Taking the green message to business

29 Aug 07 (Business Times)

IT'S been said so often as to seem almost a platitude: 'Go green
because it's good for your business'.

And certainly there are many high-profile examples of corporations
taking measures to make their businesses more environment- friendly.
But by and large, the impact of the green message on the corporate
world remains depressingly negligible.

We need to ask why, and what can be done about it.

Many are passionate young people who have moved beyond traditional
media to the interactive world of the Internet. For them, the Web's
social networking sites and strategies are the perfect way to
disseminate information, identify and encourage green initiatives, and
generally educate tens of millions of their young peers in an
intensively interactive environment.

The educating is more effective because the lessons are shared,
dissected, criticised and recreated by consensus.

It is education that is absorbed, not imposed. Some call it Web 2.0;
the name doesn't matter, the experience does.

And that is a lesson that their senior counterparts in business and
government could take to heart.

Not in the area of green products and activities; leave that to the
experts.

It takes scientists to create more effective and eco-friendly fuels
and efficient hybrid cars, engineers to reduce the power and emission
needs of a manufacturing process.

It needs an experienced business team to convert eco-friendly
innovations into commercially feasible products. And it takes
visionary government officials to project a country's needs decades
into the future, and create a public transportation system that is
effective, and people as well as environment- friendly.

But that's already happening.

So why do the mass of business folk, who stand to benefit from
eco-friendly innovations and infrastructure, continue to drag their heels?

Simply, the message hasn't got through.

And so long as this vast majority remains uncommitted, the industrial
fog will stay, both literally and figuratively.

Clearly, education is key. But education imposed in the traditional
way has proved to be ineffective.

Which is why it's worth paying attention to the new-media world of our
youth, where information is dynamically shared and absorbed. It could
be the strategy that turns the tide.