GoLite: Down to earth for the Earth

Everyone's going green. It's a good thing--manufacturers are cutting down on waste and energy while also making things out of renewable or recycled materials. But haven't you begun to wonder, who are the people who really care and who's just taking advantage of the trend?

I went to a green business conference in Boulder about a year ago, full of companies eager to learn green, to advertise green, and sell green. "Green consultants" littered the room, wandering around and passing out business cards. Quite a show was made of recycling the nametags and making it a zero-waste event, which means you can't find a trashcan anywhere--only recycling and composting--good luck finding a place for your chewing gum.

I witnessed a panel where speakers talked about what their companies were doing to help save the planet. The first couple of speakers were guys in suits with big companies who seemed kind of detached from the actual process of going green, maybe I shouldn't judge, but they seemed more aware that it was good for advertising than good for the earth. One of them had actually had his job title changed from "attorney" to "energy consultant" for the year while he headed a project to reduce the company's energy consumption. There was that much money in his company's budget that he could take time off to do that.

The final speaker was a woman of about my age, thin like a doe, wearing a fleece and corduroys, who looked bewildered to be there among corporate types. As soon as she opened her mouth and began to quietly speak you could feel a shift in the room as we all began to realize what green really was. She represented a company called GoLite, an outdoor gear manufacturer who's been around a few years. The company has probably cared about the earth since its founding, but what immediately struck me as she talked about GoLite's habits is that the company had never sent any press releases to my newspaper about going green. We had been flooded in recent years with press releases about companies introducing various green measures, but we had never heard about this one.

She said that her company didn't really have a budget for becoming environmentally friendly, but that it was a policy of the company to hire people who already had that consciousness. Over the past year or two before the conference, the employees had initiated a process of greening the company. They weren't paid to do so, each department (design, marketing, sales, etc.) had one volunteer that would meet outside of work hours to figure out what they could change within their departments to lower their impact on the planet. It might be as simple as streamlining a zipper to use less material, or putting an extra paper recycling bin the office to reduce the amount of paper that got put in the trash. One thing I liked was that for every ten times an employee rode their bike to work, they got somewhere between $10 and $20 for a local restaurant. That's how little money the company had to go towards green efforts.

Especially at the corporate level, people seem to forget how simple environmental measures really can be. Everyone thinks it has to be big--buying carbon offset credits, making things from bamboo, tearing out the old lights and installing new ones. The idea is buy, buy, buy, more, more, more. One of the best things I've seen is a coffee shop in Boulder that has neat rolls of cut up old t-shirts in their bathrooms to use as hand towels. Thing about the massive amount of paper and energy they've conserved over the years. Green can start anywhere in a company, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, or in an unprinted e-mail.

From looking at its website, GoLite appears to have picked up some momentum with its green initiatives. It's advertised a little better--if you look, the company even offers paid time to do environmental volunteer work.

If you like GoLite, and you need to get anything for the outdoors, their products can be bought at REI.