In Women We Trust

Is there such a thing as Green Packaging?

My guest blogger today is JoAnn Hines, the Chief Executive Officer at J.R. Hines International to help us make sense of green packaging. She is an expert in packaging trends and implementing innovative new packaging technologies covering consumer product packaging, sustainable and green packaging, branding, merchandising, retail packaging trends and packaging patent infringement. Her packaging articles and columns are syndicated around the globe including Webpackaging.com, the #1 consumer products packaging site, and a blog entitled Packaging News You Can Use.

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JoAnn Hines: I just got a call from Brandweek to comment on green product packaging backlash. I've been writing about it for a while but this week reading about square milk bottles brought it all to a head. While the idea of a square milk bottle looks good on paper and its attractive financially to the retailer, a lot of consumers hate it.

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Every week I get dozens of new green packaging press releases. Some of these are really a stretch. It seems with green the "in" thing to do, everyone is trying to jump on the band wagon. Many of these innovations really don't make sense or in many cases won't "connect" with the consumer. Just because its green, environmentally friendly, sustainable, compostable, recyclable or biodegradable doesn't mean that consumers will buy a product. Consumer acceptance is a very complicated issue. The growth of convenience and luxury categories flies in the face of the environmental movement too. They use lots of packaging and are expensive too.

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Two companies working to get it right are Cargo Cosmetics and Method. Cargo starts with a bio-based plastic case for their lipsticks and then packages them in seed embedded boxes - just plant the box and you'll get flowers. Method uses 100% post consumer recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET). You might recognize the phthalate part as it's been getting a lot of bad press when used in beverage bottles. You don't drink the Method cleaning products; in this case it's a good use of recycling technology. Both are useful products that consumers want - being green is a plus.

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We want it and we want it now. If it happens to tap into the "green movement" so much the better. The average consumer really does care about the environment they just aren't going to sacrifice their creature comforts to get there. In reality only about 10% of the American populace are willing sacrificers. We can all use a little less packaging in our lives, however, without the package you cannot have a product so give packaging a break.

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Packaging has many roles to play in addition to protecting the product and getting it in your hands, and they are attributes which many will not willingly give up. Just think how you shy away from any damaged product packaging or regect the damaged or bruised product at the supermarket. The regection rate is already 20% and without packaging this would skyrocket. And who do you think pays the ultimate price for less packaging? It's not the retailers or the consumer products companies, it's YOU the consumer.

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When was the last time you saw a sales person trained to tell you all about the item you are considering purchasing? The packaging tells you the story about what is inside and why you should buy it. You know the "silent salesperson." So before you jump on the "less" packaging bandwagon give some consideration to why the packaging is there in the first place. I wrote this little jingle for Twitter and that's says it all. "Toothpaste squeezes, eggs aren't cracked, pizza delivered, headache's better, beer anyone? Packaging a love affair you never knew you had."

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Now don't get me wrong, I have seen some very interesting concepts in "green" product packaging some that make sense to the consumer, but I have seen a lot of junk too. Some companies that are just making some green packaging noise hoping to capitalize on some of the current media buzz.

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What's your opinion? What kind of packaging are you willing to give up or have you switched to a different product because of a package seemed more environmentally friendly.

Do you have questions about what is green and what is greenwash? Ask them here or I can be reached at PackagingDiva@aol.com.

Natural Networkering at Work

If there was one big gift that women give the world and business, it's networking.

Yesterday I met Sande Hart for coffee. Two years ago, Sande sat at my table at a Gather the Women function and told me that her mission is to bring peace to the world through interfaith exploration. Her growing group, called SARAH, impresses me still. Sande is a people connector and is also a big advocate for living the green life.

After a quick regroup, Sande decided that I needed to meet her two friends, Sheri and Margaret, who work with www.ocice.org, a large group of interfaith/greenies in Orange County who recently launched an initiative to have all 900 or so churches in OC resolve to live more in tune with the planet. I see in my email box, an E-intro has been extended. Thanks Sande!

Later that day I attended the Women's Summit, which I learned about through Nina Burokas. (I met Nina at BlogHer) The Summit takes about 80 women, adds wine, a speaker and then gives us a chance to intro-date two tables of women for the soul purpose of identifying synergies for future business.

As fate would have it, at my table, I sat between a Laura Curran, the owner of Greengood.net and Jamie Welsh, the founder of 10%Solution and her pal Krista Thomas who also works for Reuters. Talk about green luck.

Our table also held our hilarious speaker for the evening, Kim Shepherd, Debra Trujilio who has launched a "how to Manage your money program for kids" while holding down a Senior VP job for Primerica. Ali McDermott Wilcox, an attorney for Sedgwick, and Teigue Thomas, the VP and General Counsel for Gateway.

I could have talked all night to any one of them. but we still had another round table of people to meet.

Table two brought me face-to-face with Glenda DeLuca who focuses on natural products; Christina Bergmann, marketer at large; our hostess Ashley Sattar now the Director for Corporate Sponsorships for Big Brothers and Sisters; Lynn Halstead, Financial Services; Debra Garcia, Artisian Wines; and finally to my right, Carol Kurimsky, VP Marketing for Ingram Micro.

Missing in action from the lineup is the one gal who didn't have a business card with her and I couldn't hear her name well from my chair, and I can't forget Paula Noone who I met when I first got in the door.

One day, 18 women, all of whom are self-selected networkers or they would not have been out and about. I'm always impressed at how fast we bond and our willingness to share information. It's very reaffirming and gives me hope for the work ahead of us all.

Heidi Sanborn: Pay now, or Pay later in a throw away world

I slid into the the Zero Waste conference last week, just in time to hear Heidi Sanborn talk about the Product Stewardship Council. She gave a terrific presentation on the growing problem and cost of household waste and who is responsible, the manufacturers who make the throw away stuff or the taxpayers who must manage the thrown-away stuff?

I couldn't take notes fast enough. The WHOLE presentation is on http://www.caproductstewardship.org/. If you scroll down, you'll see it at the bottom of the page where you can download the whole thing. It puts climate change pollution into a whole new light. Even if you don't think Global Warming is real, our massive waste problem sure is.

But that's just the beginning of the problem. The bigger problem is that WE pay for it on the front end as consumers AND the backend as taxpayers - and that system could bankrupt most communities.

Heidi believes that putting the burden of creating a safe and recyclable product on the manufacturer's shoulders is the answer. But if you were a manufacturer, where do you start and how do you do it and stay competitive with someone else who carried the same product line?

The more I know, the more I'm impressed with how the SMaRT Sustainable Product Standard works to solve pollution problems in air, water, earth and the atmosphere, BEFORE it hits the landfill.

Heidi, with 17 years in integrated waste management, has seen all the solutions come and go.  Check out her presentation. If you weren't motivated to buy less, or buy sustainably before, you will be after you see it. The section on pharmaceuticals is especially eye opening.   

 

The Women of Kenya: Practical Leadership for Troubled Times

Guest Blogger: Kathe Schaaf / Changing the World

As 2008 began in Kenya, her citizens huddled terrified in their homes for protection from a wave of violence and killing sweeping through their country. Anger and frustration over a corrupt national election process had bubbled up into a river of rage that quickly became a familiar ‘us vs. them’ battle drawn along ethnic lines. Thousands of homes were burned and stories drifted into the global media about violent deaths at the hands of angry mobs of young men.

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By February 200,000 Kenyans were living in tents in primitive camps for ‘internally displaced persons’ with little food and even less hope of returning home. All of this unfolded in a country already struggling with incredible challenges; the short list includes high incidence of HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria; a shortage of drinkable water and fuel for cooking fires; lack of educational opportunities especially for girls and rural youth; little sustainable employment; and a primitive infrastructure which complicates transportation, hygiene and safety at a most basic level.

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Following the news of these events, I kept saying to myself over and over again: I trust the African women to restore sanity to Kenya. My faith in the women of Kenya has its foundation in relationships with courageous women from that country. In Bondo, Kenya in December 2006, I had the opportunity to attend the Grassroots African Women’s Conference, spending four days in the company of 513 grassroots African women leaders.  These women were remarkable, tackling the enormous problems in their villages with practical ideas using whatever resources they could find.

• Ten mothers in a small village on the shores of the Indian Oceanhad organized to integrate 50 orphans into their families.
• Women in remote rural areas had created their own ‘merry-go-round’ micro-lending programs to develop small businesses and a sustainable source of income for their families.
• Successful strategies for purifying water and solar cooking were being developed, shared and replicated.

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It was easy to develope warm relationships with these women, both at the conference and traveling to visit them in their villages.  I witnessed firsthand their self-sacrifice and hard work, their creativity and persistence, their collaborative spirit and their commitment to their families. I danced with them, singing their songs of hope and enjoyed their easy laughter. I was hugged and welcomed into their homes and their hearts. We nurture our friendships through the miracle of e-mail.

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So when news coming out of Kenya was at its worst, I took solace in knowing that the women would eventually be able to emerge from their homes and do whatever it takes to pull Kenya back together. I knew that they would begin to care for the children and feed the hungry and find homes for the homeless. I knew that they would talk among themselves about the roots of this violence and quietly find ways to bring reconciliation and healing.  I knew that the women of Kenya would show up fully in the face of this craziness and bring sanity back to their land.

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It is what they have always done.

www.KatheSchaaf.com

http://katheschaaf.blogspot.com/

Hank&Cheef - what goes around comes around

I'm one of those people who carry a blue bandana in her purse. It's a leftover habit from my Girl Scout Camp director days when the "AP" (All Purpose) cloth used to hang from my belt loop. I had to smile when I saw this return of the Hanky. It's stepped up to meet eco-expectations, and definately not what my grandmother would carry. I don't know if it will catch on in this germy world, but I applaud the effort and the designs.

Why Do Green Women Gather? See Below.

" Ever notice how bloggers talk about the same people over and over? That's because we have relationships with them." Yvonne DiVita, Lipsticking

I laughed out loud when I opened my email this morning. In one of my Feedblitz aggregators, the two new posts offered came from Yvonne DiVita and the other Toby Bloomberg. As I scrolled down to see what they were talking about I ran into myself and the cover shot from WECAI this month. (12,727 readers so far) WE is published by Heidi Richards, who is also another great blog and biz buddy with 35,000 on her mailing list.

What made it particularly poignant was that I just read an email from Emily McKhann from The Motherhood (who I met through BlogHer).(23,000 women bloggers/8 million readers) She asked if I (or Diane MacEachern) (2500 eco women) would be interested in talking to a grad student (another woman) regarding ECO women's green groups.

Why do we gather? For the same reason we blog together - to support one another.

These are crazy times, we need each other to help keep the crazies at bay. Kimberly Danke Pinkson of Eco Mom Alliance (11,000 women) sure knows the answer to that one. It's the same reason we join Weight Watchers or AA. Like any good 12 step program, first you have to acknowledge you have a problem and then, by being accountable to others in your group, you can work to solve it. Why are we accountable? Because we have a build a relationship with the members of the group.

Let's take it a step further, take a look at the banner on this blog, see the woman who is in the black suit (second from the left) that's Terry Gamer. She recently bought the rights to 500 women's small town, local level news sources which account for 36 million readers. Small, local papers who would have thought they have much to do with why women gather? The answer is as simple as to why do they subscribe to a small women's paper - it's all about the relationships that it helps to foster between women.

That's the short list, but these are the nine whom I intersected in the last 4 days. Nine women representing a reach into over 45 million women's lives. Why do green women gather? Because we can!

Green Gals Make My Earth Day Memorable

Happy Earth Day. How are you spending your day?

I can't think of a better way to celebrate then with new friends working to implement the choices we have to make.  This weekend, the California Chapter of N.O.W. the National Organization of Women met in West Hollywood, CA. I was honored to be asked to speak on Sustainability Standards and how women can bring them forward. With me was Kimberly Danke Pinkson, the founder of Eco Mom's Alliance (left) and Lani Lee, (right) a recent college grad committed to bringing eco-issues to N.O.W. (Lani moderated our panel.)

Kimberly is a single mom with a six year old son. She developed Eco Mom Alliance not as a business platform, but because it was needed. As she explained to the crowd, if anyone knows about making green ends meet, she does. She knows that making adjustments in our lifestyle is hard, but she also knows that with the help and inspiration of others in a peer group, that it can be done and it can be fun.

She was inspired to create the Eco Mom Alliance one day at a picnic table talking with friends about light bulbs and discussing which ones to buy. Since that picnic table day, the Eco Mom Alliance has grown to over 11,000 on their mailing list.

After meeting Kimberly, it's not hard to understand why she has such a strong following, she is gracious, encouraging and inspiring to be around. The Eco Mom Alliance had been quietly working at making their lifestyles greener and then the NY Times wrote about them. Kimberly said that they have since been deluged with requests from business and non-profits alike. Many want to be a part of their group as a sponsor or partner. That's the power of purses and peers at work.

Lani Lee was amazing as well. Besides running the panel, she also brought gift cards and items made of Elephant dung. Don't squirm, they were very cool paper products and they certainly had a wonderful story to tell. There are about 40,000 elephants in Sri Lanka and 4000 were killed last year because they were interfering with agricultural. To save the elephant, they needed to find a way to make them profitable. It turns out that elephants, as mass consumers of vegetation, they are also mass producers of mashed up pulp (per se) ready to be made into paper products. For a closer look check out www.mrelliepooh.com

If they can turn a profit from, well, recycled goods - think what you can do with a little creative thinking. Write me and tell me about your best way to rally the women and create a bit-o-fun in the process and have a great Earth Day.

WECAI Springs into Earth Day

I am honored and humbled to be the cover girl for the spring issue of WE Magazine for Women. The E-issue is packed with great women with green ideas just in time for Earth Day on April 22.

The publisher, Heidi Richards gave the publication it's new "look" and direction. She also makes it FREE. Download you 68 page copy of the E-zine here http://www.wecai.org/wemagspring08.pdf.

My thanks to the ever gracious Heidi, for putting this Women & Green issue together on top of running several companies while launching WECAI into a thriving organization of 1200+ global women. WECAI, (Women's E-Commerce) it's an organization dedicated to teaching small business women how to become better at conducting business online.

I'm joined with many other women on the same green mission to create a more sustainable world. Suzy Miller questions ethical marketing or is it just greenwashing? Bea Kunz, WE's green editor addresses how we can spend our way to a better world. Teresa Morrow provides Green Cleaning tips. Elizabeth Skronski Supports Mother Earth in a whole new way. Linda Pereria takes on "Are we loving it to Death"?, Jeanne Horak-Druiff wonders if green glass is possible, Diane MacEchern looks inside her Big Green Purse, Green Granny Joyce Emery shares her point of view and Carol McCelland gives green career guidance.

The Issue also has a special Women's Green Commerce Survey. Anyone who participates will recieve a list of hundreds of green resources which Heidi has been collecting over the last year. We'll also give you the results, first! Link to it from inside of the Spring issue or here.

Earth Day is only a marker of greater things to come. It's all about Purses, Peers, Posts and the Power to Move Green Markets. Download your free copy of the Spring E-Issue and catch the green buzz plus hear much more from the many bright women who are out to recreate their personal and business life. http://www.wecai.org/wemagspring08.pdf 

In Women We Trust!

How Method Moved to Social Media

I was honored to moderate the the discussion for the Method Social Media Case Study at BlogHer Business last week. On the panel, (left to right) were Amy Cotteleer, President of A Squared Group (A2G), Anna Boyarsky, Senior Associate of Influencer Marketing at Method and Kathryn Thompson, who blogs for Parenting.com and DaringYoungMom.com. (thanks CB for the pic)

In preparing for the discussion, I checked out A Squared Group and was instantly impressed. They just "get it" - this marketing to women thing as well as seeing women's for the "really new media" that they are. It's no wonder that Method chose A2G to help them develop a sincere social media program.

Detoxing Seattle

The Detoxing Seattle program was a completely new way to enter into a market. Method, with it's sculptural design has been in major retail stores for a while, but it doesn't scream "Green" which is its main selling point in an evergreening market. I asked the BlogHer audience how many are "greenies" and a modest show of hands went up. When I asked how many used Method products however, and many hands went up. Without knowing it, they were supporting the green movement, the product's styling and recyclable packaging worked. Being green(er) than other options was icing.

What they did

The agency first got to know different bloggers, like Kathryn on a personal basis. Kathryn already had recognition in the local market, is an entertaining writer and someone who cares about how her home environment affects her family. Amy explained that her agency always tries to meet with Bloggers first to see if it's a good fit of values and interest or not. How many agencies are willing to do that?

Next they invited the women to a night out with cocktails and no expectations except to bring with them all the under-the-sink chemicals that they would want to take into detox. Even if no one liked Method, the night was still be a success. (Hundreds of toxic products were brought in.)

Afterwards, they sent a basket of Method products directly to each women's house. Pretty nice and unexpected. Needless to say, they had many nice things blogged about Method later and now that's a permanent part of the Method legacy for others to read including investors. I know I sure would invest in a company that is good to the planet and good to those who buy it. What's not to love? For the record, Method is the 7th faster growing privately held company in America according to Inc. Magazine in 2006.

What's next?

This very Social Media program will continue in Boston, Minneapolis and more major cities. Their plan is to detox the world one woman and one city at a time.

My thanks to Amy, Anna and Kathyrn for a great discussion that had us all laughing. If you want to be someone who "cleans like a mother" fill your house with Method eco-safe products.   

The Power of the Big Green Purse

It's getting to be such a small green world out there. I opened up my Green Biz email today and in the top section, my friend Coral Rose is linked to for her Organic cotton info. The next block of copy featured Diane MacEachern who is on tour with her new book, "Big Green Purse." While in San Francisco she met up with an old acquaintance, Joel Makower the co-founder of Greener World Media. The following is their conversation covering Diane's recommendations she gives to women consumers who want a greener world. You can catch the full interview over on Green Biz Radio. 

Even thought I've featured Diane many times, hearing her talk is something to experience. She makes me feel like anything is possible and if we just approach in a calm, methodical way, we can change things for the better. It's an insightful conversation at how to think about green products from both a consumer and a manufacturer's point of view.