Crikey intern Olly Perkins writes:
Today’s green news:
Carrot mobbing? No, it’s not a euphemism but a new a way of promoting responsible business practices by combining consumers buying power and using it as an incentive for businesses to make greener operating choices. Using the carrot and not the stick.
Basically, a group of shoppers organise, usually by way of the internet and social networking sites, agree to co-ordinate their buying power, offering their combined patronage to local businesses who then bid a percentage of their takings for environmental improvements. The business with the best offer win the mob.
Checkout this video of the first carrotmob in San Francisco in February of last year. Having watched the video, although braving a small local business in the company of around 300 other shoppers might not be something everyone can handle on a weekly basis, more developed networks, such as that in San Francisco can manage a mobbing every couple of weeks and have a large enough network that tuckered out consumers need not present at every event.
Perhaps it is a sign that the power of the mob can influence businesses to lay out the capital for those green changes they have been putting off.
In other news:
So oily. Reports about the extent of the oil spill off the coast of Queensland keep getting worse. The Bligh government now estimates that around 250,000 litres of bunker fuel leak when the ship, Pacific Adventure, got caught in Cyclone Hamish last week, writes The Age. Still unaccounted for are 650 tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertiliser.
