sustainable business
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Buy an electric car, get a steep discount on the rooftop solar panels required to charge it
Ford has teamed up with SunPower to offer buyers of its forthcoming Ford Focus Electric a significant discount on SunPower's home solar power systems. This is more than just two companies teaming up to target a demographic likely to want to be interested in both their products: It also makes sense in terms of helping families get off of oil and coal at the same time.
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A green giant passes: Ray Anderson, sustainable-biz pioneer, dies at 77
Years before every business started angling to be seen as green, Ray Anderson set out to make his company Interface truly sustainable. He passed away today.
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Is it meaningless to talk about ‘sustainable’ food?
How sustainable is your jar of Ragu tomato sauce? That is an insane question, says self-described “anti-foodie” Frederick Kaufman in his TED Talk.
Sustainability, Kaufman suggests, can be sort of like porn: you know it when you see it. But people really want it to be quantifiable. Kaufman describes efforts by a grand consortium of scientists, farmers, agribusiness, and environmentalists to track all the inputs into a product and mush those into one number that would reflect its overall sustainability.
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Green jobs growing even as economy wilts
Job postings in sustainability have quadrupled in two years.
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Pro sports are going greener, and that means the rest of us are too
The Seattle Sounders don’t just have crazy fans. Their facilities have a 57.6 percent landfill diversion rate.Photo: Mike HPro sports may not seem like a natural ally for environmentalists. Players fly from Boston to Los Angeles and back for a single game. Leagues and teams convince cities to build expensive and often unneeded new facilities […]
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Forget the gloom — new ways of living and organizing our economy are flourishing
Despite a flurry of bad news recently, good things are spouting up.Photo: Judy Merrill-SmithThe last couple of days have been gloomy ones. I kept checking in with the vague and dire reports from the nuclear-power bleeding edge in Japan. For part of the time I was also immersed in a post about truly awful things […]
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Sustainable Apparel Coalition delivers the eco-skinny on your skinny jeans
Wheredja get those jeans?I spend a lot of time shining a light on murky areas of the food system, but what about the industrial-apparel complex? Just as the food we eat has a material basis and a history, so do our clothes. It turns out that I know a lot more about the (grass-fed, local) […]
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New number quantifies greenness of your unitard
Something in the water.Photo: Google MapsDenim sucks — at least, environmentally speaking. If there’s any doubt in your mind, check out the image to the right. New York Times writer Tom Zeller Jr. found the Google Maps photo of Xintang, China, the No. 1 denim producer in the world. That dark blue stuff? That’s dye […]
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Now on Facebook: your grandma, mailman, and … the solar industry
You just got poked by the sun.Photo: diogo dubiellaYou have a new friend request … from the sun! OK, it’s actually from a company selling solar panels. “Solar service providers … are increasingly turning to social media tactics in an attempt to create engaged communities around the sunny clean power,” says Earth2Tech. Solar startups are […]