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Green Business Partnership Certification “ Just how green is green” I responded to a recent advertisement of yours in our local business journal which made a few interesting suggestions about thinking green. It suggests that green is as green as a dollar bill-by watching our water consumption, energy usage, recycling certain waste products valuable and limited natural resources can be made to last longer giving us all time to convert to less destructive alternatives and save money in the meantime. Green Business sent me an impressive questionnaire covering all aspects of ones daily life as a consumer of water, energy etc. A few days later I received a visit from a Partnership executive who checked out my business for matters green and awarded us a pass certificate with a modest score of 100%. WOW. My elation was short lived. How could a small business be so green. On reflection I realized it was not that my business was green but that, ironically, I was running a green business. Moneyjingle is a business directory in Sarasota offering web pages for advertising. The internet is the first new media opportunity to become available since television over fifty years ago. It is the style of our business that is green. There are thousands of eight inch by ten inch advertising pages in full color available all day-every day on our money jingle website yet we use no more than six reams of white paper per year. Our color printers use about ten cartridges of ink per year. Unlike other forms of paper-based advertising we use little energy, no printing machines, no giant rolls of paper or hundreds of gallons of ink, no delivery trucks, no fuel and no recycling other than for our few color cartridges. We got our 100% pass mark by default. This does not mean that other forms of paper-based or energy-based forms of advertising are any less green than money jingle-only that they have the opportunity to create greater savings, greater improvements in their production and transport activities. However modest Moneyjingle’s green savings will be-the same percentage from paper-based advertising will be much more valuable-making them the real planet savers of the future. I would, in return, like the Green Business Partnership to give its certificate holders sound information on matters green. I have heard very impressive arguments that the recycling processes are themselves far from green and are more likely to be “dollar green” than actually green. What are green thinking people to make of the disputes with regard to global warming. There seems to be a basic query over whether the world is in fact getting warmer. There is great international controversy over the causes over “global warming” per se. Please give us business people “true facts” and we will have no excuse not to follow your very worthy initiative. Derek A. Bishopp
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