Why Go Green

The hottest movement around in both the promotional products industry and the country is — choose your label — green, sustainability, the environment, social responsibility.

It seems to have legs this time around, too. And it has come about four years sooner than a shy, futurist friend of mine had predicted. His forecast was based on the generational shifts taking place and the fact that kids brought up thinking green will be voting in 2012. That is certainly a part of the phenomena. The young people who grew up learning about the impact of our consumption on the environment are entering the workplace and having a voice.

In his eye-opening book, "A Whole New Mind," author Daniel Pink points to three trends that are revolutionizing our society and moving us from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The three factors — abundance, Asia and automation — are changing how we must think to excel in this evolving world. Material abundance is deepening the yearning for more meaningful lives. The sensibilities that this drives include beauty, spirituality, emotion, and a corollary sense of responsibility and connection to nature.

Many people point to Nobel Prize Winner Al Gore’s amazing presentation turned Academy Award-winning movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." This, they say, helped convince many Americans of climate change, and the movement is resonating with a wide range of people. On the subject of global warming, even those who prefer to believe Exxon/Mobil’s scientists over hundreds of independent scientists from various countries cannot deny that we’re reaching a level of trash creation that has got to stop.

Business writer Polly LaBarre in Fast Company magazine wrote, "The United States spends more on trash bags than 90 other countries spend on everything. In other words, the receptacles of our waste cost more than the goods consumed by nearly half of the world’s nations."

You and I are generating 4.5 pounds of trash every single day of our lives. That’s some 95,000 pounds that we’re leaving for our grandchildren to figure out what to do with. Our children and theirs may be challenged with fresh water to drink. There may be wars fought over fresh water tomorrow just as we fight them today over oil. One billion people on this planet have no source of clean, fresh water.

Being green is the right thing to do. Most faith-based belief systems call on their followers to be good stewards of this Earth. Most scientists agree that we cannot just keep ravaging the earth to create more stuff for us to throw away, pile up, burn up or pollute the only planet we have. But businesses are about making money and the moralistic argument usually doesn’t drive movements like we’re seeing in green. Are major corporations suddenly doing the right thing because it’s the right thing to do?

In a recent survey, Fortune 500 CEOs identified environmental responsibility as one of the