Zcause Blog; Anthony Zolezzi.com

Green conferences need big companies
to help promote eco-friendly products

November 22, 2009

This year I have attended at least five "green" conferences and all have been feel-good affairs with some very fantastic people who are doing great things. The only issue I have is that I continue to leave these sessions with the uncomfortable feeling that the people in attendance represent a non-mainstream segment of industry, and that they are the only ones talking about making any actual, meaningful changes within a time period that will have an impact on us all.

The problem, at least from my perspective, is that most of the participants in these affairs are very small companies that fail to adequately address the basic issues of awareness, performance, affordability and availability of their products.

Now I am not a negative person by any means. But I can’t help feeling that we have to start using these forums to attract the big companies as well, and to recognize some of their holistic and environmental achievements. We also have to work on making people more aware of why green products and services are better in the long run, and that they will not have any performance issues, make sense from an economic perspective and are readily available to the consumer.

My hope is that these same conferences next year will have some major companies participating – and do more to promote awareness of the high performance standards, economic benefits and availability of the multitude of services and products that can help in preserving the planet’s livability.

An Update:

A few days after writing the above blog, I had the privilege of taking part in the World Economic Forum on Sustainability’s working group on “Closing the Loop” at the Nike Tiger Woods Conference Center in Beaverton, Oregon. Unlike the “green conferences” discussed above, I found it to be a truly exhilarating event that totally succeeded in getting me out of my funk. Here was an example of just what I thought was missing from those other conferences – a whole slew of major-league companies, including such heavyweights as Hewlett Packard, Levi Strauss, Gap, and Kimberly Clark (as well as Nike), not there to simply make speeches and run, but rolling up their sleeves and joining in the collective effort to find ways of “closing the loop” (which is defined as “completing the recycling cycle by buying products that were made with recycled materials”). The people involved were smart, dedicated and action oriented, and left me feeling like we can indeed make a difference in bringing about meaningful change. (Kudos to Nike’s Hannah Jones and Kelly Lauber, and Jean Brittingham of the University of Cambridge).

(More information on waste to resources and what people are doing for the cause of resource conservation can be found at www.greenopolis.com)

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