Wow – I never thought I would have a blog. But here goes…

By way of introduction, I am a sustainability enthusiast, living in San Francisco, home to some of the greenest folks and legislation in the country. That said, I’ve been overwhelmed at times by the blinding green light emitted by so many companies and organizations around me. It’s hard to know who is hopping on the green bandwagon sincerely or with an eye at favorable press. I do appreciate even small steps in earnest in the right direction, though, and I know that it takes time to get to the zero-waste, carbon-negative, equal-opportunity ideal I envision. So I want to devote this blog to celebrating what’s good and green in my life, this city, this country and this world. I want to share with others what I’ve learned through my own research in the sector – about products, companies, organizations, events, jobs, websites and more – and save you some of the legwork in greening your lifestyle, as it were. I want to help navigate the green scene, creating an unbiased forum in which we can share resources and information.

This blog is not about me, and this will likely be the most personal of all posts, but I’d like to give a little background so folks can learn where I’m coming from with this blog. I grew up in small town coastal New Hampshire, with an avid gardening mother and a yoga teacher father. We had three compost piles in the backyard and a slew of vegetable and flower gardens. My mom even planted me and my siblings our very own gardens where we could choose the crops and reap the rewards. Mom of course did all the gardening but we felt some ownership of the process. I spent summer afternoons wandering around the neighborhood picking neighbors’ flowers to make potpourri and also sifting through the house and collecting any unused items, both of which I would sell in a daily mini lawn sale, with minor success. I wanted to make money by recycling things others didn’t need (though it’s a stretch to think the neighbors didn’t need their flowers). To this day, the most exciting area of the green realm is reusing and recycling goods a la used clothing stores and using waste to make new products a la Preserve and TerraCycle. I plan to devote a good many posts investigating this sector of the green economy; now you know why.

Alas, my yard sale days came to a close. In middle school I lived in Switzerland for a time and was wowed by their waste diversion techniques (a separate bucket for food scraps to bring to the farm for the pigs!). I wanted to be an environmental scientist…until I took environmental science and became profoundly depressed by the hopelessness of the situation. In college at Brown I majored in Psychology, and wanted to be a psychologist…until I realized people only change when they want to, which isn’t often, and that I wanted to have a bigger impact on the world. So I went into business management consulting at Bain & Co, where I hoped to discover what I love doing. It was here that I was reminded of my passion for sustainability. In my first few weeks of work I noticed a few things amiss in the office – there were no recycling bins at our desks, no compost bins in the kitchen, our paper was not recycled, our disposable kitchen products were made of plastic and non-compostable paper, and so on.   Unsolicited, I emailed a request to our office services department and received a ‘not our fault’ reply. Four months later they had made each and every change I demanded. I was shocked and exhilarated at the same time. How was it so easy? Had they just not thought of these things? I then noticed that our other offices had developed Green Teams, so I went about putting one together for my office (the fact that San Francisco was behind the Atlanta office on this front was embarrassing). With the help of my smart, resourceful colleagues, we went about greening the office – we replaced office supplies with post-consumer and recycled alternatives, we brought in local organic fruit and snack vendors, we performed an assessment of the carbon offset provider landscape with an eye towards firm-wide carbon neutrality, we examined office energy use, and we promoted environmental awareness in the office.  All in all, this was quite possibly my most rewarding consulting experience.  Which is why I left after just shy of two years.  I can thank Bain for sending me back to my roots.

I currently work at Green Zebra, an awesome green start up that compiles “sustainable savings guides” to make it easy for Bay Area residents to go green and rewards businesses for caring about the environment.

Now that I’ve given you a tour through my life’s environmental landmarks, I think I’ll close.

Thanks for reading my first ecofrenzy blog post!

Amie