Daily Loaf

The Tampa Green Business Designation Program is a partnership of the Sustany Foundation and the City of Tampa designed to highlight green and sustainable businesses in Tampa. Their website states:

“Businesses seeking to participate in the program will be reviewed against a list of criteria that evaluate their organization’s level of sustainability including green policies and practices. A business can achieve one of three distinct levels of green designation depending on the number of points achieved through the evaluation. Businesses that receive the designation will be provided an item to post at their business location that recognizes their achievement. Additionally, the organization will be included on the City’s green web page as part of Tampa’s “Green Pages” for businesses.”

The program has just given its first three Green Designations to Florida Business Interiors, Bayside Engineering and The Children’s Cancer Center.
Read the rest of this entry »

The inaugural Tampa Bay Green Business Summit, hosted by Mayor Rick Baker, will be held tomorrow (Tuesday, October 27)  at the Progress Center for the Arts at the Mahaffey Theater in Downtown St. Petersburg. The event will allow the business community to share ideas, strategies and best practices to invest and grow business in the emerging clean technology and green industries.

The Green Business Summit is a free event open to the public that targets members of the business community seeking to learn about opportunities and risk management of green business in the wake of impending climate change legislation and litigation. The green business revolution offers businesses both challenges and opportunities. This event will identify business strategies for coping with the challenges and taking advantage of the business opportunities.

There will be three panel discussions on green investment and the economy; understanding regulation and carbon markets, and managing sustainable businesses.
Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the buzz on the latest issues in the Green Community? Check out what you may have missed this last week:

Fixing sprawl and redesigning suburbia- Grant Rimbey CNU explores a possible strategy towards improving existing sprawl. Fixing the sprawl that we have, along with sprawl demolition and recycling, are strategies that could be employed in the future as a new green industry.

Nation’s largest solar facility to be in DeSoto County by next year- Florida Power and Light is currently building the nation’s largest photovoltaic plant in DeSoto County, a $173.5 million, 25 megawatt solar generating facility.

Fresh: New Thinking About What We’re Eating screening – What’s wrong with the mega-industrial food industry- Struggling small farms, problems with food safety rules and the mega-industrial food industry, and a film about all of the above.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tampa Bay Green Drinks is relaunching and their first networking event is being held Wednesday, August 19 in Ybor at 6 pm.

Tampa Bay Green Drinks is relaunching! Join us on August 19, 2009 at 6:00pm at the Roosevelt, a green building in Ybor City located at 1812 N. 15th St.

The Roosevelt showcases a multitude of environmentally sustainable and preferable construction techniques and systems. Meet other professionals in various “green” businesses for networking and discussion. We encourage you to bring anyone interested in green building to check out the progress being made at the Roosevelt to see just what is possible. Wine and beer will be provided.

What is Green Drinks?

Green Drinks is a social networking group that brings together corporate, government, ngo, non-profit and interested people who want to learn about environmentally responsible practices and other related topics. Our goal at Tampa Bay Green Drinks is to bring together the Tampa Bay community to keep “green” moving forward in our community.
Read the rest of this entry »

There are five easy habits you can develop to be more environmentally friendly without much effort and still be able to keep your tax refund check. No, you don’t need to build a hydroelectric plant in your backyard, convert your car to bio-diesel, or live in sweltering heat without air conditioning in your home. You may, however, have a couple of habits to break.

Turning lights off, not leaving the water on while brushing your teeth, and recycling raw materials are all ways we know how we can help out the planet. They’ve been talked before, and are probably the three biggest things one can do to make the most waves. What one forgets though, is that those aren’t the only small things you can do to not only save the environment, but money as well.

1. Reuse plastic shopping bags.
This one I think many people do already but it bears mentioning. After a huge trip to Wal-Mart you come away with enough plastic bags to make a tarp to cover your house. My household bought one of those nifty long sock tube things where you stuff plastic bags on one end and bags come out of the other open end. From portable biohazard containers to a simple makeshift small trash basket liner, plastic grocery bags are the Swiss Army knife of plastic containment.

Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know the coral reefs are being suffocated by tourists’ sunscreen? Going to the tanning bed sets up a controlled environment so you can regulate your light absorption and then have a base tan that will help you avoid sunburn and use less sunscreen, therefore preserving the coral reefs and other oceanic life affected by multitudes of tourist sunscreen!

Raydiance Tanning and Spa (and Wellness Gardens and Tea house) offers a multitude of services to keep your lifestyle “green”, healthy and inexpensive. In light of our new proposals for a universal health care system as well as the one already in place it has become all too obvious we need new ways to stay healthy that integrate into our everyday life, because the health care is way too expensive and only used in dire need. There is now a resource to end this cycle of frustration, and it located so conveniently there is no excuse to make a step to integrating preventive health care into your world.

Read the rest of this entry »