Exciting NEW Green Crawler Developments. ‘People Helping People…It’s Powerful Stuff’

April 13th, 2010

When you visit Green Crawler, what do you see? A few “Fresh Finds” handpicked by our team and a nice search bar for you to explore our inventory of eco-friendly products. We’re ready to add to your “Green Crawler” experience in what we think is going to be revolutionary and completely user-generated way.

Our team loves sharing new, unique, “fresh” products from the Green Crawler inventory with its users, but we want to take this, well, more than one step further.  Green Crawler will be featuring a new platform that will allow people to help people go green through a way of logging in, sharing, and voting on user-generated information…ultimately developing a community of eco-conscious individuals. You, the users, will help each other find useful green products, green deals, offers, etc. After all, we’re all trying to better our planet together, right?

We will be sending out invites to test this platform, very soon, so if you are interested in being a selected “tester”, please send us an email at info@greencrawler.com, send us a tweet @GreenCrawler, or write on our Facebook Fan Page.

We’re extremely excited about this user-generated platform and its long term potential. This is a brief introduction, and as we roll out its launch, you will all see how it works, more in-depth. It will be as good as you, our “green crawlers”, make it, and our job will be to listen to your feedback, and add as many new features to it as we can, in order to make your Green Crawler experience as beneficial and enjoyable as possible.

We will be back with updates on these developments soon. Thanks for all of your support!

10 Days Away: Earth Day Giveaway…3 FREE Prizes

April 13th, 2010

With the 40 year anniversary of Earth Day just 10 days away, we want to celebrate by giving away 3 cool eco-prizes right from our Fresh Finds, including HelloRewind’s Laptop Sleeve, in which you send in one of your tee’s (paid for by HelloRewind), they turn your tee into a Laptop Sleeve (with some padding) and then ship it back to you…a $50 value.  We’re also giving away a SolLight, a perfect water bottle for an overnight hike or camping trip, since it turns into a solar-powered lantern…a $30 value. Finally, we’re giving away a KEEN wallet, which is more than just a traditional leather waller. This wallet is made from recycled rice bags.

GC Earth Day

Click to see how you can participate in Green Crawler's Earth Day Giveaway

From now until Earth Day, you can participate in 1 of 2 ways…or both. To see the complete Earth Day Giveaway rules and information on how you can win one of these 3 items, please visit http://www.greencrawler.com/earthday.php

Spring Cleaning

March 10th, 2010

You may have noticed a staggering drop in the number of products on GreenCrawler.com.  We like to call it “Spring Cleaning.”  In a sense, taking the vacuum and sucking out all of the products that we label as not “truly” green (and making sure that all future products we receive have some kind of “green” characteristic).  Making sure products that we list in our database are made of eco-friendly, recycled, natural, organic, pesticide-free, recyclable, energy-efficient, water conserving, biodegradable, sustainable and/or renewable materials.

But it doesn’t end there.  We are enforcing strict merchant “listing” rules and guidelines as well.  We accept merchants (large online retailers like REI.com, Zappos.com, Newegg.com, etc. or smaller online retailers like BuyGreen.com, VashonOrganics.com, ShopOrganic.com, etc.) that sell eco-friendly products, but on top of that, we are making sure these sellers keep an updated product inventory in our database.

Every merchant must submit or send at least one updated product inventory every 60 days, or else that merchant will be contacted, products will be removed, and that merchant will not be listed on GreenCrawler.com until a new product catalog is received.  This will help ensure that the prices you see correlate with the actual price on the merchant’s site, it will ensure that the link is working, and ensure that the product you see on GreenCrawler is still in stock.  Hopefully this will improve every green crawler’s (hopefully this name for our users will catch on, too) experience.

This is definitely a step in the right direction in providing accurate product information and legitimate green products. This is only a fraction of what we are currently working on.  We are preparing the Green Crawler site for its next launch, including enhanced search options, browsing options, user interactive features that will be reason for every green crawler user to keep checking back in.  These new elements will go into effect in mid-April, so stay tuned.  For now, keep checking back in to see the latest Fresh Finds, and keep searching.  You never know what types of green alternatives you may find.

Green Crawler Adds “Fresh Finds”

March 3rd, 2010

As our database of products continues to expand on a weekly basis, one of the key pieces we wanted to include with our growing site was a “Fresh Finds” feature.  You can find these fresh, handpicked products on our homepage, with an entire archive as well. As we continue to add new merchants and thousands of new products, we continuously find cool, unique, useful products that we don’t want hidden in the mix, and only accessible through a specific search.  This is how we developed “Fresh Finds”.

Green Crawler's "Fresh Finds"

They are either great deals ($10.99 recyclable aluminum usb flash driver from Newegg, for example), great alternatives (slippers made from recycled plastic bottles from The North Face that can easily replace a pair of Uggs, $30 vs $90), and products that you never even knew existed (like shipping an old tee to Hellow Rewind so that they can turn it into a laptop sleeve for you).

This was the idea behind “Fresh Finds”.  Sharing our green discoveries with you.  Be sure to check back often for the latest finds. You can also join our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter to get notified whenever we add a new ”Fresh Find”.

This is just one of the new features that Green Crawler will be developing over the next 2 months and presenting to you in mid-April, for our anniversary and Earth Day.  Stay tuned for our next round of features…enhanced searches, browsing options, and many new products to choose from (just to name a few).

The Copenhagen Wheel: Technology for Biking 2.0

December 15th, 2009

M.I.T. researchers (who else, right?) have invented a bicycle wheel that uses the technology from hybrid cars, which is believed by many to be the next big thing in biking…Biking 2.0.

Here’s how it works: “The new wheel uses a kinetic energy recovery system, the same technology used by hybrid cars, like the Toyota Prius, to harvest otherwise wasted energy when a cyclist brakes or speeds down a hill. With that energy, it charges up a battery inside the wheel’s hub” (nytimes.com).

The Copenhagen Wheel (image via nytimes.com)

The Copenhagen Wheel (image via nytimes.com)

If you’re saying to yourself…”don’t we have electric bikes already?”  You’re right, we do.  But, unlike previous Read the rest of this entry »

Why Climategate is a Pathetic Reason to Discredit Climate Change

December 9th, 2009

Discredit climate change all you want, but I'm fairly certain these smokestacks aren't making our air cleaner.

Discredit climate change all you want, but I'm fairly certain these smokestacks aren't making our air cleaner.

Suddenly, when a hacker in the UK gets a hold of e-mails between leading climate scientists that show an effort to raise fears about global warming through data “editing,” the whole issue is debunked.

You may have heard the term “Climategate” being thrown Read the rest of this entry »

Samso: Denmark’s Energy Self-Sufficient Island

December 2nd, 2009

Can a 30-mile by 15-mile wide industrialized island of 4,000 inhabitants be completely energy self-sufficient?  With 21 wind turbines, power plants that rely on furnaces fired by wood chips and straw, and farms of man-sized solar panels (kept trim by herds of sheep), an energy self-sufficient island is a reality.  It’s the Danish island of Samso.  It has become one of the first industrialized places in the world to qualify as being totally energy self-sufficient.

How Samso has become energy self-sufficient (image via ngpowereu.com)

How Samso has become energy self-sufficient (image via ngpowereu.com). Click to zoom in on the Infographic.

In 1997, Samso won a competition between 5 Danish islands to become Denmark’s renewable energy island.  How?  It presented a 10 year plan to to Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Green Crawler’s Facebook Page

December 2nd, 2009

So you’ve either joined Green Crawler’s Facebook page or you’re looking at it and thinking “okay, what is this website all about?”

In the booming industry of “green” shopping, many of us are still unaware of our options online.  “Where can I buy green? Do my favorite stores have green products? If so, how can I locate these products on their websites?”  This is where Green Crawler comes into play.  Our mission, in a sense, is to provide savvy shoppers with a one-stop resource to find products that contribute to a healthier, more eco-friendly lifestyle.

Now, you must be thinking, “What constitutes a “green” product?”  The fact is; you don’t have to dress like your 8th grade art teacher to be more eco-friendly.  When you come to Green Crawler, you aren’t just browsing through pages and pages of Birkenstocks, hemp pants, and tie-dye ponchos.  You are finding “green” alternatives.  CFL bulbs, Energy Star TV’s, fashionable jeans and shoes (organic 7 jeans for example), SIGG reusable bottles, messenger bags made from recycled sails and billboards, etc.  These products are both from reputable merchants (Buy.com, Zappos, Shop.com, Amazon’s Endless.com) and merchants you probably haven’t heard of (Mothernature.com, Shoporganic.com, Nimli.com).

In addition, we constantly strive to keep our users informed about green news.  We will be using this Facebook fan page to share what we find via Twitter, our favorite Blogs, our own Blog, YouTube, and tons of other resources.  And of course, this can be a place for you all to share your findings, thoughts, and favorite products…and of course, give feedback.

That’s Green Crawler.  If you like what we’re doing, join the page and spread the word.  Our job… keep looking into new ways to make the site more user-friendly, adding more sellers and products, and allowing you all to collaborate with us.  We have some new features in the works right now and will be sharing them soon! Talk to you all soon. Thanks for joining our fan page!

The Paint-Less Coca Cola Can…Slick and Eco-Friendly

November 29th, 2009

Between classic Coca Cola, Coke Zero and Diet Coke, 37.7 billion cans are sold each year (excluding the other cans that are produced and not sold) (gizmodo.com).  Think about the aluminum and paint required to produce this unfathomable amount of Coke cans.  Here are some numbers (from a simple Google search): 1 empty can = 13.6 grams = 0.0299828677 pounds. .029983 x 37.7 billion cans = 1,130,359,100 pounds of aluminum per year…or, 565, 179.55 tons of aluminum.  Painting all of these cans is one of the biggest polluters during Coke’s production process (air and water pollution from its coloring process and then the energy required to separate the paint from the aluminum during a can’s recycling process).

Now I’m not a fan of aluminum cans to begin with, but Coke has definitely taken a step in the right direction.  In order to offset the staggering amount of paint required to put Coke’s logo, nutrition facts, ingredients, etc. on each of these cans, Coke has introduced a naked, paint-less can.  And to be honest, it looks Read the rest of this entry »

The New Green Crawler Homepage Goes Live

November 28th, 2009

You want to go green, but you’re not sure where to start.  Or maybe you do have an idea of what you’re looking for, but you’re curious about the other green alternatives out there.  One of the new features of the Green Crawler homepage will assist you in your “green” shopping journey.  It’s called Fresh Finds.  Through this feature, we will give you ideas of some of the cool, unique, low-priced and/or popular items that we discover when adding merchants and their products…or products that we just happen to stumble upon.  This feature will help give our users more “green” gift ideas, updates on deals that our merchants are having at the moment, a different approach on everyday products that can help them go green, etc.

Need ideas? Check out "Fresh Finds"

Need ideas? Check out "Fresh Finds"

In addition, we have added a Read the rest of this entry »