The Green Capitalist

摘要

The "greenillg" Of corporate behemoths like Wal-Mart, DuPont, and Toyota has received much media attention in recent years. But consider small businesses: according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, of the estimated 27 million firms in the United States, 99.7 percent have fewer than 500 employees, 97.5 percent have fewer than 20, and more than 70 percent are "Mom-and-Pop" home-based concerns. Small businesses employ almost exactly half the private U.S. labor force-some 57.4 million people. Individually, they may be minimal energy users and waste emitters; collectively, however, their environmental impact is potentially huge.rnSo how big is their footprint? No one knows for sure. Greener World Media's unflinching State of Green Business 2008 points to some key gaps in data and methodologies relating to the measure of progress of environmental practices of firms, both big and small. We have, for instance, estimates of job numbers in clean technologies, but no clear data on the number of people doing green work in unclean industries; likewise, we have no idea how many jobs are being created in green business sectors, or, indeed, how many green businesses comprise that sector. In fact, the very term "green business" eludes precise definition.