LiveGreen gives a shout out to Green Option

I recently had a chance to chat with Green Options founder David Anderson. Green Options is a new site this year aiming to weed through the internet and present quality green content. I have been really impressed with the quality (and quantity) of their posts and look forward to seeing where they go from here.


LG: What is Green Options? What is its mission?


GO: There is so much information out there waiting for consumers, that could readily be applied to their lives. This is the blessing of the new internet boom, as well as its curse. Today, all information is at our fingertips, but we often don't know where to find what's relevant to us because of its sheer volume. Google was the first to address this issue as a fundamental social challenge. This issue is all the more difficult in the world of sustainability because of the complex confluence of economic, political, and moral motivations behind even the minutiae of the green world.

I wanted to start a company that would use some of the best technology and formats afforded by the web 2.0 explosion to help filter and organize information to make relevant information accessible to a spectrum of consumers, from green novices to sustainability experts. Hopefully, GreenOptions.com does just that.

For newbies, it presents ways to learn what "greening your life" means before starting the process, and emphasizes that looking for new solutions does not mean giving up a quality of life that most Americans value over more abstract environmental issues. That is a much needed message today. Consumers don't like to be condescended. Instead of telling them bluntly that the things they like are bad, we want to let average consumers understand the real costs and benefits of their decisions, and we believe in the power of the internet to enable that understanding.

LG: I read a little on your bio about how you started Green Options, can you expand on that a little?

GO: It's really an odd story, and one that won't be appropriate or make much sense until we've launched all of the tools we're currently developing. Basically, though, I had just finished writing my honors thesis for Political Science at UCSD on renewable energy policy, graduated, and took a job at a marketing firm that served to increase the amount of market information available in a very particular niche: architecture and engineering firms that live off of government projects. They did great work, but their narrow mission mingled with all I had just spent months writing about from a very interdisciplinary perspective: the deficiencies in the nascent market for green products and services.

Why, I thought, are there so few resources that really address the sociological and psychological barriers to individual acceptance that, in some form, green is the future? (This was back in 2005; the situation is quantitatively better today, if not qualitatively.) At this point in time, with so few people really striving to live sustainably relative to the entire population, for individual consumers it's more about starting the process than making drastic lifestyle changes (on a policy level, drastic change is needed, but I'm not a lobbyist, so I have no control there). Of course, a real shock to our precarious food or energy systems would be necessary to alter this situation in the near term. So, here we are. We're not too late for the Prom yet, but if we don't start getting ready, we're probably going to regret it...



This is just a short post on Green Options. We look forward to continuing our discussions with David and the rest of the Green Options crew in the future.