Most marketing Guru’s agree that the greener your company looks, the more profit you are likely to reap. This is especially true within the newly emerging market of electronics trade in portals. Gazelle.com is the market leader and a huge proponent of recycling your electronics while getting some cash at the same time.
In addition to giving straight cash for old electronics items, Gazelle understands that offering extra services like recycling can go along way.
It’s become very smart indeed to be green.
So much so that in many sectors, not having substantiated green credentials can be commercial suicide. Take the Gazelle example again. Having strong green credentials means effectively you can charge more for your services because you are adding the vital ingredient of the good will factor.
The Good Will Factor - an important lesson for every business…
Today it is important for all of us that we feel we are doing the right thing for the environment. When we buy a dishwasher, we need to know that our old one will be recycled and kept out of landfill. We need to know that our Laptop has been made without PVCs, we need assurance that our wood comes from a sustainable source.
General consumers are doing their bit to help the environment such as separating the trash, unplugging their chargers and using efficient light bulks. They expect the same from retailers they buy from, and will go out of their way to seek out green options if they are readily available.
What’s crucial for business is that they will pay more to do so… and this is what will give your business the crucial edge in being green.
Gazelle does not give very much for many items they buy off of customers. However, their green credentials enable them to pay a bit less for an item because the good will that flows from their environmental credentials allow them to increase their profit margin.
Yourenew.com has taken note of this magical effect and taken the business of being green to a new level, donating a portion of the money they make to tackle e-waste. They do not appear to be too competitive on price, and they don’t need to be. It just feel good to sell your electronics to them. You just feel you’re doing something good for the environment. In short, we are willing to pay for that good feeling we get. As a business, ignoring this fact can spell doom for your enterprise.
So here are the 10 most important ways to become green and profit from being green.
(1) Research. Research. Research.
If you’re going to look green, you’ve got to figure out how you can be green. Affiliate yourself with environmental organizations. Two great places to start would be The Carbon Fund and The Carbon Neutral Company. These companies will work with you to help build your company’s green credentials.
(2) Become a green certified site
By clicking on this logo inside your website, it enables your customers to verify your green credentials through a reputable organization. The site calculates your company’s carbon footprint through the energy consumption.
Logo credentials are very effective in making your business immediately stand out from your competition. Some affiliations do not come cheap. Becoming affiliated with the Better Business Bureau for example can set your company back over $1,000 a year. Most would agree that this is money well spent. To become a Green Certified Site will set you back about $300. Again, money well spent.
(3) Link Greenness with your Company Ethos
A mission statement is not just how customers should feel about your company. It’s also a reflection of how your employees feel about working for you. This goodwill can go a long way in keeping the staff that make money for the business.
(4) Green Companies pay less
If your company has a strong green mission, it’s going to be easier to hire the people you need to make your buainess successful. They’ll want to come and work for you and that means they’ll accept less of a salary from you compared to your competitors.
(5) Put one person in charge of the company’s green credentials
As stated earlier, making your company green and demonstrating it to your workforce and customers is not a walk in the park. It has to be worked on. By placing someone in charge they can do all the necessary research. This employee will draw on other members of staff to pitch in and become part of the ‘Green Team’. Green Teams have also become vital team building exercises within larger corporations.
Ebay and Google both have a Green Team.
(6) Establish a Green Team within your organization
Green Teams are not just the privileged domain of large organizations with budgets to suit.
(7) Always Always link your company greenness with what your company does.
For example, say you have a printing company. Make sure you provide paper from sustainable sources or old recycled stock and state it plainly. Your customers will want to know, and if your customer is a business it will add value to their business.
(8) Increase your profit margin
Quite a bold statement in itself, but you’re in the business of making money, and investing a lot of time and energy into being green has got to pay off somewhere. This is where being green pays.
Going back to the example of the printing company, recycled paper is actually cheaper to produce than the non green options. However, Printing Businesses will charge more for it. They make a bigger margin on their green products.
You can increase your product margin because people want to do business with green companies and are willing to pay more for it. It is one reason why Wholefoods is such a success. Green detergent is never cheaper, but it’s often cheaper to produce.
It is often a worry for companies to alter their pricing structure after an internal green revolution. There are 2 main factors to consider. If your new greenness is going to actively increase the number of your orders significantly, your company is obviously going to reap extra profit on the upside.
You may find that orders do not increase in any significant fashion and that your hard earned green credentials may have seemed like a waste of time. This is because you are missing the key ingredient of your new greener beusiness…
(9) You are not just selling a service or product, you are selling a lifestyle
As a green company, you no longer need to be the cheapest in your field. Greener, more environmental businesses are never perceived to be the bargain basements of their industry. People expect to pay a little more for your services. If you don’t increase your prices you are simple missing the point of your company being seen to be greener.
(10) PR. PR and then some more PR. Publish your green credentials on a regular basis.
It’s easy for your customers to forget you are greener. If you stop working at it, your newer customers may not be directed to the fact. You need a website which strongly reinforces your green credentials. Highlight the issues with the environment associated with your business. For example, if you provide server storage services, ensure that your customers are aware that your servers are run using super efficient semi-conductors, and that your facility sources much of its energy using solar panels on the roof. I’d happily pay an extra $20 a month for our server if I knew that.
The problem is that many companies spend a small fortune doing some great work to make themselves greener, but then spend much less effort making their customers aware of it.
Happy Friday from trade2save!
It has been a chaotic but rewarding week as our new office is pretty much up and running albeit a few tweaks to be made here and there. Furthermore, with the rampant spreading of flu, colds, and general sickness our staff has taken it’s fair share of casualties so make sure all you out there are taking your vitamins and getting your 8 hours of sleep!
Reported last night, news website examiner.com posted a great article summarizing our nation’s major e waste issues, referencing great back links to our current national (or lack of) policy, state’s attempts to enforce local legislation, and even frontline video reports, a must see. Focusing specifically on the Bay Area and San Francisco, the author continues to follow through where most consumers stop caring (out of sight out of mind), calling out recycling companies’ shady exportation of electronic waste.
Trade2save is happy to see that bigger name news companies such as the examiner are directing their focus on e waste. This is a great summary article that highlights the e waste issue quickly and to the point but lacks further depth. We believe this is still not enough coverage but at least is a start that is approachable by most average readers. The article does do a good job of emphasizing the need to start focusing on creating electronics that are easier to reuse, refurbish and recycle. Naturally trade2save is with this argument for extended life span as with longer use comes less waste. Regardless of future products, just make sure to think twice this holiday season before you buy that new 24″ monitor to replace your 19″. Enjoy the weekend!!
World renowned “Stanford Graduate School of Business” recently published the results of a study on the effects of upfront recycling fees for old electronics, and frankly trade2save couldn’t be more excited. In a nut shell, the research strongly suggests that not only will upfront recycling fees encourage the life span of electronics and reduce waste, but actually benefit manufacturers as well, giving them more time to develop new, innovative products.
The study chose to cite California as it’s example of a flat, enforced fee charged to consumers when recycle electronics. Not only does this fee ensure the proper and safe disposal of the e waste by avoiding shady middle man companies (who often export e waste to developing nations) but the enforced charge makes consumers less eager to toss electronics at a whim. In the current economic situation, consumers are getting more spend conscious and this extra recycling fee is just the nudge consumers need to realize that tossing their last generation ipod for a slightly newer model may actually not be worth it.
The study also cited staggering statistics on the wastefulness of global consumers, noting that Americans buy a new cell phone every 18 months and businesses replace entire fleets of PCs every 4 years. By creating such an immediate demand for new products, consumers effectively instigate the “Osborne Effect,” in which the anticipation for new products actually hurts current product and manufacturer sales. Stanford’s Erica Plambeck argues that by extending lifespan and reducing the demand for arbitrary new products (Woo! 3 megapixel phone instead of 2!), electronics “manufacturers are in less of a rush to introduce new products. Consumers anticipate using a product for longer, and so are willing to pay more for it. Because manufacturers have additional development time, they can make larger leaps in both product capabilities and quality, so the new products coming out are substantially better than the previous generation.”
This truly is a win win scenario for all parties involved, so as usual we here at trade2save hope this research gets the recognition it deserves from both consumers and manufacturers! By extending lifespans of electronics and buying/selling/trading pre-owned we can all do our part to reduce e waste and save ourselves some hard earned cash during this economic situation, which hopefully will permanently change our wasteful habits.
Check out a good summary article by greenbang.com !
Happy Tuesday from trade2save!
After a brief break our blog is back to keep our readers updated on e waste news from around the globe.
Today, techie news website”PC World” reported that the community organized “eday” in New Zealand may have fallen subject to corrupt e waste recycling companies. According to PC World’s article, 3rd party e waste company CRTNZ which is responsible for the safe recycling of e waste collected on eday, is undergoing investigation regarding their handling and shipping of electronic waste to reputable recycling/re-using centers. While the whole investigation has been kept relatively mum on account of the potential bad publicity for both the company and eday representatives, it has been suggested that CTNZ may have breahed e waste regulations by branding e waste as reusable/resellable products.
While eday is likely to continue in New Zealand, the bad publicity could cause an overall drop in participants, public approval, and sponsorship. This potentially a huge problem for New Zelanders as eday is currently the only way for citizens to properly dispose of electronics (966 tons were dropped off last year alone).
The trade2save team is both thrilled to see that smaller countries such as New Zealand are making government and community initiatives to increase public awareness to e waste, but are also very frustrated to see such controversial news already tarnishing a good program. Internationally people need more options to recycle electronics as opposed to just the dump. Regardless of community/gov programs, the ability to re sell and extend the life of used electronics always exists! Hopefully our cry for consumers to buy/sell/trade pre owned electronics will be realized globally, as the garbage is never the place for old electronics (plus you’ll make some cash!)
Posted just today, www.businessdailyafrica.com reported on the major warning signs of improper e waste dumping and handling in Nairobi, Kenya.
This is both a major concern reflecting the negligence and ambivalent attitudes of countries which export large amounts of ewaste, and a major failure on the part of the Kenyan government to allow such toxic material into heavily populated areas. According to this article Nairobi’s largest dumping site, Dandora, is accepting huge amounts of e waste in which the most popular disposal method (burning) is leading to already noticeable increases in lead poisoning in children.
It seems each day here at trade2save we stumble upon another “developing” nation which is exported our own potentially lethal garbage. While the commonly known ewaste dumping grounds in the world such as rural China and India are bad enough, it seems that the rapidly amassing quantities of ewaste are now happily being sent out to all over the world.
The new pre-owned electronics marketplace, trade2save, will be launching imminently. Last week our 1st parcels went out to some of our earliest beta testing customers. The first parcel sent out was to Kevin Patrick, Manager of Business Development at USPS San Francisco. Jesse Wakefield of trade2save.com (pictured here with Kevin’s parcel) dispatched said parcel with diligence, efficiency and delight. The trade2save team then carried the parcel to USPS and spent the rest of the day celebrating at the Clay Oven Indian Tandoori Restaurant on Church Street Noe Valley. Only the hottest curry on the menu could do for such a special occasion.
Trade2save plans to specialize in buying and selling pre-owned electronics to encourage customers to trade-in their electronics so they can be reused to help cut ewaste - before they become obsolete.
Trade2save will also sell new products so long as customers trade-in.
To encourage more trading-in, trade2save will be making new products available to customers as well as used electronics, providing that they trade-in at least 20% of the value of any new purchases made.
Customers can track their Carbon Footprint and earn valuable Carbon Points
In addition to paying the highest cash or trade-in prices available on the web, trade2save.com will also give Carbon Points for every pre-owned product bought or sold. On our website, customers can track their carbon footprint as every product has been given a carbon offset total. For example, we have calculated that a Thinkpad has a carbon footprint of 950 lbs of CO2. When a customer trades his in, we sell it on to someone who will buy it instead of a new one. This reduces demand for a new Thinkpad by one unit. If it is resold again, it reduces that demand by 2 and so on.
So his carbon offset total increases by 950 lbs. These Carbon Points can be redeemed in a number of ways. As well as trading them in for more store credit, when you reach certain levels, it will qualify you for special status, such as 10% more store credit for your trade-ins, and special gifts.
Every electronics product, be it a PS3 or an iPhone has to be manufactured, exported and eventually discarded as ewaste. By incentivizing a pre-owned market and making it more secure for buyers and sellers, ewaste streams can be significantly reduced. Currently the electronics industry has yet to be able to recycle more than 15% of an average product - this compares to an average car being over 90% recyclable.
Trade2save has been a massive development project, but we hope that the end result will wow you as much as it has wowed us. For a sneak preview of the beta site still under construction have a look.
The latest Laptop range from Apple is a new milestone in the company’s ethos to make more environmentally responsible consumer electronics. Critics like Greenpeace, who regularly beat their environmental breast plate to the rhythm of itunes have been strangely silent about the launch until recently. This may have been thanks largely to their inability to adequately market their evidence of ewaste abuse in China and trying to point a finger directly in the face of Steve Jobs.
They learned the hard way that it’s simply not cool to slag off something that’s considered cool to a large sway of their traditional support - college students and graduates. The backlash against Greenpeace was not a calculated stealth mission by a clever PR executive in Cupertino. The backlash came from within and was loudest on the Greenpeace website and blog.
As a result of falling contributions, Greenpeace has had little option but to back off so to speak - but the damage has been done, and it will take some time before they can shake off the conception that they’re a bunch of sanguine pretenders who pick on household brands to gain attention and not much else.
The good they have done on the subject of ewaste should not be swept under the carpet just because they’ve made a few tactical mistakes in their ongoing fight against ewaste.
It was Greenpeace who first opened our eyes to Guiyu, China. It took an organization like Greenpeace with a tradition of cutting through bull and border controls to bring home the shocking images of children, their hands and feet covered in mercury residue while washing themselves in a putrefied river, their single water supply.
Before then, people didn’t have any visual perception of how great the problem was. It was never considered a humanitarian crisis. Visual perception is a powerful weapon that can get things done fast - a power mobilized to full affect during the Ethiopian famine of 1984/5. For months previous we heard of thousands of people starving in Africa, but it took a crack team of BBC journalists to bypass border controls and get the images out. The rest was Bob Geldoff history, live aid and a fund raising PR machine which still raises millions today and provides rock stars like Bono and Sting a ringside seat at G7 summits - such is their influence as power brokers of global public opinion.
The revelations from towns like Guiyu had a similar opportunity to broker a new movement to tackle ewaste as a humanitarian issue, but the solutions proved to be complicate - it was much easier for Geldoff to scream at the camera “Give us your fucking money!” Raising money to buy food for the starving is a challenge - changing the fundamental problems of an eight hundred billion dollar electronics industry is something else.
If the problems of an industry can be distilled down to a single issue it is this: Only 10% of consumer electronics is recyclable. 90% will end up either in the ground or littered on the ground. Extracting the precious 10% out of this ewaste takes the lives of tens of thousands of peasant workers and their families every year through illness and disease caused by the toxic pollution created from the medieval recycling methods employed by their employers, who are (to all extent and purposes) gangsters.
Today GM and Chrysler are chastised for poor cars and wasteful management practices. But they are still able to produce cars which are over 90% recyclable. How is it that a car can be 90% recyclable, yet the greenest computer is still only 10% recyclable?
A car is 90% recyclable, the greenest Laptop is 10% recyclable… here in lies the green myth.
We don’t see mountains of cars rotting in piles so large they can be seen from space because legislation has been active for decades which demands adequate recycling and re-use. Your shinny new Hummer may guzzle that petrol, but you can be sure it’s made of 90% recycled material. Something to consider the next time an eco-warrior on his bicycle smugly tuts you to the tunes of his 10% recyclable iPod.
What’s more, 90% of cars are re-used 2-3 times (through second hand resale) before they are eventually recycled… compare this to 7% of consumer electronics.
90% of cars are re-used 2-3 times before recycling… only 7% of consumer electronics are re-used
Until electronics manufacturers have to abide by the same laws as car makers, the piles of ewaste will continue to double every 4 years. We are not going to stop buying electronics. What we can do is increase the reuse of electronics from a paltry 7% to a more respectable 50-70%, bring them more in line with the car industry. This would mean a significant drop in electronics sales and a dent in the trade of unrecoverable ewaste. We’d still be using the same cool gadgets with the same cool feature. Second Hand is cheaper of course, and with the economy on the bring of a depression, greener use of electronics might come sooner than later.
ewaste is something most people don’t attribute to themselves. But did you know that there is as much ewaste hidden away in homes as there is polluting the drinking water in places like Guiyi, China ?
As ewaste crusaders we want to see more folks trading in or selling their un-used electronics to other folks before they become obsolete. Because once they become obsolete, they become ewaste by definition.
the answer is to trade in your electronics BEFORE they become obsolete
And that’s why we’re launching trade 2 save.
trade 2 save has been designed to make trading-in and trading up easier, while giving customers an honest trade-in price which is not the case with the ‘we buy’ trading portals currently available on the web.
At trade 2 save you’ll be able to buy and sell in the same transaction. You’ll be able to use the credit from what you’re selling immediately and you’ll get what you’re buying first. This is especially convenient for someone upgrading their cell phone. You get the cell phone you are buying first, and then send us your old cell phone in the packaging we supply (in most cases with free shipping) - all you pay is the difference in price if any. And in the same transaction you could also trade-in a DVD, a computer, some music, an iPod or something else.
And because we test and certify everything we buy off of our customers, the product you buy from trade 2 save will be graded for condition and guaranteed for a full year of normal use. This will enable customers to buy pre-owned with complete confidence.
When you sell to trade 2 save you’ll get 2 prices to choose from, a store credit price and a cash price. The store credit price is usually about 10-15% more than the cash price. The cash price is always good, however, if you are intending to buy something else from trade 2 save now or in the future, it’s always better to take the store credit, which never expires.
trade 2 save also has a marketplace where customers will be able to sell their products to each other using the same trade 2 save product pages. For this service, trade 2 save will take a small commission if you sell but will charge no listing fees whatsoever. It can remain their indefinitely.
trade 2 save will also level the playing field for small private sellers and so called power sellers. There won’t be any preferential rates - everyone will be able to take advantage of the same super low rates for selling on the trade 2 save market place.
We can’t always buy pre-owned, but when you trade something in to us we can sell it on to someone else before it becomes obsolete. Buying pre-owned reduces the amount of units demanded through manufacturing more, which will ultimately end up as ewaste.
Did you know that only 12% of the material in electronics is recyclable?
Production of electronics and components have more than trebled in just a few years and only 12% of the material from them is actually recyclable (contrary to popular belief).
If you’ve got an old Pentium 3 in your garage that’s been sitting there for 4 years, then it’s too old to be re-used and re-sold. Recycling is the only viable option - providing it is not sent across the water to join a toxic dump (once 12% of it is extracted using toxic chemicals and a blow torch).
If you had traded the Pentium 3 in earlier before it became obsolete, someone else would have bought it pre-owned instead of buying another one new, reducing ewaste by a factor of 1 unit, or about 900 lbs of CO2.
These are tangible small changes to consumer habits which we can make at a time when we need to save money too. Trading-in your electronics and buying pre-owned when feasible doesn’t just make environmental sense it makes economic sense at a time when most of us are having to tighten our belts.
trade 2 save is set to open its beta site by Christmas.
Well that’s according to Greenpeace, who all but lost their credibility during their pitched battle with Steve Jobs - a quick look at the comments section shows what even their readers think of their persistent Apple bashing.
The new Mac Books now don’t contain mercury or arsenic which is a great start whilst the circuit boards and connectors etc are free of the usual bromine or PVCs. They still do contain cadmium beryllium and antimon - I figured this simply because their removal is not indicated in any marketing information from Apple.
Apple have also published the Mac Book’s Carbon Footprint for the first time. Apple have included customer usage with this calculation in addition to the manufacturing of the unit. A Mac Book’s Carbon Footprint is about 1000 lbs of Carbon Dioxide, however, about 400 lbs of this is attributed to its usage.
It’s conceivable that a consumer might use their Mac Book wholly from renewable energy, say for example, their home electricity might be run through wind power or solar panels on their roof. Including a substantial ‘usage’ estimate into the mix is a good way of sharing the footprint blame with their customers (while sharing the love of the Mac Book too).
Trade 2 save measures the Carbon Footprint differently. We don’t include usage estimates but base the Carbon Footprint on manufacturing, raw materials, transportation and the toxicity of none recyclable components.
Of course the greenest computer you can buy is a pre-owned one because you are not adding demand for a new one to be manufactured for you. And to make it greener still, don’t let it lie idly in your cupboard when you have finished using it, trade it in for an upgrade before it becomes obsolete - you’ll save money whilst saving the environment too.
With an annual energy production rate of 2000 KWh and an instantaneous power rating of 1.2 kW (1200 watts), the Mariah Power Windspire turbine could be the answer to the global energy drain being caused by consumer electronics.
Strong Black Friday trading suggests that come recession or depression, most of us now consider our gadgets integral to the running of our daily lives.
For $5,000, the Windspire can stand relatively unnoticed in your back yard and make all your gaming consoles, LCD TVs and other electronics instantly greener.
Unusual design
Because of it’s unusual design, cheap installation price and comparatively high energy production rating, the Windspire has won a host of awards, including the “GoingGreen” Top 100 Winner.
The first multi-unit commercial installation of 6 Windspires was ordered in Reno, Navada by Devon Bank, an LEED registered project. he LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environment Design) Green Building Rating System is a nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings. Combined with the banks solar panel program, they hope to create up to 40% of their own energy needs.
At $5,000, the Windspire is certainly low cost, and standing at 30 feet tall and 2 feet wide, offers a sleek propeller free design - a great relief to bird lovers and birds alike. The 30 feet height is also below most residential and urban zoning restrictions, making it ideal for placing on top of blocks of flats - who can share the installation cost whilst benefiting jointly.
Extremely Quiet
The most common complaint from residence living near propeller wind turbine farms is not the destruction of their view, but the annoying noise these turbines produce. The unusually slender design of the Windspire allows it to operate virtually silently thanks to its lower operational speed.
Feel Good Factor
One thing we really like about the Wind Spire at Trade 2 save is that the turbine allows you to wirelessly check your power production at any time, a bit like the Carbon Footprint rating that Trade 2 save will be launching at the end of the year.
The Windspire comes with a 5 year limited warranty and a quote can be obtained from Mariah Power
