Pay the Farmer or Pay the Hospital?

Birke Baehr is an awesome 11-year-old that wants to make a difference in the world by becoming an organic farmer, instead of a football player. He actually understands that we need to do something dramatically to our food system to keep our communities healthy and alive and keep our selves healthy and alive. He asks if buying organic is really that expensive, in response he says, "We can either pay the farmer, or pay the hospital." Baehr has a good point. We can either pay the farmer for healthy fruits and vegetables or we can pay for genetically modified foods that potentially cause cancer.

The point to this blog and video is that we need to start supporting our local farmer's markets and buy those foods that are ungenetically modified, meaning that they are real and found in nature!

Do you think he can make a difference with one kid at a time? Can any of us make a difference one person at a time? Tell me thoughts!

Check out this quick 5 minute video on TED.com to learn more.

You Think WWU is Green? Check Out This Shcool...

You may think that Western Washington University is the greenest school in U.S., but it's certainly not the greenest in the world. Check out this Green School in Bali. John Hardy created it after seeing Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. He said that Gore ruined his life by saying that his grand kids won't be able to have what he had. In response, he came up with Green School.

The school and it's surroundings are 100% sustainable. The school is made of bamboo and it's pathways are molten rock from nearby volcanoes. They even made their whiteboards from old car windshields and put white paper behind it.

They started building in 2006 and were able to open up in 2008 with about 200 students. Amazingly, their students are from 25 different countries. As they focus on the local factor, 25% of their students are from Bali.

Not only do the kids learn regular school curriculum, they learn how to use the resources around them. For example, they learn how to plant, take care of, harvest, and cook rice. You don't really learn that from any primary school.

Their architecture is phenomenal! The administration office resembles that of a double helix, instead of a square and is called the "Heart of School."

 

On their website, they even encourage others to create the next green school. They only ask of three conditions: be local, let the environment inform your decisions, and think about how your grandchildren might be influenced by your decisions.

This sounds and looks like an amazing place to go to school. Do you think we could have a school like this here in Washington? What recycled materials do you think we would use to hold up for weather conditions?

What's Your [1Thing]?

My favorite radio station is 107.7 the end. They play awesome alternative music, but that's beside the point right now. 107.7 is actually concerned about environment. They help support this movement called "What's Your [1Thing]?" by Entercom, along with a few other Seattle radio stations and others around the country.

"What's Your [1Thing]?" is a way to provide information to people to help them start living green in their community. They give tips for at work, at school, and in the community.

It only takes one person to do one thing to make a difference. So if everyone does one thing to help the environment, just think of the difference that would make.

So, what's your [1Thing]?

Green Ways to Advertise

So today, I thought I would actually talk about marketing and marketing campaigns. More specifically, green ways (and agencies) that companies have found to advertise their products.

The first agency I found is called Green Street Media. They are based in the UK. To advertise their clients uniquely, they use the street. Literally, they pressure wash the ad onto the street or sidewalk or walls and they last 3-5 months.





Here are some cool ads that I found that use unique ways to advertise in an earth friendly manner.




Snapple is getting the attention of people at the beach to not litter, while they also promote their product.


This one is from France and their awareness of how important trees are to our lungs.


There's an Apple in the clouds.


It's not advertising, it's "flowertising." This was for a Chelsea Flower show.


I just thought this next was funny.


This one is HILARIOUS! "Til the sun shines out of your ass, use energy efficient light bulbs."

Have you seen any other advertisements that weren't the normal advertising? Do you think that they are more effective in getting consumers awareness than traditional advertising?

I Know You Like to Turn Them On...

Target Market definition: College students ages 18-25 who are environmentally unconscious and who are environmentally conscious. The environmentally unconscious are those who leave the lights on all the time and don't bother to turn them off, whether the lights are being used or not. The environmentally conscious are those that think and care about the environment and turn off the lights to conserve energy. 

Objective: Make students aware of how much energy they are using by leaving the lights on and show them how to reduce their energy use and their impact on the environment. It’s also to remind those students that already turn off the lights, to keep turning them off.

Creative strategy: This is a rational and financial appeal because it’s focusing on the student’s interest of saving money, which at the same time it saves the environment. The environmentally unconscious are more likely to think about what the benefit is for themselves. But if they do this there’s also a nice benefit to the earth too. The environmentally conscious are reminded about the good they are doing by already turning the lights off.

This was an assignment from last quarter for Sustainability Marketing. The assignment was to make up an attention getter poster that would be put up around WWU's campus to help them make environmentally friendly choices.

So what do you think about my poster? Do you think that it would get the attention of WWU students and help remind them to turn off the lights when they aren't being used?

Party with Jelloware

Jelloware. That's right, I said it. Jelloware. Edible Jello cups that allow you to litter and save the earth, or at least help your garden.

Not only are these cups edible (and vegan), they are biodegradable. They are made to party with and then be thrown onto the ground. No clean up needed, an extra bonus! Each one is to correspond with the drink in hand.

Here are a few drinks: lemon basil, ginger-mint, and rosemary-beet.


The people are The Way We See The World came up with this great idea. The way they work is that they are made with agar agar and whatever flavor you want. Agar agar is a vegetarian gelatin substitute made from a variety of seaweed vegetation. This is how they are able to be composted and help the growth of plants and grass.



It's time to get back to playing with your food and do the jiggle dance with your jello cups at your next party!

Jelloware is currently a project and you can keep up with them on Kickstarter. Hopefully they get enough backers and pledges to keep this going, so we can have these for those spring and summer get-togethers.

Four Loko: Not Fuel for You, Fuel for Your Car

I'm sure everyone has heard that Four Lokos were banned because of some students at Central that couldn't be smart about drinking. Of course, people wanted to get the last of the Lokos before the formula change, but places didn't sell completely out of Four Lokos, one because there just wasn't enough time to buy them all. So, what happened to the rest of them that didn't sell?

Well, they are now being bought back by MXI Environmental Services to turn it into ethanol for vehicles. Not only are they getting the Four Lokos, but they are also getting other companies similar alcoholic energy drinks that were taken off the shelves.

The way that MXI turns the alcoholic energy beverage into ethanol is that they distill the alcohol from the drink and turns and sells it to be blended with gasoline. They don't just stop there either with the recycling. MXI recycles the whole product of Four Loko. They sell the cans to recycling plants and then recycle the packaging and pallets.

While reading the TIME article about the new home for Four Lokos, I also found the Unlikely alternative for them... Adult Chocolate Milk. That's right, 40-proof chocolate milk. So instead of getting "Blackout in a can," they say you can "Re-taste your youth. At 40-proof." The short article gives some suggestions of other concoctions.

I think that it's pretty cool that instead of dumping all that alcohol into the environment, they found an alternative way to dispose of it. What do you think?

What Does It Mean?

It's been a while since I've been on here, but I'm back and this time I'm not going to leave anyone hanging. My blog is still going to be about sustainability and marketing, but I want to mix it up and make it more interesting and engaging.

So, what does sustainability marketing mean?

To me, from what I've learned, what sustainability marketing is companies who market "green" or "green products" to help utilize what we have left, in order for the next generations to have what we have now and taking into account the triple bottom line (social, ethical, and environmental factors of marketing).They market to consumers not only a product, but the future of the next generations to come.

As trying to find an actual definition of sustainability marketing, it's kind of hard to find. Most definitions that come up are from other bloggers or the term is 'green marketing' instead of sustainability. In doing this, I also found the blog of the authors, Frank-Martin Belz and Ken Peattie, of the book of Sustainability Marketing, that I read last quarter in my Sustainability Marketing class. In the book, he defines sustainability marketing as "an evolution of marketing that blends the mainstream economic and technical perspectives with the emerging concepts of relationship marketing and the social, ethical, environmental and intergenerational perspectives of the sustainable development agenda" (pg. 18).

I believe that what many companies are doing now is not sustainability marketing. What they are doing is 'greenwashing,' saying that their products are "green" and not specifying in fact what is actually 'green' about their product. That's one reason why I think it's going to be hard for those true green companies to market their products because people may not believe them, based on what they've been told before. The FTC did recently come out with new laws and regulations for green marketing.

What does sustainability marketing means to you? Do you think that people are still going to buy sustainable products after all the greenwashing and new regulations companies have to follow?