Moving towards sustainability in local business
By Kristin Schillings
One individual’s choices to “go green” won’t save the world. That said, creating ways for businesses to market their choices to support sustainability can encourage products made with circularity in mind. With an increasing number of consumers seeking more sustainably made options, there is a great opportunity for businesses to meet a rising demand.
At our last Brown Bag event, we sat down with Patty Cervenka of Greenish Neighbor to talk about what it’s like to be a local business providing services and education to move our community towards sustainable systems. With a mission to ‘build community, educate about waste reduction and talk to anyone who will listen about climate action’, Greenish Neighbor plays an important role in providing services and education that prioritize a healthy future.
Part of the Greenish mission is to provide consumers looking for eco-friendly options tools to guide them in choosing products and services. This can be a complicated issue. Hand in hand with the growth of a demand for environmentally friendly goods and services comes the risks of greenwashing, as some seek to exploit the promise of an ethically made product. Greenwashing is the practice of deceptively trying to persuade the public that an organization’s products or practices are environmentally friendly. The term was coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986 when he noticed the irony of a resort building new bungalows on the shoreline while simultaneously asking customers to hang up their towels to ‘safe the reef.’ Greenwashing can come in many forms, from misleading packaging and overstatement to blatant lies, as in the infamous Volkswagen scandal.
There’s a lot of room for uncertainty when it comes to rating a business as ‘green.’ It’s nice for a restaurant to spring for the compostable takeout container, but if it’s only compostable in a commercial facility and there aren’t any nearby, is there a better option? What about a company that uses sustainably grown material, but it ships from halfway across the world? Some groups are working to provide frameworks to help businesses and consumers access better choices (the Living Building Challenge is a great example), but it can be hard to choose what’s best in a sea of information. Take buying a sustainably made item of clothing. There are a host of factors to choose from when considering the environment, all with differing benefits and drawbacks.
Types of sustainable fashion options from Redress Raleigh
When there’s a significant risk for misinformation, it’s important to have transparent and easily accessible education. Looking for sustainable options herself, Patty thought it would be great to have a list of local businesses that were working toward sustainability. In partnership with Towards Zero Waste, the idea for a listing of eco-friendly local businesses grew into the Greenish Directory. The directory is grounded in the belief that businesses, like individuals, are on a spectrum of sustainable behaviors. Some of them don’t consider the impacts of their choices on the environment at all while others prioritize adapting their business models with the circular economy in mind.
The directory is searchable by category, providing a reference for types of sustainable behaviors including things like reuse & landfill reduction, carbon reduction, sourcing local & organic, prioritizing conservation, and participating in green certifications and partnerships. Providing transparency in an area where there is a great deal of confusion, the Greenish Directory provides businesses and consumers an important communication tool. Focusing on specific actions a group can take to make a positive impact is a great way to encourage change without making broad and misleading generalizations.
Businesses and consumers alike can suggest an organization be listed in the directory. Patty and the Towards Zero Waste team vet every submission, ensuring accurate representations. As the Directory highlights many ways a business can make sustainable choices, it encourages taking steps in the right direction. Making change can be overwhelming as an organization has to balance the realities of cash flow with the need to adapt processes to circular systems, so celebrating choices that help move an organization towards sustainability is important. This focus on the process of becoming a more circular community is what puts the ‘ish’ in Greenish. So next time we’re looking for a restaurant or notice a business that is doing its best to make circularity work, remember that we have a way to support the organizations in our community working to make a sustainable future a reality.
