Women at work and their tips, challenges, advice, complaints, and experiences

Working Mother magazine recently ran an entire "green" issue that is of interest to anyone looking to make their lives more environmentally-friendly.  Whether you want to green your home and family or your office and company, there were some excellent suggestions in the November 2007 edition of Working Mother.  (Need more ideas?  Check out my Easy Environmentalism posts too!)

They also announced the winners of their first Best Green Companies award.  Some of the names will be new to you if you've just begun your foray into easy environmentalism; others will be shocking if you, like me, have a suspicion about the big names in the corporate world when it comes to true green practices.  Personally I wasn't surprised to see folks like Nau, Aveda (owned by Estee Lauder Companies; NYSE:EL), Whole Foods Market (NASDAQ:WFMI), and Burt's Bees there.  I was mildly startled to see Johnson & Johnson [NYSE:JNJ] (though they do own Aveeno, a company I consider to produce fairly green products I use for my family), and I was interested in their assessments of PepsiCo (NYSE:PEP), Dell (NASDAQ:DELL), and Home Depot (NYSE:HD).  What really caught my eye was seeing S.C. Johnson & Son, Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG), and *gasp* Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) on there.  Wal-Mart I can give a few kudos to, as they are definitely making a name for themselves by providing more organic products, including baby clothes (which are actually super cute and affordable - my parents just sent some for my son a few weeks back).  Still, when one considers corporate giants who are easy to assume aren't green - those are the names that come to my mind. 

Take a look at the list - what do you think about the companies there?  Are you, like me, happy about the changes described by Working Mother but suspicious that a lot of it is just corporate green hype that is overshadowing the wrongs they could be doing?  Do you think these corporations are making real changes?  And the question before us all: how do we encourage this behavior so that MORE companies do some "spring cleaning" and get green?

Be sure to go over to the Working Mother website and apply if you believe YOUR company should be in the running for next year.  The list will appear in the May 2008 issue; don't forget to tell me if you'll be on it so we Workerettes can celebrate with you!