Get involved! Are you a green business? Want to get greener? Contact us to find out how.
A collaboration between Mālama Kaua`i and HawaiiHealthGuide.com offers Kauai businesses the opportunity to go green and let the world know about it at the same time. Membership in Hawaii Health Guide’s new online Green Business Directory goes hand in hand with Mālama Kaua`i’s new Green Business Program – purchase an ad package, and the program fee is free!
Hawaii Green Guide and Mālama Kaua`i have partnered to make it easy and cost effective for a business to make meaningful improvements to their environmental impact, marketing efforts, and bottom line.
Mālama Kaua`i Green Businesses care about giving back to the island by leaving a lighter footprint on the environment and supporting the community. Participating businesses pledge to reduce electricity, waste, and water use, buy green supplies from local businesses, support local farms, and more. The Green Business Program aims to alleviate some of the economic burden of business, foster a vibrant local economy, and set up a healthy island environment for generations to come.
And participating businesses can expect to see a payback for the positive changes they make. Surveys routinely show that people are doing increasingly more business with socially and environmentally responsible companies, a trend that is, in fact, not a trend at all. By adopting sustainable practices, businesses can gain competitive edge, increase their markets, and boost consumer loyalty.
By fostering the strength of the local business, we support a healthy local economy, minimize economic leakages, create more and better jobs for Kaua`i residents, and raise the quality of life for all those who call Kaua`i home. Our future goals are to create a strong and vibrant local economy made up of local, environmentally responsible businesses that could even develop further into a strong decision making body if desired.
To join, Mālama Kaua`i offers a tiered system of certification to help Kaua`i businesses through the process, whether they’re just starting or have been "green" for years. Tier one focuses on laying the foundation for better business practices, and changes are free to low-cost. The goal is to create change without overwhelming business owners or employees. Tiers two and three follow up on the foundation with further steps to create a "green" business.
The three tiers represent a unique feature of the new Green Business Directory on www.hawaiihealthguide.com, providing potential clients with transparency on each business’s environmentally friendly practices. Says Anandra George, HawaiiHealthGuide.com sales manager, “We’ve always focused on supporting small businesses who are doing good things for the islands. Launching this partnership with Mālama Kaua`i ensures that we’re not simply ‘greenwashing’ business who want to cash in on the increased demand for eco-friendly products & services, but helping them make real, impactful improvements and highlighting them to our site visitors, who tend to be very interested in progressive businesses.”
Hawaii Health Guide encompasses every aspect of health in Hawaii: personal, environmental, cultural, and community. The website directory, news resource and events calendar receives about 30,000,000 hits per year, already making it the best-trafficked “healthy & green” online resource in the state. They also produce the statewide Hawaii Healing Garden Festivals, focusing on sustainable agriculture and natural medicine.
The Green Business Directory packages (which include the Green Business Certification Program fee of $200/year) range from $500/year to $899/year, depending on the level of visibility on www.hawaiihealthguide.com. Other price points are also available. For a full listing of promotion benefits included in the package, please contact us.
If you’d like to enroll, please contact Hawaii Health Guide at 808-638-0888 (Ext. 1). For more information on the Green Business Program and how to get involved, call Katie Paul at Mālama Kaua`i, 808-828-0685
