Green is the new black. Wear it well.

In a country where gas prices are flirting with $5 a gallon and the cost for a barrel of oil has roughly doubled in two years, green has become the new black.

Fashionable. Trendy. Sleek. Always appropriate.

It’s also dressing up a golden opportunity for you to save money, reduce your footprint and grab attention through resource-conscious marketing.

Make more, use less.
Big dollars are being banked and technologies discovered as part of a burgeoning green economy. Two examples of this of which I’m most familiar:

Bank of America saved $500,000 in the first year of using thinner, lighter ATM receipts. With its recent direct check deposit at ATMs, electronic-only statement options, ATM receipt opt-outs and more, you can be sure that BofA has saved millions of dollars and significantly reduced its environmental impact.

Xerox recently developed erasable paper, which seems counterintuitive from the company whose bottom line appears to depend on the use of as much paper and ink as possible.

This is still incubating in Xerox laboratories, but we are one step closer to a sustainable future as a result of this company’s innovative spirit. Every year, 10,000 sheets of copy paper are printed per person—in the U.S. alone. Imagine if, only hours or days after the ink fades, all that paper could find its way back to the printer, ready for reuse? Direct mail by Etch-a-Sketch coming to a campaign near you.

Innovation begins with “How?”
From my personal experiences and others I’ve admired from afar, most corporate innovations start with a single question: Is there a better way to do what I’m doing now? Leaders are now following that up with: How can I lessen my impact and be seen as a waste reduction expert who saves or makes my organization money?

In a previous life with the environmental nonprofit Metafore, I worked alongside some box-burstingly creative people inside and outside of Fortune 500 corporations. They put aside differences and collectively unearthed ways to lesson their environmental impacts—and increase revenue—by wasting fewer resources and innovating new technologies.

And if you read the Wall Street Journal, the green tide may be turning on the need to pay a premium for doing the right thing. With the rising energy prices, mainstream products are in some cases costing more.

Take a look at the mother of all eco-marketing campaigns from GE, Ecomagination, and ponder its demand-generation and financial success.

A progress report in May 2008 noted that GE would surpass its seemingly lofty goal a year early—growing corporate revenue by $20 billion through its Ecomagination product line in less than five years and promptly readjusting it to $25 billion by 2010. If a monolith like GE can move to the greener side of life and see results, B2B marketers should feel confident walking in their footsteps.

Weigh the Tradeoffs
Here are a few things to consider and questions to ask about environmentally conscious marketing operations.

• Mix it up! Use e-mail, digital assets (PDFs, webcasts, videos, eBooks, etc.) and digital promotion mechanisms more, leveraging printed materials for targeted campaigns.
• Clean your database. A clean internal list of targeted direct mail recipients or proven rented lists is green on a variety of fronts. It reduces print runs, postage costs, fossil fuel use and landfill fodder for the roundtrip DM drops branded “Return to Sender.” Added bonus: Your ROI per campaign will also climb.
• Investigate alternatives. When designing for printed materials ask your vendors about the feasibility, quality and cost of using:
• Recycled paper, paper with a lower basis weight (thinner), and/or paper certified as being sourced and manufactured in an environmentally responsible way
• Soy-based inks and water-based coatings to reduce the use of lead-based ink, which has toxins that leach into the water supply and increase cost during the recycling process that gets passed on to consumers
• Digital printing technologies that eliminate plate processing and enable variable data printing for customization

Paper is but one path to take on your rewarding, yet unending, journey toward sustainability.

Keep digging to learn where the materials you use originate, how they are produced and how they are getting to you. Then thin out redundant, resource-wasting tactics. It can save you money and inform marketing strategies that resonate with your customers.

Get the GreenBuzz
Here are a few places to learn more and keep plugged into sustainable business practices. Let us know what Babcock & Jenkins can do to design the strategy and tactics that keep you aligned and capturing minds.

www.GreenBiz.com—Get the free GreenBuzz newsletter! This site is an amazing aggregation of news stories, issues, how to’s, expert blogs and success stories.

www.Grist.org—A little giggle with your green. The Onion meets Slate.

The Consumer’s Guide To Climate Change to learn about what you can do as a consumer of paper-based products and when/if recycled paper is the right answer.

The Natural Step International Gateway—The go-to Web resource for educating yourself about sustainability, designing a proven plan and incorporating a sustainability framework into your business and/or personal life.