creating closed loop cycles where waste=food (rather than linear), optimization rather than maximization, using benign manufacturing (as opposed to harmful chemicals), creating conditions conducive to life, being more efficient, effective and resilient (as opposed to wasteful and vulnerable to changing conditions), banking on diversity (yields strength from risk-mitigation), being resourceful and opportunistic (rather than wasteful), adapting and evolving (rather than being stagnant), and doing more with what you’ve got (smart!).

True innovation requires you to re-design your systems, products and/or services to serve a purpose and a function, with those sustainability/resilience principles as the foundation or lifeblood to be infused from the beginning of the design process.

There are some sustainable design principles found in your examples, but you would have to conduct a life cycle analysis to determine the footprint of each, and whether or not is is truly sustainable:

eBay: closed loop (recycling and re-using, being resourceful and opportunistic, uses less energy, and resources than new products)

Swiffer: nothing really re-designed except the shape- not innovative or sustainable.

Apple: efficiency

Zumbox: resourceful and opportunistic

Kindle: you would have to conduct a life cycle assessment to determine if this product is truly green. Making the Kindle’s takes resources, energy, pollution from transportation, etc..

Fast Skinz: using nature’s adaptation’s as design inspiration is called Biomimicry. Every organism on the planet has adopted some way to survive that is better than its predecessor. This is not true Biomimicry because it has been retrofitted to “mimic” a golf ball, which mimics an animal’s skin (which evolved over billions of years of research and design), and only in shape, not material, form or function. The shape reduces drag, and therefore creates efficiency in its use, but you would have to look at how the product is made and then disposed of (or recycled) to determine true “greenness”.

Sustainable innovation is a choice- and it must be conscientiously integrated from the very beginning of the design phase. Otherwise, as you have pointed out, you get some “green” benefits, but not all.

True innovation is sustainable innovation- if it is done right, from the beginning, and is identified as “sustainable” and “resilient” and “emergent”, not “green”.

Green isn’t good because it’s “green”, green is good because it is sustainable, resilient to change, capable of adapting and evolving, risk-adverse, and most importantly life-friendly.

For too long we have focused on “green” as the goal or target, when in fact it is sustainability we are aiming for.

Innovation, whether in Objectivism or Green 2.0, is king.

I think it’s hard to say that all new technology is green, though. In the end it is energy and resource intensive to create, use, and dispose of. Emails and web conferencing do save paper and plane flights but they also use electricity and have their own disposal issues (see GOOD’s great video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl2j83LCHss)

But I am a green copywriter, meaning I write conscious copy for conscious companies, and believe that Green 2.0 and social media are the futures of business, and that those businesses will empower the future of the USA. It’s where I make my contacts and where I do my business. Thanks for getting me thinking about what Green 2.0 means for the weekend!
@ecoscott