Benchmarks

Are you greener than St. Patty’s Day beer or brown as a dead houseplant or something in between? How would you know? There are various measures, serious to flippant. Aside from recognizing particular things you can do- light bulbs, driving habits, and whatnot- you might want a broader, more inclusive perspective. So, having similar questions I found some questionnaires to take myself.

"My Green Quotient", despite its name, isn’t a quiz at all, but a useful website.

The National Geographic has nineteen quizzes about Green subjects, each of them short and sweet, and backs them up with videos and other information. What would one expect from Nat Geo, right? There were five questions on the water quiz, but (gasp!) I only got 2 right! Time to learn more.

Oregon Go Green.com's is a short, loose quiz, and partly tongue-in-cheek, like its answers don’t reflect some of the things we do at my household. My result was 21, or “…fairly green, but you could use a few tweaks.”

This is from Canada, and I didn’t sign up for everything, but the questionnaire is similar to Oregon Go Green, except that they also include lists of things one might own and use.

Here’s one from Go Green Online that’s much more detailed. I scored 251000 in water. I’m not sure what that means, but I’m pretty sure I did well. There are modules on packaging, planet facts, power, and transport I could have quizzed through.

Shoreline Green Business Program is focused on what businesses need to do, and is quite rigorous, not only about turning off lights, but about such aspects as

• Increased efficiencies and productivity
• Improved worker safety
• Lower operational and environmental compliance costs
• Reduced or eliminated long-term liabilities
• Decreased disposal costs
• Decreased cost of raw materials
• Diminished need for onsite storage space
• Greater compliance with state and federal regulations
• Protection of natural resources, providing for long term sustainability of the business
• Increased integrity and status within the community = increased marketing edge, attracting new customers
• Enhanced employee morale and employee retention
• Eligibility for recognition and incentive programs such as EnviroStars or the Shoreline Green Business Certification available through this website.

I talked about the Chinook Book’s complex process for choosing genuinely green companies for their coupons in my article , and it really comes down to deciding what’s the least material and energy input you can find for the desired functional output. Easy to say; hard to do.

All these tests go back to something my Dad told me when he was teaching me to navigate: “If you don’t know where you are you can‘t very well get where you need to go.” So settle in, answer honestly, and place yourself on the Green map. Maybe then we’ll be able to get to a better place.