Here we are, floating blissfully through our Universe, as the Christmas Star begins its annual glow overhead. Suddenly, warning lights begin to flash on the dashboard of Spaceship Earth, and a disembodied mechanical female voice bleats its irritatingly calm countdown of doom … “Warning… Waste disposal systems on overload. Bulkhead breech imminent ….” Soon, we realize, our living quarters will be filled with the toxic discharge of our very existence.
At least, that’s how Christmas morning looks sometimes, as I sit nursing a 10am rum & eggnog and contemplate the pile of wrapping, plastic, casings, blister-paks, Styrofoam, styrene and miscellaneous jetsam that festoon our living room. Surely there must be a better way. People smart enough to send their fellow primates to the moon and back should be able to conquer this problem. I have heard it said that humanity functions best when faced with imminent doom, so I propose a solution that came straight from one of NASA’s greatest dramas – Apollo 13.
For those of you who don’t remember the incident, (or the film), three crew members were stuck in a malfunctioning capsule, halfway back to earth, with limited oxygen supply and a wrecked  CO2 scrubber. If they couldn’t find a way to fix it with the parts they had on hand (no nearby Home Depot, really) they would literally suffocate in their own emissions. Back on Earth, NASA grabbed an exact duplicate of every piece of tubing, wiring, duct tape and usable component available to the astronauts on board and dumped the pile on a table in front of their best engineers. “Gentlemen, invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole. Rapidly.” The technicians responded, inventing from the detritus a lifesaving CO2 filter.
So here is my Holiday Challenge to the packaging and product designers of the world. On Christmas day, pile up every piece of paper, cardboard, plastic, twist-tie and ribbon on the living room floor in front of you. Grab a sketch pad and a double dose of your intoxicant of choice and see what you can make out of it. Then reverse-engineer your creations into value added components for next year’s Christmas rush. (If such a thing still exists) Turn December trash into treasure. Please.
You are our best and brightest. The fate of all our fellow astronauts lies in your hands.
Godspeed.

Well, Dear Readers, I am happy to report that the selection of affordable and palatable organic wines seems to be on the rise, and the whole organic section at my local full-service BC Liquor Store (8th/Cambie in Vancouver) appears to have grown. (Note to international readers… our Canadian Province has some very interesting and archaic liquor control and marketing issues, a whole different subject) The bad news is, the whole section looked quite lackluster and was woefully short on organization and information. Myself and a few fellow shoppers were left to our own devices, randomly squinting at labels for details on origin, varietal and certification.
And so, for your December quaffing pleasure, we assembled a panel of testers to give you a review of three contenders under $14, with a few marketing asides thrown in for good measure.
Ciao – Organic Sangiovese, Italy
Soft on the palette, smooth and actually moderately complex for a dry and fruity Italian. (No, I’m not referring to one of our testers) This wine is not only organic, but also comes in a shipping-carbon-friendly lightweight tetra-pak. Ugly, but efficient. (Bonus points –this is a full litre of wine for $13.99, vs the 750ml size of the other wines in this test. A fact that did not go unnoticed by our panel) Unfortunately, the hideousness of the CIAO! package design may leave you looking like you brought a carton of bathroom tile wax to the party. Decant fast.
Terra Sana  Organic Sauvignon Blanc, J.F. Lurton, France
One tester reported that this wine tasted a bit ‘soapy’, but palatable. I found it lively and bright, but not highly complex. A decent white for warming up the party or sharing on a hot day. Certified organic by ProCert. $13.99
Soleus – 2007 Organic Cabernet Sauvignon by Montgras, Chile
Made from organically-grown grapes, certified by IMO Switzerland. This was a testers favourite, with a rich colour,and  woody, dark overtones of chocolate and blackberry. Not a bad adjective count for 12.99. The Montgras website offers a wealth of more interesting stories relative to this wine. Shame they didn’t put more of them on the bottle.

If you have a point of view on these wines or any organic alcoholic beverages you think we should test, please let us know. Drop us a comment, below.

The global financial meltdown has hit the green movement hard, right here in our back yard. Everything that goes into your blue box for recycling is sold to mills, usually offshore, who process it and sell it to the factories that make the cheap consumer goods we love. This works well when commodity prices and consumer demand are high. Now, both of those indices have tanked, and municipalities are forced to stockpile the materials gathered. Which is a real shame, as local recycling companies were beginning to take us a lot closer to the cradle-to-cradle manufacturing model our bulging landfills so desperately need. So how can we help?

First, we need to increase demand for recycled content in everything we buy. And wouldn’t it be great if we could knowingly choose goods that were helping us with our own trash problem? Of course that would take a domestic recycling and manufacturing industry. Which would employ people, and might actually be a decent use of government stimulus dollars… but is still likely a long way off. So I guess it’s not quite a marketing job just yet.

Unless you include the sell-job we have to do on the Canadian Government to get them to subsidize recycling plants instead of tar sands plants.

This summer, a new green growth quietly sprouted at London Drugs. ‘What’s the Green Deal?’ is a program that puts environmental and sustainability information on display, with in-store signage, flyer features and even a new web site – www.greendeal.ca. (Full disclosure – Unicycle Creative was the consultant employed to help develop the program, so you’ll have to excuse me if this post doesn’t live up to my usual standards of journalistic impartiality and acerbic criticism!)

For customers, ‘What’s the Green Deal?’ highlights eco-friendly features and benefits of products right at the shelf, from organic certification to recycled content to energy savings. It also lets people know about the ‘green’ services London Drugs offers, from in-store recycling drop-off for plastic bags, batteries, electronics and appliances, to the packaging take-back on all purchases. (London Drugs is one of the only places around where you can actually recycle those infuriating Styrofoam cubes that cushion everything we buy) For interested customers, organizations and the media, www.greendeal.ca also compiles London Drugs corporate environmental and sustainability information in one easily accessible resource.

The program idea originated In 2007. With growing public awareness and interest in all things ‘green’, the London Drugs executive and marketing team decided the time was right to tell their story and take the next steps down the endless road to sustainability. Unicycle Creative was engaged to consult on communications and the development of a Green Marketing Strategy.

This was done through a three-step process; 1) Analyzing the market; 2) Reviewing London Drugs programs & products; 3) Developing a sustainability platform and in-store program. (For more information on the case study, please drop me a line)

Unlike some green product programs, ‘What’s the Green Deal?’ is not designed to judge which products are ‘green’ and which are not. It simply identifies product benefits that help customers make their own greener shopping decisions. Some of my greener readers may see this as a cop-out. “What’s so green about a computer router, even if it does have an Energy Star rating?” I hear you say. Fair enough. But if someone does need a router, they should be able to quickly identify the one with the best environmental attributes. And if the hundreds of thousands of people that shop London Drugs’ 68 stores are learning about environmental benefits on the shelf, I believe that drives the movement to green awareness forward, in a very mainstream way.

That’s the real strength of ‘What’s the Green Deal’. It’s a program based on the customer service values and ‘friendly expert’ positioning that is at the heart of London Drugs. It has the support of the executive. And it’s backed by some very solid corporate behavior that had its start long before sustainability was a water cooler buzzword.

Will ‘What’s the Green Deal?’ be criticized? Probably. Will the program change and evolve? Absolutely. Will London Drugs customers shop greener as a result? Stay tuned….

*Founded in 1945, B.C.-based London Drugs currently has 68 stores in more than 35 major markets throughout British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.  Renowned for its creative approach to retailing, the company employs more than 7,500 people and carries a diverse range of health and consumer electronic products.

I have to come clean, dear Green Briefs Readers. There is someone else – that I write for, that is. SustainableMinds.com is a Massachusetts company that integrates product design, life cycle assessment and environmental systems design into a web-based software and information suite that answers the questions: “What is sustainable design?” and “How can we make it work for us?”

Your humble Unicycler is one of a group of bloggers who offer commentary on the emerging green products industry.
My blog entry for them this week poses the question, ‘Where is the Green Mafia?’ Check it out for a light look into the future of environmental lobbying, and have a look at the other bloggers as well. It’s a resource worth exploring.

I was down at the Cenotaph today, at Victory Square in downtown Vancouver, explaining to the 8-year old on my shoulders why we were watching at a sea of umbrellas in the cold November rain. As my mind grappled with imagining the sheer horror of the individuals involved in the dirty, brutish life of armed conflict, I wondered what effect such devastation had on a planetary environmental scale.
Google ‘environmental cost of war’ and it doesn’t take long to find out. A web page by UK’s Peace Pledge Union gave me more than enough for a whole series of blogs. For instance:
The Devil’s Garden, 1942 – Some 18 million landmines are buried in the sands of El Alamein, most of them laid by the British in their fight against Rommel; he gave the region its nickname. At first it was common for mines to wipe out whole herds of cattle and clans of camel-herders… sand shifts the mines, rains dislodge them, and rust in the detonators sparks off spontaneous explosions. Bedouin men hold up their mutilated hands ironically to show to British visitors. There are people who will die from the mines who are not yet born.
Killing a Culture, 1962-71 – US military carried out a massive herbicidal programme in Vietnam for almost a decade. With 72 million litres of chemical spray, they defoliated the forests which provided cover for guerillas. ‘All our coconut trees died,’ recalled a woman ten years later, in hospital with a third miscarriage, and also having chemotherapy… ‘Some of our animals died, and those that lived had deformed offspring. The seeds of the rice became very small, and we couldn’t use them for replanting.’
One very well-annotated article I downloaded from the Green Party of Massachusetts  showed that the problem is not confined to conflict zones. The production and storage of munitions has created a wave of eco-disasters right here on home soil that are just beginning to come to light:
“The Massachusetts Military Reservation (MMR), which includes Otis Air Force Base and Camp Edwards, and is situated directly above a “sole source” aquifer, the only source of drinking water for 200,000 permanent and 500,000 seasonal residents on Cape Cod … has been contaminated by military fuel spills and hazardous munitions waste that have leached into the soil and groundwater.
By 2001, there were 28,538 known waste sites on current or former U.S. military bases
in the U.S., with the military being, in the words of the Baltimore Sun (1/19/03), “one of the nation’s biggest polluters”.
The cost of war is outrageous by any measure, whether it be the life of a single soldier given in the name of freedom, or the degradation of an ecosystem in the very land he fought to liberate. We cannot hope to protect the environment unless we are at peace.
Lest we forget.

Well, Dear Readers, I have managed to parlay my recycled office paper business cards into a coveted Applied Arts Advertising & Design Annual award in the category of best logo usage.  AA is a highly respected magazine profiling the finest design, advertising, photography and new media from across Canada and around the world.

My cards, in case you haven’t yet had one forced on you, are made from paper sourced from my blue box. Each is a recycled piece of art, hand-stamped or embossed with the Unicycle Creative seal. (E-mail me if you want a few)
Now would it be too cheeky to make a limited edition series of cards out of the award certificate?

Well it’s all over but the handoff. A planet collectively sighs with relief, and can now laugh a little less nervously at SNL’s Sarah Palin skits.
But with the economy disassembling itself, the environment has not been the stuff of big speeches in this election. So how will Obama’s ‘Change’ manifest itself for the green movement?
I came across a great blog post this morning by Adam Stein of TerraPass. Here he quotes from a couple of Obama interviews that seem to indicate the President Elect has a lot of grey matter at work. Take this:

“…the fact that the engine for economic growth for the last 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20, and that was consumer spending… And what that means is that just from a purely economic perspective, finding the new driver of our economy is going to be critical.
… to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy, that’s going to be my number one priority when I get into office.”

Sounds like good news for green energy entrepreneurs. Here’s another clip:

“… if we’re going to be serious about renewable energy, I want to be able to get wind power from North Dakota to population centers, like Chicago. And we’re going to have to have a smart grid if we want to use plug-in hybrids then we want to be able to have ordinary consumers sell back the electricity that’s generated from those car batteries, back into the grid. That can create 5 million new jobs, just in new energy.”

How could this all affect Canada? With British Columbia’s potential for hydro, wind and wave energy, we could be a key part of a Western North American green power grid. But only if our policy-makers can look beyond our current role as dirty-energy and clean-water bulk wholesalers and invest in some quick R&D for green technology.

But for now, remember that Obama’s quotes here are off-the-cuff interviews, not scripted speeches. A President that even knows that plug-in hybrids can be connected on a smart grid has got to be good for our green priorities.

I wonder if he can unicycle?

One of the big drawbacks with public transportation is that it just isn’t cool. Unless, of course, you’re in London.
Here, tourists gladly shell out 20 bucks for t-shirts featuring their favourite stations, coffee mugs with the Underground logo and everything from umbrellas to boxer shorts featuring – get this – the bloody route map. Even their in-train announcements are cool… the phrase ‘Mind the gap’ has a product line all its own. Including the thong pictured here.
So how did they do it? To begin with, the system has some serious cultural history to it. Heck, the tunnels served as bomb shelters during WWII. And the term ‘Underground’ has a cool to it that ‘subway’ can never hope to match. The logo is even older, passing it’s 100th year mark in 2008, having undergone several renovations. Most notably by Edward Johnston [1872-1944], the brilliant arts and crafts calligrapher, and most recently by Henrion, Ludlow and Schmidt in 1984. The map is widely recognized as a design masterpiece. (Harry Beck, the designer of the map in 1933, was only paid five guineas for his original job. The only official acknowledgment he received is a plaque at Finchley Station)
As a result, at least for tourists, the London Underground seems to suffer from little of the stigma of most North American transit systems. Everybody uses it, from Fleet Street bankers to mod clubbers. It’s just the way things are done. They have also developed a tidy side-business in tourist wares.
So how does the branding of Canadian systems rate? The Toronto Transit Commission dubs their clanking, clanging streetcars the ‘Red Rocket’… which only really makes sense if Jules Verne is your astronautical engineering reference point. Vancouver’s ‘SkyTrain’ sounds a bit newer, but suffers from a pre-school compound-word simplicity… rather like the TreeHouse or GummyBear. And TransLink… BC’s regional transportation authority, sounds like a manufacturer of train couplings. Not to be appearing on sexy tank tops any time soon.
Actually, there’s little chance a Canadian trasportation board would even approve the term ‘Underground’ at all. I can just hear the focus groups… “Sounds too dark. Scary almost.” “What abut the trains that run above ground?” “Is there a more positive spin we could put on it… how about ‘HappyTrains’…?”
Perhaps our North American society won’t be able to match the cool of London’s Underground until we’re out of short pants. But gosh, I wish we could. Getting people out of their cars and onto more efficient and responsible transportation would be a lot easier with branding that has a chance of being cool.

SNCF, France’s national railway, and their parking subsidiary, Effia, have announced a great new deal for electric car drivers. When they park to take the train, they can plug in and recharge for free.
This represents a level of cross-platform eco marketing we haven’t yet seen in North America, stuck as we are with Transport Canada dragging their feet on electric car approvals and ‘Canada’s New Government’ letting passenger rail crumble.
But the signs are there that this is the way more providers of green products and services will gain momentum. Imagine the possible links. Organic garlic with a coupon for organic mouthwash. Discounts on spa leg treatments for people who buy new commuter bikes. Compostable coffin vouchers for buyers of organic tobacco. All kidding aside, if you’re a green marketer, who could link with your product or service? Who could you swap customer lists with? What public service could benefit from association with your brand?
Plug it in and go.