Green Retailing 3.0: An Interactive World of Green Internet Shopping

In the past few days, we’ve seen a lot of bleak stories about how the retail industry is struggling to make ends meet due to consumers limiting their spending. Dire predictions have been made about the many outlets that won’t survive the season, as people do everything they can to save money – including not buying anything at all. But, even as most mainstream retailers resort to desperate measures for sales, the green retail industry is seeing growth.

Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger, wrote about how the green retail industry can continue to beat the odds, and proposes a quick shift to ‘green retailing 3.0’. From The Huffington Post:

So how about leap-frogging to green retailing 3.0? This would combine the best of two worlds - the well-developing empire of Internet-based e-commerce and an expanded universe of truly well-designed and quality-made green goods. An example of an early attempt at this is the Green Home online store, and the UK’s Green Store.

However these, and really most e-commerce sites, have been hampered by an inability to give people a full shopping experience. But that is starting to change. Look at Zoomii, an online bookstore that copies Amazon’s pricing and shipping policies but lets you browse the bookshelves. Perhaps It won’t be long before your own (realistic) Second Life avatar can go in to a virtual store and try on the organic t-shirt and jeans you’ve been needing.

Seem far-fetched to think that those vast tracts of land now taken up by the behemoth buildings we call “malls” can be replaced by online sites and distributed networks of green suppliers? Well, E-bay probably seemed like a crazy idea not too long ago.

Hill points out that brick-and-mortar neighborhood stores with a green theme typically don’t have a great selection, and we can’t depend on mega-retailers to go green in any meaningful way, no matter how they might attempt to pander to environmentalists.

There are pros and cons to both local shopping and internet shopping, and that won’t change no matter how fancy and interactive online storefronts might become. Earth 911 has a rundown on the battle between online vs. local in-store shopping.

Hill’s ‘green retailing 3.0’ idea is intriguing, though. We’d certainly love to see the world of online shopping get a lot greener, and in order to do that on a large scale, stores need to entice even mainstream consumers to buy their merchandise.

Link [The Huffington Post] + [Earth 911]

Natural, Organic, Ecocert – Which Eco-Labels Can You Trust?

In a society where greenwashing is rampant, it’s easy for well-meaning people to simply trust that the labels on the products they’re buying actually mean something.  By now, there are so many ‘eco-labels’ out there that purportedly certify products as safe and natural, it can get pretty confusing as to what they even mean.  While you definitely shouldn’t trust a product that merely calls itself ‘natural’ without any kind of certification, an official-looking seal doesn’t necessarily make the product all that great either. So, which ones can you trust? The Daily Green has taken a comparison created by David Bronner of Dr. Bronner’s castile soap fame and added text that explains them.

From The Daily Green:

USDA “Organic” - ***** (5 Stars)
When you see the word “organic” you know what it means. U.S. standards back it up. If the entire product is labeled USDA Organic it contains at least 95% organic ingredients, and any ingredients that aren’t organic are included only because organic versions don’t exist in a commercially viable quantity or quality. If the labels says “made with organic,” it has at least 70% organic ingredients.

As Bronner writes, these products have “no synthetic preservatives or petrochemicals” and the statements on labels are backed up with “rigorously enforced compliance.”

NSF ***+ (3.5 Stars)
NSF International, a U.S. not-for-profit, develops standards and certification for products. Its rating system is a “responsible compromise” between the makers and consumers of products and the cosmetics industry, according to Bronner. It allows a few synthetic preservatives that are identical to compounds found in nature, according to Bronner.
The rest of the certifications rated include ‘Natural Products Association’, ‘Ecocert’, ‘Certified Natural Cosmetics’ and four more.

Check out The Daily Green for the full list!

Link [The Daily Green]

When Kenyan Greenbeans Are Better: Why Local Food Isn’t Always The Best Choice

For Mike Small’s family in Fife, Scotland, it’s all about the local ingredients. For the past six months, the Smalls have been dining only on foods and beverages that come from within their home district. That means that on any given evening, the Smalls sit down to a combination of meats like fish, pork and lamb and local veggies such as parsnips, beetroots, kale, potatoes, leeks and other root vegetables. As long as it’s local, the Smalls are down with it.

While it sounds like the Smalls are making big leaps towards reducing their own carbon fooprints, turns out it just ain’t that easy. There are so many factors involved in the production and distribution of produce that it does not suffice to simply “eat what’s local” and assume that the impact that you are making is significant. Here are some reasons why:

• Food grown in areas where fertilizers and tractors are used is hardly carbon-friendly
• Many developing countries that export produce don’t use machinery and use cow crap for fertilizer, which means that even after air-freighting occurs, the carbon impact is less than it may be on a local, diesel-driven farm
• Purchasing local ingredients that are naturally dried instead of cooked and ready (chickpeas, for example) doesn’t mean you’re saving energy - you’ve still got to take them home and cook them, something that emits more carbon when done in small batches than when done in large ones
• Storing locally grown products that are not available year-round requires refrigeration, which emits carbon. Importing seasonal produce from where it is grown, even when done so via air-freight, is often more environmentally friendly than storage.

“The concept of food miles is unhelpful and stupid. It doesn’t inform about anything except the distance travelled.” — Dr Adrian Williams, of the National Resources Management Centre at Cranfield University.

Link [The Guardian]