Is it just me?  It’s kind of embarrassing to always end up at the grocery store on the 14th looking at cheesy mylar balloons, bad greeting cards with no matching envelope, and half dead roses. Those mylar balloons sure help me feel green,  yeah right… and to boot, buying anything romantic online has never happened in my world.

But going green this Valentines Day, doesn’t mean you have to suck all of the fun out of giving gifts to your sweetie! Why not turn this Hallmark holiday into an opportunity to support ethical and eco-conscious businesses with your dollars while simultaneously showing your special someone just how you feel? From sexy sustainable skivvies to gorgeous green jewelry, check out our Valentine’s Day Eco Gift Guide for everything your main squeeze wants.

You might want to TAKE YOUR BABY’S BREATH AWAY

This breathtaking heart-shaped wreath made of wisps of organic baby’s breath and preserved roses sends all of the right signals with none of the yucky pesticides or overseas shipping.

Go check out more titillating surprises. It’s worth your perusing our friends blog for more Valentines Day eco-gifts for your honey.

These ATM machines accept stacks of up to 50 cash bills of various denominations or a stack of up to 30 checks. The machines take an image of the bills and checks and immediately provide the check images to the user.

No envelopes or deposit slips are required for the deposits, and so far companywide the ATMs already have saved about 460 tons of paper or 8,331 trees.

I’m talking about Wachovia Bank, bought by Wells Fargo in 2008,  going “green” starting with 12 bank locations in Georgia.

I used to be surprised to hear GREEN NEWS from our southern folk friends, well, not anymore. Even Chattanooga is considered one of the greenest small towns in America and can prove it with the first Green LEED Certified Movie Theater.

Installation of the ATMs is expected to go nationwide rapidly.

The banks and gas stations need to also stop criminals from swiping our ATM card numbers. The hackers are like inmates and sometimes it feels like they’ve taken over the jail!

Just last week, a friend of mine went to use the local Chase ATM to get some cash money. When he walked up to the ATM something struck him as funny.

If you had a couple drinks you may not notice

He told me, “I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but the card reader didn’t look right, like it wasn’t completely attached. I grabbed and pulled at the card reader and, lo and behold, it came off! It was actually a card skimmer attached to the ATM over that actual card reader. On the back there is a battery,  flash memory card, and a mini USB port it was set up so that ATM cards would first go through the skimmer and then into the ATM itself so you’d never know the difference.

Fortunately I’d seen a news story about this sort of thing a couple of years back and have been paranoid ever since.”

If the card reader on an ATM seems like it doesn’t belong—and especially if it looks fragile or misaligned—go to another ATM. And let someone at that bank or store know that they may want to double-check their ATM for skimmers.

these are attached to ATM's everyday. BEWARE

My gut says, that the companies born in this recession will be the stuff of legend by the end of the decade.  Here’s 5 trends for small business I see coming at us like a storm on doppler radar.

5. Mastering (note: the word “mastering”, not just tapping into) social media is one of the hottest of all online trends.

I thought “Sex” was the most searched term online in 2009. NOT! Facebook” in fact was the most searched term in 2009. (Source: Experian Hitwise)

Big business has discovered what many small businesses already know: Facebook is a great place to advertise.

Hop on the social media train, Jane, because it’s headed out of the station at light speed.

4. Going Local in a green farmers market sort of way: Consumers are increasingly looking for a local angle when looking where to spend their hard-earned dollar.

Example: The explosion of farmers markets across the country. According to Entrepreneur, “there are almost 5,000 farmers markets across the country, the result of more than 5% annual growth for the past five years.”

Additionally, with people staying closer to home right now and with the green ethos growing, home is where the heart (and dollar) is.

3. Sharing vs. Shared Experiences: We are all not watching or experiencing the same thing nearly as much.

For the small business person, it is vital to realize that 1) people look for, and increasingly expect, the personal, and 2) small, localized, immediate user-created media are where the eyeballs are headed.

2. Mobile marketing is exploding. Whether it is creating the Next Big App, offering customers a real-time mobile coupon, or creating a text marketing campaign, in 2010 there will be mobile options galore for small business.

It is a new world indeed.

1. The Start-Up Economy:

The outlook is both brighter and calmer. It is calmer because things are slowly getting back to, if not normal, at least something recognizable. And it is brighter because out of the rubble, a new, vital, innovative start-up economy is being born.

We have entered the era of small business. Whereas GM president Charles Wilson once said “What’s good for the country is good for GM, and vice versa,” it can now safely be said that what is good for small business is good for the country. Consider these statistics.

Small businesses now

• Number almost 30 million
• Employ more than half of all workers
• Constitute 99.7% of all employers
• Constitute 97% of all exporters
• Create the majority of business innovations
(Source: U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, 2009)

With 10% unemployment for as far as the eye can see, with the unemployed running out of benefits, and with benefits not what they once were for the employed, start-ups of all shapes and sizes are taking root: One person shops, green home-based businesses, part-time ventures, online enterprises, high tech companies – you name it. These are the folks who, with their creative energy, drive, ingenuity, and hard work will be leading us out of this anything but great recession.

When you get pneumonia or a really bad bug do you change anything in your less than green life? When I checked myself into Emergency a few days ago, the M.D.  diagnosed me with pneumonia and then went holistic on me by sending me to a Compound Pharmacy. I thought I was visiting a doctor, not a naturapathic holistic nutritionist.

I’m not judging anything yet, until I try for more than a week, what he recommended, including probiotics, lots of vitamin D, fish oils and Alkaline water to cure my burping problems. The pricey water tastes better than tap until you get on the internet where experts rip it big time.   

Here’s one Doctor’s opinion with quite the notariety.

“Taking calcium supplements or drinking alkaline water will not change the pH of your blood. If you hear someone say that your body is too acidic and you should use their product to make it more alkaline, you would be wise not to believe anything else the person tells you.”

He continues with “no foods change the acidity of anything in your body except your urine. Your stomach is so acidic that no food can change its acidity. Citrus fruits, vinegar, and vitamins such as ascorbic acid or folic acid do not change the acidity of your stomach or your bloodstream. An entire bottle of calcium pills or antacids would not change the acidity of your stomach for more than a few minutes.”

Mayo Clinic tells us…

“Alkaline water has a higher pH level than normal tap water. Some proponents say that alkaline water can neutralize acid in your bloodstream, boost your energy level and metabolism, and help your body absorb nutrients more effectively. Others say that alkaline water can help you resist disease and slow the aging process. However, there’s no scientific proof that any of these claims are true. For most people, plain water is best.”

What do you believe about Alkaline water?

We know our tap water provides us with safe levels of toxins, so any improvement with filtering is a smart green choice.

We know PLASTIC bottled water, like “Fiji”, which is supposedly “carbon-negative,” and the Lexus of PLASTIC bottled spring waters can’t be that good for us.

According to the company’s website, this product is carbon-negative - implying the planet would actually be worse off without it - for numerous reasons.

Starting in 2010, for instance, Fiji “will require 25% fewer emissions to produce and deliver; 50% of our energy will come from renewable sources like wind, to power their bottling facility in Fiji and biodiesel to replace traditional fuels used in transportation.”

The company is also investing in “forest carbon (e.g., reforestation) and renewable energy projects that prevent the release of carbon into the atmosphere; these add up to at least 120% of our remaining product lifecycle emissions.”

While carbon-offsets are a great way to make up for green sins, the fact remains that shipping water across the world in plastic bottles is far from environmentally sound. Tap water in a reusable stainless steel bottle is still a far better option.

I think the Fiji water thing is a joke. It’s a textbook example of using one so-called green aspect of a product as marketing tactic. I could maybe see this making sense if they were shipping it to countries that don’t have drinking water readily available, but we’ve got lots of water in America. At least for now.

So many topics to discuss. Brad Pitt’s biodegrable body lotion, Tiger Woods is now like the rest of us, a real human being. America’s dollar is weaker, China is building huge solar plants in Arizona and India will not buy our bonds, rather they buy more gold. Most of what I just said is not that interesting so lets do some “You Got to be Kidding Me” gift ingredient audits.

I’ve been shopping for holiday gifts and as a cheif responsible blogger at Hart of Green, I have to pull back that veil on “Biodegradable”. What you don’t know will only help you feel more stupid when you find out whats really in these products posing as 100% green.

You got to be kidding me #1…

100% biodegradable body wash? …really? 100?

On the positive side, when I look at all the ingredients in most of these products, I found most are able to break down within 28 days. Not much biodegrades available as ingredients, especially the thing we care about the most, THE SCENT - there are really only three scents to choose from. Hence, why we see so much aloe.

Packaging-wise, most bottles are made of post-consumer recycled plastic

However, all had fragrances and preservatives such as potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate, which can form into the carcinogen benzene if it comes in contact with acids. And there’s isoeugenol, also found in the body wash, which is currently listed as a “high hazard” ingredient on the Environmental Working Group’s cosmetic database.

Of course, it’s not as though using this body wash will cause skin cancer, but compare it to something like Dr. Bronner’s soaps, which are made of nothing but glycerin and essential oils - fair-trade, organic ones at that - and it suddenly doesn’t seem so impressive.

You got to be kidding me #2

While most all bottles are recyclable, the pumps are not. Even Brad Pitt’s, Kiehl’s, generally tries to be eco-conscious in their product development and retail, it has yet to offer an in-store refill option.

What’s scary is we should grab a bottle of Jean-Nate and see what’s in that. Remember that stuff? They still sell it.  Even scarier, I bet Brad Pitt and Angelina flood thier bathtub with it.

Furthermore, biodegradable soap is actually not biodegradable when it ends up in a body of water, because it requires soil for it to break down properly.

This is why many “camping friendly” soaps have labels reading “Do all washing, bathing or cleaning at least 200 feet from any water sources.”

So you make the call. More products posturing as green this holiday season on the margins of what is otherwise an unsustainable product. There are two components with biodegradable, the ingredients and the packaging, and neither is as sustainable as something like a bar soap, which is natural, doesn’t require packaging and has a long shelf life.”

There are two categories of green products:

Best in class, which refers to the best of a bad set of products (for example, biodegradable plastic bags, which are better than regular plastic bags but still belong to a category that’s inherently unsustainable); and alternatives to unsustainable products, such as a cleaning solution that uses vinegar instead of ammonia as a base.

Companies that are genuinely trying to change their ways for the sake of the environment should be commended, even if they’re not perfectly green in the end.

But consumers who are serious about reducing their footprint will soon figure out that words like “recyclable,” “biodegradable” and “natural” don’t always translate into sustainable.