Mother Nature Network:  MNN is a one stop shop for anyone looking to green their life.  From the simple tasks of recycling to the more complex undertakings of remodeling your home the green way, MNN is a great resource for helping you help mother nature.

Green Hands USA: “Local Action, Global Reaction” Green Hands USA is a volunteer network and green resource center for anyone who would like to lend a helping hand in a green project.

As a company dedicated to creating carbon neutral shipments, Green Shipping (www.greenshipping.com) is glad to see that other organizations are beginning to consider their shipment emissions and offer ways to offset them. “What is good for the environment is also good business.” Reducing the CO2 emitted by packages will help in the fight against climate change. Green Shipping offers a comprehensive carbon neutral shipping solution and supports shipments from UPS, FedEx, USPS as well as freight carriers. Green Shipping uses the weight, mode of transportation, and routing information for each and every shipment in order to provide the most accurate carbon footprint calculation available.
With Green Shipping, participating businesses can use their environmental commitment as a competitive advantage. Certified Green Shippers can display the Green Shipping logo on their website and in communication to their customers. With the Green Shipping iTrack™ package tracking tool, businesses can quickly and easily enable package tracking on their website and provide customers with a one stop solution for information on their orders. Green Shipping offsets the environmental impacts of customer shipments with purchases from Bonneville Environment Foundation who was award the EPA 2009 Green Energy Supplier of the Year award and is leading the way to a cleaner environment.
For more info on Green Shipping’s carbon neutral shipping solution, check out our short video
For more info on UPS carbon neutral shipping click here

PORTLAND, Ore. – September 15, 2009 The Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF), an entrepreneurial supplier of green power solutions, announced today that it has won two Green Power Leadership Awards- an awards program jointly sponsored by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and the Center for Resource Solutions (CRS). BEF has been recognized as the Best Green Power Supplier of the Year and its Solar 4R Schools program won Best Green Power Education Outreach Program in the Market Development Category . Award winners were announced during the Renewable Energy Markets Conference being held in Atlanta, GA this week.

Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) was founded in Portland, Oregon in 1998. BEF is a national, nonprofit organization and has played a major role in the development of the carbon offset market. In 2000, BEF helped to create the voluntary market for carbon offsets by closing the first retail REC trade deal with the Environmental Protection Agency. They also launched the first online carbon calculator in 2001. In 2008, BEF Carbon Offsets became Green-e® Climate certified.

The partnership between Greenshipping.com and BEF Carbon Offsets, empowers organizations and individuals to dedicate funds to the development of renewable energy sources like solar power and wind farms, while at the same time making their package shipments carbon neutral. We are glad to have BEF as our partner and know that with their help, Greenshipping.com and our customers will reduce climate change.

The Fast Company article by James Hofflin hits the nail right on the head. Companies, particularly retailers, are beginning to actively engage in greening up. From conservation, to recycling, reducing and reusing, many retailers are thinking about their footprint and acting to reduce it. But… most of these green activities are taking place inside the store, office or in manufacturing. This leaves out a huge part of retailers Co2 emissions.

Transportation and shipping throughout the supply chain, from the supplier, to the manufacturer, to the retailer and the customer is most likely the largest carbon emitter of a company’s operations. So, why haven’t retailers thought about this? The most likely answer is that up till now, greening up your transportation and shipping meant leaning up your operations, investing in new trucks and strategiizing different routes. But now with Greenshipping.com, this daunting task is a bit more simple.

We agree that companies have to consider the entirety of their transportation and logistics to come up with the greenest solution. For example, Investing in renewable energy is one of the best ways to offset your transportation and shipping emissions. Greenshipping.com is happy have this opportunity to help businesses go green.

So, what would happen if USPS decided to reduce or cut Saturday delivery service?  According to some investigative research on this very question by Pablo Paster of Treehugger, the atmosphere might become a much cleaner place.

Currently, USPS drivers spend a total of 1.2 billion miles on the road each year and 90% is attributed to letter delivery.  “Cutting six days of home delivery service to five days would cut the miles driven by delivery operations by 1/6th, or 167 million miles.”  Potential savings of GHG emissions to our atmosphere due to this cut back would be around 211 million pounds per day.

Sounds like a pretty good idea.

From Dr. Vino's Website

In May, National Geographic published a small expose on “The Toll of Wine”. The article is based off of research by Pablo Paster (Climate Check) and Tyler Colman (Dr. Vino). Transport tallies for the shipment of a 750 mill. bottle of wine are estimated for shipping and trucking from Napa, U.S., Sydney, Australia, Bordeaux, France and Santiago Chili to L.A., Chicago and New York city.

The Results:

Trucking from Napa to NYC has the largest impact at 4.4lbs/ bottle shipped where as shipping from Bordeaux, France to NYC has the smallest impact at 0.3lbs/ bottle shipped (Yes, this is even smaller than trucking from Napa to LA which equals around 0.6lbs/bottle shipped).

So, it is clear that trucking is a lot less efficient than shipping but this doesn’t necessarily mean that you should import all of your wine. Shopping for local wine (as well as food) is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint. But, if you must get a Pot de Bordeaux, a bottle of Calistoga, a flagon of Yellow Tail or a carafe of Casas Del Bosque delivered to your door, Greenshipping is a great way to offset those emissions!

Here are links to the study and comments about the article:

Dr. Vino: “The Tolll of WIne”

Treehugger: To Ship or Truck?

Packaging Design Principles & Guidelines

Approved and Published 9/29/08

The following are guidelines for business sustainability efforts in the area of product packaging, both in terms of consumer point of purchase, display packaging, as well as shipping and protective packaging throughout its entire supply chain.

REDUCE

□ Do we need it?

□ Minimize material usage or eliminate packaging completely

□ Use single materials and avoid laminates or multiple materials

□ Substrates shall be separable without the use of tools

□ Minimize size of packaging (reduce shipping space)

□ Examine the package-to-product ratio

REUSE

□ Create packaging that can be reused within the retail operations.

□ Packaging that can be reused within and between retail stores, distribution centers, and

factories

□ Consumer packaging that can be reused or has alternative use

If creating reusable packaging consider the following:

How many customers will actually reuse the packaging vs. throwing it away?

Can it be done without using more material than non-reusable packaging?

Will it be compatible throughout the supply chain (i.e. transportation, distribution centers, retail store, etc)?

RECYCLE

□ Create packaging compatible with recycling systems (can a person in the average city recycle

this at home or at our retail stores?)

□ Single material (multiple materials reduces recyclability of packaging)

□ Avoid laminates, films, wax, or wet strength additives and coatings

□ Avoid pressure sensitive adhesives, closures, foil stamps, aluminum tags, etc.

□ Avoid adhesives and coating (they contaminate the recycling process)

□ Avoid metallic, uv-cured or fluorescent inks (they contaminate the recycle process)

If creating recyclable packaging:

Movement to educate via the graphics and clearly label as such

Actively support recycling as the end-of-use destination for all the paper we use.

Packaging shall declare the approximate recycled content for each material

Recyclable packaging needs to be recovered by brand owners to guarantee that it is recycled

The retail stores shall include a free service whereby the packaging material can be collected and returned for reuse or recycling

SUSTAINABLE MATERIALS

□ Maximize use of post consumer recycled content, agricultural waste or textile scrap

□ Maximize use of sustainable materials

□ Use materials with high recycle rates

□ Identify all packaging being used by our vendors

PAPER OR PAPERBOARD

□ Post-consumer recycled content, agricultural waste, textile scrap, etc.

□ FSC certified paper and wood products (this ensures no old growth or clear cut forests)

□ Unbleached, totally chlorine free or process chlorine free paper

□ Acid free paper

□ Water based and/or soy based inks

□ Avoid wax and other wet-strength additives and coatings

□ Avoid plastic film laminations, extruded coatings or foil stamping

□ Avoid inks with solvents

□ Avoid uv-cured printing inks, metallic inks or fluorescent inks

□ Avoid pressure-sensitive adhesives

□ Avoid film applied over a cut-out “windowing”

□ Avoid wax coatings, e-beam inks or uv inks on corrugated cardboard

PLASTIC

□ Post-consumer recycled content

□ No PVC

□ Do not mix resins or incompatible attachments

□ Biopolymers: be cautious about additives such as coupling agents, plasticizers, fillers, dyes,

and pigments

Pretty Cool Huh!  Good luck OIA!

Tracking goods and services has become a major part of consumer life. We like to know where our things are and when we will get them. In the past decade, customers have increasingly been able to track everything from packages, to flights, to Pizza delivery and now CO2 emissions. Companies have caught onto this customer need to track and are offering more in depth ways of tracking the where, when and how of a good or service.

Greenshipping.com is proud to be one of these Companies. We give our customers an easy to use service that tracks two things:
1. Your Packages: Where it starts, where it ends, what mode of transportation it uses en route and, most importantly, an accurate arrival date.
2. Your Packages’ C02 Emissions: Calculated by tracking the packages’ weight, the transportation mode used to deliver it and total miles traveled based on Professor Arpad Horvath’s extensive research on emission profiles of freight transportation.

Check out the USA Today article on Track-a-Holics, then become a Greenshipping.com Track-a-Holic and easily track your packages and their CO2 emissions.