www.practicallygreen.com
Sometimes the prospect of going green can be overwhelming, and knowing where to start can be difficult. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were someone, like a coach, to help guide us to be greener?
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Practically Green is an online guide to help people become greener in their everyday lives, using a point system that’s backed by science. Like a diet plan, this system helps people trim the waste while providing a support system and tracking your progress.
• Bottom Line: Practically Green is designed to make healthy green living easier and more enjoyable for the millions of people who want to be greener as well as for the companies who are trying to reach them.
What makes Practically Green unique? • Assessment Tool. PG’s full lifestyle diagnostic (a.k.a. the Quiz) focuses on the respondent’s daily life. Answers illuminate four areas of green living - Energy, Health, Stuff, and Water. Results segment people into one of ten green profiles, from Barely Green to Superbly Green. • Actions. A proprietary recommendation engine provides people with a customized, manageable list of suggestions to do next: Actions. A registered user can check off completed Actions and select more for her Green Action Plans. • Impact Points. Actions vary in terms of impact. Their proprietary points system translates complex science about impact into something real that people can understand: 150 points = big impact; 5 points = small impact. • Robust Interactive Database. PG’s Actions database pulls together expert and real-life data, all in one place, to help people make decisions to change. In addition to why it’s green and how to do it, what products and services are really green and which do people like? This helps protect people from greenwashing and other bad experiences, by directing them to solid companies with genuinely green products and services. • Social Networks. Integration with Facebook & Twitter makes the process a whole lot more interesting and fun. And research shows that when friends make recommendations and share progress, people are more likely to take smart positive steps themselves.
Inspired by life...and LEED® Susan Hunt Stevens’ son was diagnosed with serious food and environmental allergies when he was one year old. She embarked on a serious green home-life makeover, beginning with food, organic mattresses, personal-care and cleaning products. On a quest to make important, healthy decisions for her family, Susan marveled at how inconsistent, confusing, elusive, dull -- and just plain erroneous -- the information often was. Her project led to a major home renovation, a popular mommy blog, and to the graduate program in sustainable design at Boston Architectural College. There she learned about LEED, a rating system for green design and building. Susan began to wonder why there wasn’t a similar system for real people and their families. The vision for Practically Green was born. The Future After a little over one year, Practically Green has grown from an operation in Susan’s dining room to an incubated, funded start-upor in Cambridge, MA. This online “guide to be green” is attractive not only individuals, but large companies too. With social sharing and a system based on science, Practically Green will likely be the way everyone learns to go green in the near future.
blog.practicallygreen.com www.facebook.com/practicallygreen twitter@practicallygrn