing.

I was also sent a sample of recycled paper that was impregnated with seeds of native trees so you could put the letter in water and watch the trees grow after you had read it. This might be a great gimmick for children’s birthday cards but I thought was actually off the mark.

These are just two examples that came quickly to mind about green business and I think that both miss the point.

If increasing numbers of people and businesses sat down and systematically thought through all their activities, then worked out which ones cause most environmental damage and how they can minimise their impacts, we would make steady and legitimate improvements to the environment. Picking on just one issue out of context is not the way to make real and sustainable improvements.

In the article “New Companies Sprout Up to Help Marketers Reach Green Businesses”, Kyle Cahill counsels companies to perform a comprehensive internal audit of their environmental efforts before they launch any green marketing programs.

The Enviro Action approach starts by helping you build a comprehensive foundation starting with an internal audit of your environmental practices. We provide the tools to allow you to do that audit in-house and do it effectively. The Green Jumpstart Kit provides a free resource to help get started on this process.

Technorati Tags: Marketing a green business, green business, environmentally friendly business, Kyle Cahill, Enviro Action, Green Jumpstart Kit, Ted Mininni, ISO 14001

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Sustainable Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.