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Archive for the ‘green packaging’ Category

Starter homes get solar panels as standard equipment

Posted in alternative energy, green buildings, green packaging, renewable energy, solar energy, tagged on March 28, 2011| Leave a Comment »

photo: KB Home

In The New York Times on Thursday, I wrote about a home builder installing solar arrays as standard equipment in new developments in Southern California:

Among the standard features offered for new homes at Manzanita at Paseo del Sol, a KB Home development in a desert suburb southeast of Los Angeles, are nine-foot ceilings, six-panel doors and a 1.4-kilowatt solar array.

While KB Home has offered rooftop photovoltaic panels as an option for some time, the home builder now will make solar arrays from SunPower standard equipment on more than 800 homes in 10 communities being built in Southern California.

“This is a game changer for our industry and a powerful way for us to compete in the marketplace, especially with resale homes,” Craig LeMessurier, KB Home’s director of corporate communications, said in an e-mail. While pricey solar panels are often found on the roofs of high-end houses, it’s notable that KB Home is installing the arrays on homes with base selling prices that range from $250,000 to $360,000. In California, that’s starter home territory.

KB Home estimates that the standard 1.4-kilowatt solar array will supply about 30 percent of the electricity for an 1,800-foot to 2,000-foot square home. Of course, that all depends on how much a homeowner runs their air conditioning, for instance.

Rooftop solar can be a hedge against California’s high and rising electricity rates. And given the intense sunshine and air-conditioning demands in desert areas where KB Home is building its latest developments, such arrays will generate more electricity than they could in, say, San Francisco. Homeowners will also qualify for a 30 percent federal tax credit as well as state incentives.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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J.R. Ewing’s back and the Texas oilman has gone solar

Posted in alternative energy, energy, environment, green packaging, renewable energy, solar energy, SolarWorld, tagged , , , , , on July 13, 2010| Leave a Comment »

In The New York Times on Wednesday, I write about the return of J.R. Ewing, the oil tycoon villain of the “Dallas” television show. Except this time, he’s pushing solar energy:

J.R. Ewing returns to the small screen on Tuesday, and the boys down at the Cattleman’s Club just might need a double bourbon when they hear what he has to say.

Larry Hagman, the actor who played the scheming Texas oilman on the long-running television show “Dallas,” is reprising his role as J.R. in an advertising campaign to promote solar energy and SolarWorld, a German photovoltaic module maker.

“In the past it was always about the oil,” Mr. Hagman says in a TV commercial that is being unveiled Tuesday at the Intersolar conference in San Francisco.

“The oil was flowing and so was the money. Too dirty, I quit it years ago,” he growls as he saunters past a portrait of a grinning J.R. in younger days and a wide-screen television showing images of an offshore oil rig and blackened waters.

Doffing a 10-gallon hat, he heads outside into the sunshine and gazes at a solar array on the roof of the house. “But I’m still in the energy business. There’s always a better alternative.”

“Shine, baby shine,” he says with his trademark J.R. cackle.

In real life, Mr. Hagman, 78, lives on an estate in the Southern California town of Ojai where he installed a massive 94-kilowatt solar system, thought to be the world’s largest residential array, several years ago.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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The Green Consumer: Myth or reality?

Posted in consumers, corporate green, environment, green marketing, green packaging, green tech, the green economy, tagged , , on April 22, 2008| 26 Comments »

Fortune associate editor Julie Schlosser reports from Fortune’s Brainstorm Green conference:

PASADENA, Calif — Consumers are feeling the pressure to go green. And it’s hard to ignore. Drinking bottled water is a definite no no. Flying across the country? Buy offsets. The consumer is being bombarded with green marketing and advertising and the result might not be what you expected. All this green guilt and messaging just might be making consumers more skeptical about the growing assortment of green products.

When polled, most consumers overwhelmingly say they want to buy green, according to Joel Makower, head of Greener World Media and author of The Green Consumer. But they aren’t actually doing it. According to the research, Makower says, “If it is green, consumers assume it isn’t good.” And that means, in many cases, green products are entering the marketplace with a deficit.

That was part of the discussion at Monday afternoon’s panel, “The Green Consumer: Myth or reality?” Andrew Shapiro, founder and CEO of GreenOrder, a strategic consulting firm that works with big brands such as GE (GE), GM (GM), Starwood (HOT) and Office Depot (ODP), moderated the panel that included Stonyfield Farm founder Gary Hirschberg, Elizabeth Lowery of GM, and Makower.

Hirschberg, the CE-Yo (yes, you read that correctly) of Stonyfield Farm, the world’s largest organic yogurt company, has a fun story to tell. He took organic yogurt into the mainstream long before organics were cool, and he has built a $300 million-per-year business along the way. He has also managed to incorporate green principles throughout the product’s life cycle. “But we don’t even use the word green when we describe what we do,” he pointed out.

Still, he argues, there is obviously a green consumer. “But we think they are more focused on quality.” And the quality does something that millions of dollars in advertising can’t. It creates loyalty, says Hirschberg. “And if loyalty comes from an emotional place, authenticity is the key to creating it.”

What consumers are showing us is that if your company has a high “talk-to-do ratio” when it comes to going or being green, you’ll lose the consumer’s trust immediately. By adopting a sense of humility and focusing on communicating honestly with your consumers, Hirschberg argues, companies can build loyalty.

So how does a company build such a relationship with their customer? By offering them a premium product and one that isn’t just greener, but tastes better, lasts longer, or is more aesthetically pleasing. And as the economy continues to slow, the best way to get a consumer to go green is to give them the goods for less.

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HP’s Green Ink: New Packaging to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Posted in green packaging on February 12, 2007| 1 Comment »

Hp_packaging_redesign_image_3_2
It’s the small things that count. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has redesigned the packaging for its ubiquitous ink and toner cartridges in a way that the printer giant claims will eliminate an estimated 37 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions this year. Or to use the cars-taken-off-the-road metric: that’s like idling 3,600 vehicles for a year. So what did HP do? It essentially shrunk the packaging and made it lighter, replacing PVC plastic with recycled plastic and paper. (Before-and-after photo above.) That will save 15 million pounds of materials, resulting in smaller packages that require fewer carbon-spewing trucks and freighters to get them to their destinations. For instance, HP says smaller LaserJet toner packages mean that 203 cartridges fit on a shipping pallet that used to hold 144. Of course, refilling spent ink cartridges rather than replacing them is another way to get rid of planet-warming packaging. HP has also redesigned the packaging for its PhotoSmart 735 digital camera, reducing the weight by 36 percent. The number of cameras per pallot has increased to 340 from 200 and pallot use has fallen 41 percent as a result, according to HP. That saves some green for shareholders: shipping costs per camera  are down 36 percent. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart (WMT) has joined efforts to rethink the box. As part of its "Sustainability 360" initiative, the retailer is working with suppliers to shrink the amount of product packaging by 5 percent by 2013.

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