It’s Friday. Before you pack your bags and head out to the Hamptons for the weekend, check out what is new in the Green Business Blog Carnival this week. Your portfolio might thank you for it! Thanks to our friends at sustainablog and Triple Pundit for coming up with the carnival. Next week, check out the carnival at Green Marketing TV.
Tag:
supply chain
Watching baseball’s first quadruple play was strange. Seeing Wal-Mart go green is stranger still.
First the baseball: The scene was a game of T-Ball, where everyone bats every inning, regardless of the number of outs.
The bases were loaded when a line drive ended up in the glove of the pitcher. While he wondered how it got there, all the runners took off without tagging up. The pitcher ran to third, then second, then first.
We kept counting the number of outs and they did not add up. First in our heads: That doesn’t make sense. Then on our hand: That’s crazy. Then our other hand: It kept adding up to four outs.
It took us a while to believe what we saw right in front of us.
And now Wal-Mart, the original Black Hat, is going green. Or better said, sustainable. Let that sink in because it is true. Big time.
So much so that Treehugger.com says It “could end up being one of the biggest motivators to make truly ‘green’ products ever.”
As in history of the world.
Wal-Mart has made believers out of not just the biggest environmental organizations in the world — like the Environmental Defense Fund and the World Wildlife Federation — but also Wal-Mart’s suppliers.
Wind turbine technology has become a fully commercial venture, but the recent rapid growth of the wind industry has strained its supply chain to meet demand in a timely manner. Furthermore, unexpected component failures, especially electronic controls, gearboxes, generators, and rotor blades, have driven up operations and maintenance costs.
During the course of the research for a new report just published by Wind Energy Update, it ultimately became clear that reliable and verifiable data on wind industry operations and maintenance cost trends is quite rare. In fact, there are no current widely available data sets illustrating these wind industry costs.
Proprietary research, reviews of scarce secondary sources and anecdotal evidence obtained through confidential interviews with wind industry owners and operators and component suppliers suggest that operations and maintenance expenses are double or even triple what was originally projected, particularly with the latest class of multi-megawatt machines now permeating the global wind market.
The green economy is thriving despite the economic downturn, according to the State of Green Business 2010 report released Wednesday by Greener World Media.
“Green professionals weren’t among the first to be thrown overboard,” said Joel Makower, report author and Executive Editor of GreenBiz.com, in a statement. “Their budgets were slashed, their headcounts frozen, all while their mandates sometimes increased. But they managed to survive, even thrive, during tough times.”
What top trends are now driving green business? To start, the report says more companies and consumers are embracing “radical transparency.”
Energy efficiency. Renewable energy. Logistics parks and the supply chain. The first two are easy unless you have been buried alive for the past 18 months. However, logistics parks and the supply chain are possibly two terms many don’t think of on a regular basis and like gravity, you would never know they were there until they failed.
Logistics parks are ‘clusters’ of distribution centers located in strategic geographical zones to aid in supply chain management, which is the science of getting the right thing to the right place at the right time in the right quantity for the right price. Easy enough?
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