Getting everybody on the same page makes sense when there’s an obvious economic or established PR benefit, such as touting an investment in more efficient lighting systems to cut your company’s power bill, which also cuts greenhouse gas (GHG) and other air pollutants relating to coal-fired electricity.

But what about other parts of the green culture war, such as car pooling, driving economy cars or riding a bike to work … in the rain? Can you be green if you enjoy a Big Mac or veal chops instead of adopting a vegan lifestyle?

Might be best to avoid these issues in a business setting. Otherwise you’re asking for trouble — the kind of trouble that takes years of therapy to resolve.

Turns out the battle of the green culture wars is creating new problems on the home front, according to the New York Times. Marriage and family therapists tell the paper they’re seeing an increase in arguments over who’s greener than who as one member of a household gets more committed to saving the planet than other family members.

For example, the NYTimes interviewed a Santa Barbara, CA, couple who both think of themselves as environmentalists. Husband bikes 12 miles or more to work instead of commuting by car, recycles and takes reusable bags to the grocery store to avoid the “paper or plastic” dilemma at checkout counter.

But that’s not good enough for the wife. She finds it depressing that her husband uses too much water to shave and shower and doesn’t share her passion for sushi.

Have you noticed any rise of environmental tensions between employees at your company? Let us know in the comments box below.

The Texas company Acme Brick, based in Ft. Worth, wasn’t going to sit back and watch a booming business go to its competitors that have found ways to add a green product line. How can you walk away from a market that’s expected to grow 7% over the next five years?

But rather than invent a green product, Acme Brick instead worked up a distributing deal with VAST Enterprises to market a line of green, composite paving bricks, which come in six colors.

VAST’s composite pavers are eco-friendly because they’re made from recycled materials — used auto tires and plastic containers.

Acme President and CEO Dennis Knautz says the move is part of a conscious effort to become a player in the green movement. As Knautz told the Fort Worth Business Press: “This market for green building materials is projected to expand by 7% annually over the next five years, and Acme Brick is committed to being our customers’ partner in green building.”

VAST’s pavers are LEED certified by the U.S. Green Building Council. This means Acme helps its customers earn LEED green building credits for:

• construction and waste management
• recycled content
  
• regional materials
• stormwater designs, and
  
• heat island effect.
  

That’s one of the lessons you can pick up from Marcal Paper Mills. The company is totally into the sustainable green thing and only produces 100% recycled paper.

Sure, the mill has invested in fancy technology over the decades to turn waste papers into fresh paper products, as reported in New Jersey’s Alternative Press. But the take-home from Marcal’s story is where their raw material — other people’s waste paper — comes from. To make its paper products, Marcal only uses the paper that’s recycled from:

• curbside pickups in residential neighborhoods
• those blue baskets in office buildings
• unwanted junk mail, and
• waste papers from printing companies.

So when your company’s thinking about going green, it can start by adopting the little things, such as recycling office paper in those blue plastic containers.

Plus, you may want to get your employees, and your mail room if you have one, to recycle all that junk mail that comes through, especially over the holidays.

It might take a bit of organizing and training to change some behaviors, but think of the positive. Recycling junk mail helps save trees. This is not a stretch. Marcal’s been relying totally on recycled paper for decades. It’s why their company shirts proudly state “We Save Trees.”

And of course, by recycling paper, you help save the trees and that prevents unnecessary releases of greenhouse gas emissions.

Check out some of the recommended Great Geek Gifts from the WebEcoist blog. Judging from the 13 geeky ideas reviewed, solar power is the big winner this year.

Not solar panels, but solar-powered gadgets — for example, the latest Apple iPod Nano features a solar-powered charging system that cuts power usage by 50%.

But it’s Nano’s cutting edge design that’s even more impressive and signals a major shift towards green chemistry and clean manufacturing. This iPod was manufactured without using any hazardous materials. Its features include:

• mercury-free LED-backlit display
• arsenic-free display glass
• brominated flame retardant-free, and
• polyvinyl chloride (PVC)-free plastics.

Then there’s the Solar Style solar-powered recharger that features 10 different types of connecting ports to recharge most phone, mp3 players and other electronic gadgets.

Or, how about the solar-powered lawnmower from Sunwhisper? But who’s thinking work for Christmas?

But don’t dismay if you’re a wind-power enthusiast. There’s a gadget for wind as well. The HYmini recharging device is a hand-held wind-powered recharger that’s lightweight enough for Santa to re-power Rudolph’s nose as he jumps from rooftop to rooftop next week.

For most companies, it’s not about creating something new from scratch.

Instead, they’re taking the road well traveled — they’re modifying existing products, tweaking them bit by bit to be more environmentally friendly than they were yesterday.

That’s what soda company Coca-Cola’s up to in its announcement that it’s creating a “green” version of its beverage “bottles.” The company’s latest innovation is technology that’s been with us since before the dinosaurs — plants.

The company’s now using plant-based plastics to reduce use of oil-based plastic. Coca-Cola’s polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles will contain up to 30% of the plant-based plastic. The vegetable matter is sugar cane and molasses.

Adding the plant plastic to the recipe will make the PlantBottle PET bottles 100% renewable because PET is a totally recyclable material. The move is part of Coca-Cola’s goal to reduce its dependence on petroleum and create sustainable packaging for its various beverage products.

The production change is part of Coca-Cola’s overall plan to make all of its packaging more sustainable by:

• reducing materials used in packaging
• increasing recycling of its products and packaging
• using more recycled content, and
• advancing innovative technologies.

The switch to a sugar-based PET is a major improvement over corn-based plastic bottles.

The corn-based plastic bottles can’t be fully recycled and are instead disposed of in landfills. This is a major problem because when corn-based plastic bottles decompose, they create methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The new sugar-based plastic is chemically the same as PET plastic, which is 100% recyclable — if it is not commingled with the corn-based plastic — and is therefore more carbon-neutral than its corn-based competitor.

The change is touted as “a major step along our sustainable packaging journey” by Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent.

Meanwhile, Coca-Cola is also greening up its vending machines. The company says by 2015 all of its vending machines will use non-hydrocarbon refrigerants.

It’s also a way to encourage your customers to recycle your packaging.

Leading this charge in the computer industry is Dell, which just announced it’ll use bamboo to package two computer products — the new Inspiron Mini 10 and Mini 10v netbooks. More computer products will be shipped in bamboo-based packaging in 2010.

Dell is also labeling its packaging to make it clear that the package should be recycled, not thrown away.

Bamboo as a packaging material is seen by many as a better choice than paper-based products, such as cardboard and paper-based foam. Bamboo is regarded as renewable because it:

• grows quickly, up to 24 inches a day and is ready for harvesting in three to seven years, much faster than hardwood trees
• is strong, with a tensile strength similar to steel, and
• is easy on the environment because it promotes healthy soil because when harvested, it doesn’t require replanting.

Dell also harvests its bamboo from growers who meet strict sustainability principles as outlined by the Forest Stewardship Council.

The switch to bamboo packaging is part of Dell’s overall sustainability plan to move away from paper-based packaging and to encourage recycling. The company plans to reduce its use of packaging by 10% in 2010. By 2012, Dell says it will increase the amount of recyclable material in all of its packaging by 75%.

The changes will not only improve Dell’s eco-credentials, but it’ll also save the company money, according to Dell’s senior manager of packaging, Oliver Campbell.

The environmental benefits for the Four Seasons hotel come from an investment in what’s known as Combined Heat and Power (CHP), which will cut its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 50% a year.

The benefits gained by CHP systems come from recycling what used to be regarded as waste heat. Now instead of releasing the heat into the atmosphere, CHP systems capture that heat and use it as an energy supply instead of just purchasing more energy from third-party suppliers.

For the Four Seasons in Philadelphia, waste heat is captured and used to heat the hotel’s various water systems, for showers, kitchen, laundry, indoor pool and hot tubs. The three natural-gas fired microturbines on the hotel’s roof capture enough heat to warm 275 homes through an average winter.

EPA promotes CHP through its Combined Heat and Power Partnership program. The benefits of CHP include:

• reducing energy costs
• offsetting capital costs
• protecting revenue streams, and
• guarding against volatile energy prices because users generate their own power .

The agency has also produced a special analysis of how the hotel and casino industries can adopt CHP.

The hotel’s CHP system was supplied by Pennsylvania’s E-Finity Distribution Generation, which is promoting CHP for manufacturing facilities, schools, hospitals, commercial buildings and other large energy users. E-Finity uses microturbines produced by Capstone Turbine.

If you don’t believe it, just ask the 100,000 companies that supply Wal-Mart.

The chain has overnight become the most potent mover of environmentalism, far more potent than EPA because companies that want to do business with Wal-Mart have to provide all sorts of sustainability information. Wal-Mart’s using the information to create a Sustainable Product Index that will slap a green rating on all products on its shelves.

But this is just the beginning of the retailing revolution, according to futurist Bob Johnansen, with Palo Alto, California-based Institute for the Future and author of Leaders Make the Future.

The not-too-distant future will feature everyday shoppers checking the greeniness of products instantaneously with simple apps on their cell phones. Shoppers looking to buy green will simply point their cell phone at the bar code on a product and get sustainable ratings on that product before they make their selection, Johansen told attendees at the Green Business Conference here in San Francisco.

And, what could be troubling for traditional corporate marketers, Johansen says, is that they’re losing control of the message because the Consumer Reports-type green ratings will be provided not by the manufacturer, but by major change makers like Wal-Mart or third-party eco-conscious organizations. Think of the movies Terminator and Minority Report where instant analysis is presented to man and machine.

In effect, consumers will instantly obtain product comparisons and ratings — like how far this product had to travel to a store, which is a measure of a product’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions — well before the traditional marketer can influence a sales choice at a checkout counter.

The technology to be able to deliver this type of sustainability rating already exists. It’s basically the same use of technology that lets you find a nearby restaurant on your iPhone. So it won’t be long before companies will have to respond to this new technology, a change that will be driven by the marketplace, not by government regulation.

To be prepared, companies may want to consider tracking their own environmental footprints, such as indirect GHG emissions, waste vs. recycling rates, water consumption, etc.  Then companies will want to tout any reduction in related pollution and explain how that change makes the company greener.

Within the next 90 days, all federal agencies have to explain how they’ll reduce energy and water usage and, of course, explain how they’ll reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The agencies have to have these plans ready by Jan. 5, 2010 under an executive order signed last week by President Obama.

A similar order by President Bush ordered federal agencies to purchase eco-friendly electronics products — those that are certified under the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) program run by the Green Electronics Council.

But Obama’s order pushes federal agencies much more aggressively to make federal buildings much greener. The agencies that run the government’s 500,000 buildings have to meet a number of green goals, such as:

• imposing sustainability purchase requirements in 95% of federal contracts
• improving water efficiency by 26%
• increasing recycling and waste diversions from landfills by 50%, and
• reducing petroleum fuel purchases for federal fleets by 30%.

To meet these goals, federal agencies will have to purchase environmentally preferred products and services, promote wider use of renewable energy systems (wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels), set net-zero-energy building requirements, purchase alternative fuel vehicles, and reduce stormwater runoff.

Those supplying federal agencies may also find themselves voluntarily reporting their GHG emissions and reporting how they’re actively trying to reduce these emissions. Vendors will be pressured to do this because Obama has ordered the General Services Administration, the agency that buys most of the products for federal agencies, to study how to create a GHG registry for GSA vendors.

This would have major repercussions throughout the supply chain feeding federal agencies. Vendors not on the list or not making progress in reducing their GHG releases could be locked out of federal contracts.

The information to do this would likely be based on the GHG emission data that will be reported to EPA starting next year.

The 2009 GSA Global Supply Catalog: Environmental Products is available here.

Can you imagine crowds cheering wildly for cars powered by a biofuel based on chocolate chemistry? Will chocolate-scented exhaust fumes go with beer?

We’re about to find out as the first-ever, sustainably built, Formula 3 race car — the ecoF3 — tries to prove its metal in the Formula 3 Championship Oct. 17 in England.

Researchers at the University of Warwick have built a racer that not only hits speeds of 135 miles per hour, but does it based on a body made from woven flax, recycled carbon fibers, recycled resins and carrot pulp (in the steering wheel).

The fuel is green too, made from chocolate and animal fats.

The lubricating oils are made from plants.

Team leader Dr. Kerry Kirwan says the idea is to disprove people’s perception that car racing is wasteful and instead reveal that “being sustainable and green can be incredibly sexy, fun and fast.” The switch to biofuels has been underway for a few years, as detailed on the Gas 2.0 Web site.

You can see a video of the sustainable ecoF3 racer on YouTube.