Evertune is a company that has received a lot of well-deserved applause for creating an innovation that is changing the world of music. The company’s lead product, the award-winning Evertune guitar bridge, is able to keep a guitar in perfect tune forever. Most recently, they were featured on CNN, and you can see the Evertune video here.

What also makes Evertune unique is company CEO Mark Chayet’s commitment to sustainable packaging that is quality, low cost and effective. Though to some those three requirements may seem almost contradictory, Mark was determined, and his search eventually led him to Globe Guard® products and Salazar Packaging. (more…)

Unless this is the first time you have visited our blog, you already know we are avid proponents of reusing and recycling packaging. That is especially true of our corrugated products that offer the most in recycled content, because no one has figured out how to improve on 100%.

The one area of sustainability that we have yet to master is that of “upcycling,” which is recycling a product and making it even more valuable than it originally was. I sincerely appreciate and respect people who are able to take empty juice pouches and turn them into fashion handbags or use empty wine bottles to create beautiful table lamps out of what might otherwise end up in a landfill. However, Mark Langan, with a lot of talent and time, is able to take corrugated board and turn it into beautiful works of art. (more…)

I often say that one of the greatest benefits of operating a green business is all of the extraordinary people and companies we get to meet. Our new friends at Mahamosa are a perfect example.

Social Responsibility and Environmental Responsibility

For most green companies, it is not a choice of one or the other; the question is how best to accomplish both. We try to make the environmental part of that objective as easy as possible by providing our customers the most eco-friendly packaging available. The nice people at Mahamosa quickly agreed that our Globe Guard® 100% PCW recycled content corrugated shipping boxes were consistent with their goals and messaging. (more…)

This past weekend, Lenora, my wife/business partner, and I attended Green America’s Chicago version of their Green Festival. As usual, we had a great time seeing a wide variety of new green products and meeting some really nice people in the process.

For the very first time, we also realized how many husband and wife couples have become green entrepreneurs and are enjoying building a green business together. Some are applying their past experience and skills, or in some cases they are utilizing brand new, previously undiscovered talents. In either case, they have teamed up with their significant other and together are making an equally significant difference in the irreversible green trend we are all witnessing.

Maybe it’s a sign of the economic times or a result of the continued interest and growth in sustainability that has helped to create these husband and wife green teams. Or perhaps it is simply that no one other than a loving life partner would be willing to work as long or as hard, and in many cases for little or no immediate compensation.

Certainly the sacrifices of owning your own business are many, but so are the benefits when you both enjoy and are totally committed to what you are doing. The festival was filled with many wonderful “grouples” stories, and I would like to share a few with you. (more…)

If you are in the green business as we are, it is easy to get caught up in the yearly hoopla and, at times, distorted perspective of Earth Day. Companies will often use this yearly focus on green to announce a new sustainable policy or program, or perhaps launch a new green product.

However, Earth Day is not about corporate initiatives, products, or even carbon footprints. It is really about a very large and diverse group of people who contribute time and talent in an effort to create a greener and better Earth for the next generation.

This year I thought I would do something different — highlight three people who have made and are making a unique and substantial difference in the worldwide effort to preserve the environment. I shared these stores with three friends in the green media, and I am pleased to say they each have shared one of the stories with their readers. (more…)

As I have said many times, one of the greatest benefits of owning a green focused business is that we tend to meet some of the nicest green minded people in the world. Through a mutual author friend, I have been fortunate to meet fellow Green America member, Rosamaria Caballero, cofounder of Green Irene, the company best known for training entrepreneurs as eco consultants. I recently spoke to her about that initiative and her new line of green cleaning products.

Dennis Salazar: Rosamaria, please give us a little background on how you and your husband, PJ Stafford, started your company.

Rosamaria Caballero: About 3 ½ years ago, we read Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, saw the movie and came to the realization that we needed to start taking our own small steps in our home and lifestyle. As we started adopting green initiatives in our own apartment, we felt overwhelmed by the amount of information and mis-information out there. We wanted to go green, but we didn’t want to make it a hobby (as it turns out, we made it our careers!) and we knew that other busy families and business owners were not going to spend hours researching reliable information and great products. As entrepreneurs, we knew that there was no way that green was going to go “mainstream” unless people could get easy and reliable advice, and that’s how Green Irene, your local Eco-Consultant was born. (more…)

Because of his unwavering commitment to sustainability, one of our favorite customers is Tom Prinzing, the owner and founder of Zing Enterprises. Tom is also one of the most creative people we know, and his products essentially communicate important green messages to the people we work or live with. We recently spoke with Tom about his business.

Dennis Salazar: Tom, there is an interesting story about how we each got into the business of green, and your business card introduces you as an Eco-preneur. Please share your story with us.

Tom Prinzing: I was working as a consultant for industrial distributors and manufacturers. A common denominator is they were all looking for future market trends.  I kept seeing “green” opportunities in my research. In looking at recycling signs, I noticed that most of them were made out of environmentally unfriendly materials.  Those signs would last for eons in landfills. The general premise would be to make recycling signs from recycled materials. Then I thought, “Why don’t I do this myself?” (more…)

Over the course of the last few months I have gotten to know John Mennell as he designed and built the Magazine Publishers Family Literacy Project. It is a program designed to help minimize waste by recycling magazines while helping to promote literacy. The concept was fascinating to me, and the more I learned, the more I wanted to be involved. We were fortunate when John selected our Globe Guard® Reusable Tote as the ideal collection bin.

As busy as John is, we sincerely appreciated him taking time to share his unique project and story with our ISP readers.

Dennis Salazar: John, before we get into your new program, please give us a little background on you as a “social entrepreneur.”

John Mennell:  I’ve spent most of my life innovating to create social value – to see things the way they could be and to find effective and efficient ways to address basic community and human needs through creativity, collaboration, technology and leverage.  Twenty five years ago, I began a lifelong “hobby” of standing at the entrance of supermarkets to conduct food drives.  There, I find captive shoppers, appreciative of the convenient opportunity to donate food for their hungry neighbors. I learned that by standing there, making eye contact, even one volunteer in one day could collect up to sixteen carts full of groceries. People had questions I couldn’t always answer – where can I donate food I have at home? Where can I volunteer?  Where can I get food for my family?  So, I engineered and launched a toll-free hotline that automatically recognized the location of a caller and connected them to their local food pantry.

DS:  The portion of your program I am familiar with is focused on recycling magazines, but it was preceded by a program that gave annual subscriptions to children’s magazines to poor children. Is that program still active, and how are our readers able to get involved?

JM:  Yes, we operate two programs – Magazine Harvest recycles clean, gently read magazines to new readers.  Magazine Mentors provides new subscriptions to children and families via community literacy programs.  These magazines are sponsored by businesses and individuals. We meet many literacy objectives, but our highest priorities are children, teens and moms in homeless and domestic violence shelters, homeless students, youth in mentoring programs and adults in job training programs.  Our mission is to manage an online marketplace where literacy agencies can post their needs and consumers can support them.  Anyone can get involved by visiting the MagazineLiteracy.org website.  Select “Donate Now” to sponsor new magazines for literacy programs or “Volunteer” to help organize community literacy outreach.  Our Magazine Literacy Ambassadors are students and citizens who work with local literacy agencies to help them get involved in our magazine programs. (more…)

Use promo code GLOBE for a 15% discount on your purchase at www.MotherTongues.com – valid till 8/30/2010.

Interview with Michelle Hamman of MotherTongues

The green community is blessed with many kind hearted and dedicated people eager and willing to make a difference. Every once in a while we are fortunate enough to meet a person and organization that really stands out in that crowd. One of them is Michelle Hamman and her company MotherTongues.

DS: Michelle, before we start talking about your business, please tell our readers about your background and home life including the transition from professional, to stay at home mom and entrepreneur.

MH: Dennis, thank you for letting me tell the MotherTongues story. I made the transition from electrical engineer to home based entrepreneur when our daughters were 1 and 3, and it was getting too difficult to keep up with changing diapers, coordinating naptime and working from home. As a bilingual person, language is important to me and so too the differences that are embedded in culture. MotherTongues began when my husband and I explored the riches different languages and cultures offer. The company has just grown from there.

DS: Your company is very unique in a market crowded with “message apparel” companies. Please explain to our readers how yours is so very different.

MH: I research words that have no direct English translation and print them with poetic and symbolic descriptions on t-shirts, socks, aprons, scarves, and tote bags. The values of community, peace, justice, and ecological well-being contained in the words are definitely unique! People wearing MotherTongues apparel show their “philosophy of life.” One’s worldview is not related to one’s age and MotherTongues clothing is worn by 4-year-olds to 80-year-olds!

MotherTongues is a fair labor, organic cotton apparel company. This combination is uncommon, but important to me since MotherTongues nurtures the earth as well as its peoples.

DS: That of course leads us to the story and meaning of your very first, and to date most popular tee shirt – Ubuntu

MH: Ubuntu is a very unique Zulu or Xhosa word from my “mother country”, South Africa. Ubuntu is a term for humaneness, for caring, sharing and being in harmony with all of creation. In “No Future Without Forgiveness” Archbishop Desmond Tutu says this about the concept of ubuntu: “Africans have a thing called ubuntu. It is about the essence of being human, it is part of the gift that Africa will give the world. It embraces hospitality, caring about others, being willing to go the extra mile for the sake of another. We believe that a person is a person through other persons, that my humanity is caught up, bound up, inextricably, with yours. When I dehumanize you, I inexorably dehumanize myself. The solitary human being is a contradiction in terms. Therefore you seek to work for the common good because your humanity comes into its own in community, in belonging.”

Hospitality, humanity, community, belonging…. Aren’t these meaningful and beautiful values that we can all relate to and learn from? (more…)

Our readers know I am a sucker for a good, green story and I have a great one to share with you today. I know Allison as owner of Rogue Element, one of Chicago’s top green design companies. She is also a fellow member of Green America Business Network and the Chicago Sustainable Business Alliance.

This interview, however, is focused on her new company called Squishy Press and the unique product line she and her husband Rob, just introduced at the Green America Green Festival held in Chicago last weekend.

DS: Allison, please tell our readers about Squishy Press and how you and Rob came up with this great idea.

AM: For years we’d been thinking that we should come up with some sort of retail product to sell that Rogue Element would design. Many designers make greeting cards, wrapping paper, gift tags, and the like to try something new and stretch their creative chops. But we could never think of anything to make that really combined our love of design and sustainability. We even had a section of our website up for a long time that kept saying “products coming soon” that we eventually took down!

Then in 2008 we had our son. As babies tend to do, he put everything in his mouth. We were able to find safe diapers, organic clothing, even nontoxic carpet . . . but not books. And what parent doesn’t want their child to have books? As he chewed on them, we were dismayed at how he would ingest the foils and laminates. We were talking one day in our kitchen about how we knew that the printing industry didn’t always use the safest materials. Then Rob looked at me and said, “We’re designers. We should design our own books!” And Squishy Press was born.

Design-wise, we knew we wanted to improve upon some of the picture books we’d seen, since many of them have terrible photography and illustrations. So we contacted our talented photographer friend Steven Gross to see if he wanted to work with us. We then engaged a printer that could deliver the greenest product possible. We even spoke with the ink and paper manufacturers directly about their processes and products so we could make informed choices.

DS: Tell us what you discovered about where and how baby books are made and how yours are different.

AM: It’s hard to truly discover how most baby books are made, since they are all printed overseas. We actually couldn’t find one printed in the USA. Some claimed to be nontoxic, but when we tried to find out how or why, there was no information available to back up those claims. Many print on recycled paper, and that’s a start, but the positives of that choice get negated if the coatings, inks, and glues are unsafe. Additionally, the shipping of books over great distances hardly helps the carbon footprint.

In February 2009 all toys sold in the United States were required to meet the safety requirements of ASTM F963, Standard Consumer Safety Specification for Toy Safety under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA). But children’s books are exempt. We sent our books to an independent laboratory to perform substrate and surface tests for lead and the seven other heavy metals covered under ASTM F963 Standards for Toy Safety. The lab told us that we weren’t required to have tests done, but we asked them to run the tests anyway so we knew where we fell in line with the standards. We are pleased to say that we fell well below the government standards for safety!

DS: One of the first things I noticed is that your books have no text and show photos only. How did you decide to take that approach?

AM: Babies love to look at pictures of other babies. So we thought that by using great photography and our illustration skills to fill in the backgrounds, we could provide pictures of babies done in a different way. As a bonus, it also allows us to get away with not writing any copy.

DS: You’ve launched with two titles. Tell us about those and when we can expect to see additional titles added to the product line.

AM:The first title, Silly Faces, is literally just a book of young kids making silly faces. It’s really fun, and kids love to mimic what they see and try to come up with their own expressions. The backgrounds are illustrated with colorful shapes and patterns.

The second title is Opposites, where we demonstrate the concept of opposites, like hot and cold, wet and dry, etc. Here we used the background illustrations to help reinforce the word that was being demonstrated. For example, the “wet” kid is soaking wet with goggles and a snorkel, and her background has waves and fish. We added the words in the background, so the word “wet” appears as waves. For a more universal appeal, the words appear in three languages — English, French and Spanish. (more…)