Happy Earth Day to you! Congratulations to the winners of the Second Annual WhatTheyThink Environmental Innovation Awards! And - Happy Birthday to Going Green! This year is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day; first celebrated on April 22, 1970. How did it start? In September 1969 at a conference in Seattle (where I live now) U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin (where I lived then) announced that in spring 1970 there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on the environment. Approximately 20 million people participated in a national day of observance of environmental problems on the first Earth Day. That date now marks the beginning of the modern environmental movement. Part of the WhatTheyThink Going Green Earth Day celebration is our recognition of five companies that have been selected as winners of the WhatTheyThink Environmental Innovation Awards. These are companies who are making real and concrete contributions to innovation, implementation, and communication of environmental solutions. While we can only present 5 awards, there were more than 50 applications submitted and every company who took the time to tell us about their programs and initiatives are environmental heroes. We will be introducing you to them over the next few weeks. In the meantime, here are our award winners:

• Environmental Sustainability and Your Plant: Brown Printing Company, New York NY Each of Brown's three facilities have implemented energy efficient lighting, free cooling chillers, variable frequency drives, computerized building management systems, and motion sensor lighting installation. A regenerative thermal oxidizer (RTO) system "scrubs" VOCs out of the air with over 99% efficiency and turns them into fuel, replacing more than 316 million cubic feet of natural gas in 2009.
• Environmental Sustainability and Your Processes: Portland Color, Portland ME Portland Color's waste reduction and recycling program extends beyond the company's walls. Portland has developed a retail fixture program that allows customers to quickly change graphics without having to replace the entire display, thus cutting both the costs and carbon emissions from shipping. The company also partners with a local company, Ruth's Reusable Resources, and the local university theater program to reuse offcuts of substrate and fabrics.
• Environmental Sustainability and Your Community: Patient News Publishing, Haliburton ON Patient News' Strategic Consumable Recycle and Assessment Program (SCRAP) has resulted in a long list of achievements including: cloth bags available for employees to use when shopping for lunch, a free lecture series on green topics called the Green Geek series, replacement of all CRT  monitors with LCD displays, an arrangement with Sears Canada for an employee discount for energy efficient appliances, and a screening of An Inconvenient Truth for employees and residents of Haliburton County.
• Beyond Environmental Sustainability: Green Books and Binders, Langhorne PA Green Books and Binders has devised a new binder that is made of recycled materials and is fully recyclable. Its Low-Carb Binders are shipped flat and assembled thanks to a snap-in fastener that secures the recycled metal ring mechanism to the vinyl-free base. Covers can be recycled by simply removing the fastener.
• Environmental "Thought Leader:" EarthColor, Parsippany NJ EarthColor has been involved in the development of a VOC scrubber as well; one that incorporates enzymes and natural bacterial to reduce captured VOCs and carbon emissions into non-hazardous solids. All airborne emissions are monitored and where they can't be eliminated, EarthColor purchases carbon offsets. The company has also developed a patent-pending calculator that uses comprehensive algorithms and environmental workflows to identify the environmental impact savings of the print and paper supply chain.

And by the way: WhatTheyThink Going Green is two years old!