Being green's more fun when you do it with online 'friends'. Meg Carter meets the men who believe that social networking can save the planet
The Independent 20 Dec 07;
Green brands tend to fall into one of two categories, believes internet entrepreneur Andy Hobsbawm. Either they are worthy, good-cause initiatives nibbling at the mainstream, or they are wannabes – established household names now eager to be seen as green.
Which is why, a little over a year ago, when he began looking around for an eco-friendly idea to become his latest venture, one thing was clear. "Without strong brands in the environmental space it will only ever be a worthy eco-ghetto, which just isn't enough," he explains. "We set out to create a green brand as great as the great brands already out there."
The result – Green Thing – is a new online community dedicated to urging us all to adopt a greener lifestyle.
Sign up to join at www.dothegreenthing.com and you will receive a monthly challenge – such as walking instead of driving short distances, turning your lights off early, or buying fewer things that are new – and an invitation to engage at a number of different levels. It's all sugar-coated with fun and entertaining content added to the Green Thing website throughout each month.
Short films are released every couple of weeks to keep the monthly challenge top of the mind.
Members will discover, too, an array of content contributed by well-known names. John Hegley and Tracy Chevalier have written rhymes and Howie B an original musical soundtrack for people to download then walk to. Former Darkness frontman Justin Hawkins, meanwhile, has written and recorded a new track called "Do It in the Dark", inspired by one of Green Thing's November films about turning off lights, featuring a glow-in-the-dark condom. December's green thing is to "buy an old thing, not a new thing" , a gently anti-consumerist message for Christmas, reinforced by a film about Mary and Joseph and photos of members' "old things".
Top creative talent from leading advertising and design agencies, music producers and film-makers have donated original content, too – inspired by Green Thing's aim to make greener lifestyles smart and sexy.
In exchange for all this fun stuff visitors are encouraged to "do the green thing" and log it via www.dothegreenthing.com each time they do. Green Thing then calculates both the amount of carbon dioxide that individual has saved and the running total of CO2 emissions saved by the community as a whole. Slip back into your bad old ways, however, and Green Thing will give you a nudge. Members collect Green Thing monsters, for example, which can be used on their profile pages or shared with friends. Log fewer green actions and eventually your neglected monster will fade Tamagotchi-style to sepia and start to cry.
Hobsbawm, whose day job is European chairman of interactive advertising agency Agency.com, conceived and developed Green Thing with Naresh Ramchandani, one of adland's best-known creatives, whose high-profile campaigns include ads for Maxell, Tango and Ikea.
"We had wanted to do something together for quite some time," Ramchandani explains from the far corner of the busy London media agency that has offered Green Thing's founders a rent-free floor tile or two on which to set up camp. Despite the two founders' industry profiles, both were keen Green Thing should be independent of commercial associations, so it has been developed and launched on a shoestring budget with much talent and resources provided free. "I'm all about making communications more engaging. Andy is all about creating communities online. It just made sense to pool our expertise."
It was Hobsbawm who proposed they do something positive for the environment. Despite sheepishly admitting to being the proud owner until recently of a car he will only describe as "a bit of a legacy from the dotcom boom days", he insists global warming and young children sharpened his environmental focus a number of years ago.
"My kids are six and three and a half now, but for quite a while I was wondering what I'd say to them when in 10 years' time they turn round to me and ask just what I was doing when climate change was going on," he explains. The challenge, however, was deciding just what to do. Both were keen not to get involved with selling green products.
"The trouble with other models – initiatives like Project Red, for example – is that the suggestion you can consume yourself out of a problem seems flawed," Hobsbawm says. "Even if you encourage people to buy more of the right kind of product, the fact remains you are encouraging consumption at a time when more consumption is part of the problem. So we decided to focus on something small, personal and intimate – individual action – rather than simply create yet another large, high-profile, mass-market campaign."
To be credible, however, it was essential that Green Thing was underpinned by solid insight and sound research. So having come up with the idea of setting up an environmentally focused online community, the pair sought advice and input from a cross-section of leading, international environmentalists to help them identify which tasks to encourage members to do and how best to structure the site.
With input from eco-luminaries including environmental activist Wangari Maathal; Cathy Zoi, a former environmental advisor to Bill Clinton; CarbonSense founder Antony Turner and WWF global policy advisor Jules Peck, they constructed the Green Thing site around the themes of reducing consumption, reusing and recycling across six basic categories including transport, energy, food and products. The monthly task is the simplest way that members can help to tackle each challenge, although the website is designed to lead the willing towards bigger and more far-reaching actions that generate a bigger environmental impact.
Green experts also helped the Green Thing team to calculate a value for the carbon saving of an individual member doing each monthly task once. For example, by substituting one two-mile drive with a two-mile walk – Green Thing's October challenge – you can save 0.67kg of carbon dioxide, based on recent government data analysis of research into distances travelled by different groups of people by different means. It may sound modest, but do it more often, then consider the combined saving made by the entire Green Thing community and the savings start to stack up.
www.dothegreenthing.com
