Celebrating Our Ten-Year Anniversary
The Center for a New American Dream celebrated its ten-year anniversary in 2007. New American Dream was founded in 1997 by a group of visionary environmentalists who believed that Americans had a moral responsibility to address the environmental and social impacts of unsustainable consumption. In a little over a decade of existence, we have reached tens of millions of Americans through targeted media campaigns, shifted billions of dollars into environmentally superior goods through our Responsible Purchasing Network, and built a New Dream Community of more than 140,000 Americans who embrace less materialistic lifestyles and make healthier choices.
Since the beginning, New American Dream has worked with individuals
to help them see that personal choices do make a difference. We have
offered our friends and supporters sage advice on how to live according to
their personal values while ensuring that their choices have a positive impact on the planet.
Some notable successes of our individual work over the years include:
• Enabling tens of thousands of people to fight advertising to kids, get off junk mail lists, and simplify their holidays by using our popular guides and kits;
• Persuading AAA to withdraw its 45 million members from an anti-environmental trade
association;
• Convincing Staples to increase the percentage of post-consumer waste in its paper products and stop stocking paper from endangered forests;
• Helping Lego adopt a worldwide policy against advertising in schools;
• Collecting nearly 70,000 carbon-reduction pledges in
only six months from individuals nationwide as part of
our Carbon Conscious Consumer (C3) campaign.
New American Dream has also worked since 2000 to help institutions become more sustainable. In 2007 we launched the Responsible Purchasing Network (RPN), a membership-based coalition of institutions committed to leveraging their collective power to shift the marketplace and make greener goods more widely available and affordable for all.
In its short existence RPN has already:
• Helped the U.S. EPA create the EPEAT standard for greener computers that has already been cited in over $250 billion worth of contracts;
• Worked with Massachusetts to create standards for green cleaning products, which have been
adopted by nearly 100 manufacturers, nine states, and dozens of other entities;
• Assisted New York City; King County, WA; San Jose, CA and other jurisdictions to implement
green vehicle programs;
• Convinced the U.S. House of Representatives to shift to 100% post-consumer waste recycled
copy paper for all 435 congressional offices;
• Enabled Wisconsin to become the largest state purchaser of grid-delivered electricity from renewable sources