Business
Greening Existing Commercial Real Estate With Solar Panels
Most of the talk about greening real estate is about building practices. Until now, the focus has been on the development side of the business. But there are some interesting ventures popping up with innovative business models. One in particular capitalizes on the enormous potential of existing commercial real estate space, where the owners do [...]
Microcredit is Sustaining the Future
I have become absolutely convinced that microfinance is the best way to eliminate extreme poverty in the third world. The traditional thinking in the developed world is that poor people are poor because they are lazy and illiterate. And, of course, credit in the developed world relies on the past performance of the borrower. Robert [...]
Publix to increase recycling via composting
While I was surfing around reading about the latest green trends, I stumbled across this post. Apparently, Publix, a supermarket chain popular in my home state of Florida, is increasing their recycling rate from 42% to 80%. Stores in Broward County are partnering with Organic Recovery to recover food waste, and the waste will be [...]
The Benefits of Building Green
Norm Miller recently co-authored an academic paper along with two Costar executives. It is the first piece of research to compare the costs and benefits of developing green commercial real estate. This is quite an interesting article and well worth the read. Here is an excerpt of the findings:
Here we reveal the first systematic study, as opposed to [...]
There is more to being clean than Greenwashing
So in a blog called GreenerTrends, we should be following…greener trends, right? Well, for better or for worse, this little article is going to be covering a decidedly un-greener trend: Green Washing.
Chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you’re already familiar with the concept of greenwashing, but for the uninitiated, it’s basically assigning green virtues [...]
Solar Powered Vending Machines
Do you know why you never see vending machines at the beach or on the golf course? If you said because you can’t effectively get power to those places, then you are wrong (well, kind of anyway). Solar Energy Vending, Ltd. has developed a product that solves the location problem in the vending business, [...]
