Green Collar Jobs

Something I have been interested in (and which is quite germane to Viridus) is the answer to the question, "what is a green collar job and how many are there?"

In terms of what is a green collar worker, the best definition I have seen is this one at Wikipedia which reads in part,

"[A green collar workers is someone who] implement[s] environmentally conscious design, policy, and technology to improve conservation and sustainability."

At Viridus we often use the shorthand definition of "anyone who has the word 'environment,' 'sustainable,' 'green' or something similar in their title on their business card." Obviously it's not a very precise definition, in the same way that "blue collar worker" is not very precise. Over time, I think the definition will broaden to include people who wouldn't fit either of those definitions, for example a packaging engineer or a purchasing manager could be green collar workers if that were their focus. After all, our tag line at Viridus is "everyone has a green collar job" and we hope one day that is true.

Another way to look at the definition is by compensation, but again that gives us a broad range too. For example, according to Salary.com, the median Top Environmental Executive of a Boston-based company could expect to make about $240,000 per year including bonuses whereas PayScale has a Solar Energy Systems Designer with 1-4 years of experience making $49,000. [BTW, there is an opportunity to create a business that aggregates compensation information for green collar jobs because none of the major current sites are doing a good job of that.]

Last year the US Conference of Mayors released a green jobs report wherein they estimated that in 2006 there were approximately 750,000 green collar jobs in the US (using a similar definition to the one above). Over half of those jobs were in engineering, legal, research and consulting and the second largest category was renewable power generation. The report also found that the jobs were spread across the country, although 85% were in metro areas. The top cities for green collar jobs were: New York (25,021), Washington DC (24,287), Houston (21,250), Los Angeles (20,136) and Boston (19,799).

But more importantly, the report's authors forecast over 4 million new green collar jobs (see table below) over the next 30 years which would represent about 10% of the total job growth over that period. In fact, many experts believe that green jobs will be the only sector of the economy that will see growth through the current recession.


President Obama is pushing for a significant portion of the $825 billion stimulus package to be directed to this sector as well. Many people have been picking through the draft legislation since it was first released on January 26th, but anyone will tell you that these bills are extremely hard to read. Some of the best work I've seen on trying to parse the bill is from the folks at Sunlight, but even they were only able to itemize a fraction of the total.

So according to Sunlight, the stimulus bill (officially called the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009") includes the following funds directed toward green collar jobs:


That is a lot of money ($30 billion) but still just a small 6% of the $500 billion in direct spending (the additional $325 billion is in the form of tax cuts, some of which are directed toward green sectors). These numbers may be under representing the actual bill because it is so hard to read. If you think we've got this wrong, please comment here or join the conversation on Viridus.

An Odd Marriage Not Necessarily Built To Last

I saw this picture in an article about a German company signing a contract to produce wind energy in Africa and I just had to share. What's happened over the past few years is that, what used to be an industry driven by passion and personal motivation has turned into a huge financial opportunity. As a result, it's brought together two groups you never would have expected: tree huggers and Wall Street.

I suspect this odd-couple marriage of convenience is going to have a few bumps after the honeymoon period wears off. I bet that there are a lot of projects that will be mis-managed due to inexperience and a lot of money will be invested and wasted.

Disruptive Environmental Innovation?

I watched PBS Nova "car of the future" last night which I had recorded earlier. The show focused on reducing carbon emissions and included pretty standard stuff - bio-fuels, hybrids, reducing weight, hydrogen, plug-in hybrids, etc. What really hit me though was the section on plug-in hybrids and the contrast between the people at Tesla Motors and the group developing GM's Volt, both plug-in electric cars (which I think will emerge as the winner of all the alt-fuel options). The Tesla is not only a very cool car (left), but if successful, it might represent the perfect example of how the theory of disruptive technology and the environment collide.

The theory of disruptive technologies or disruptive innovation was developed by Clayton Christiansen of Harvard and made popular in his book "The Innovator's Dilemma." The theory (in my words, not his) is that big companies add lots of features and cost to their products and move up-market, building infrastructure and culture to support this along the way. Innovators come in down-market with new technology, lower cost and eat the big guys' lunch, and the big guys can never switch gears and compete because of that infrastructure and culture.

In the Nova episode, the founder of Tesla says something like "we want to be the next big car company. Isn't that crazy?". But is it?

Replace "environment" with "cost" in the disruptive innovation theory and maybe it is not. Perhaps innovative companies can compete solely on the environmental impact of their products, because they can build entire culture and infrastructure at much lower cost than existing companies. Think about the cost of change that GM must incur to switch. Think about old-school Detroit manufacturing and contrast it with Tesla, who started in Silicon Valley because they recognized that the software and firmware are the most important elements of the car.

Will Tesla be the next GM? Probably more important to you, is what young, innovative company might be out there right now planning environmentally sound products at low cost that compete with you?

Red Sox Go Green

Our beloved Red Sox go green!

Fenway Park — the home of the Boston Red Sox — has installed 28 solar panels which are expected to save the park an estimated 18 tons of CO2 emissions annually. Energy generated from the project, which is being spearheaded by National Grid, will replace more than one-third of the approximately 3.1 million BTUs used for the process of heating water where the Boston Red Sox make their home, RenewableEnergyWorld reports. The maximum daily solar panel thermal energy production will be approximately 1.1 million BTUs, 37 percent of the current load.

Read more at Environmental Leader here.  Go Sox!

Virid.us Launches!

Today we are thrilled to announce the launch of Viridus, a community for business professionals to discuss and advance corporate sustainability.  

Viridus is a practical "how to manual" for issues everyone faces at work.  Our belief is that everyone has a "green collar" job and it is how you do your job that actually makes it green or not.  An accounting department working on reducing paper billing, an engineering group designing for recyclability, a purchasing department seeking to reduce the ghg footprint of their supply chain, a facilities department looking to reduce energy or water consumption and especially those who work in corporate sustainability will all find value at Viridus.

Viridus is a members-only site with 100% user-generated-content.  We feel that an environment of business professionals who have responsibility for the sustainability of their organization is particularly valuable.  This way members don't have to worry about being solicited by vendors, press, regulators, NGOs, etc.

We are strongly committed to improving the sustainability of businesses everywhere and look forward to building the Viridus community.  We are currently in invite only private beta.  If you would like to request an invite, please sign up here.  In the meantime, please feel free to send us feedback, comments or questions.