Carbon neutral, you may remember, was the word of the year back in 2006, but as my friend Joel Makower (executive editor of greenbiz.com, aka the guru of green business) has written, no one knows exactly what it means or even how to define a company’s carbon footprint.So when Dell announced today that the company had become carbon neutral, I decided to take a closer look in my Sustainability column at fortune.com and cnnmoney.com. Here’s how the column begins:Dell is announcing Wednesday that it has become carbon neutral by turning out the lights in its offices, buying wind power and protecting endangered forests in Madagascar.It’s all part of CEO Michael Dell’s commitment to make the company that he started back in 1984 “the greenest technology company on the planet.”But

There’s a fair bit of cynicism out there about Product (Red), the celebrity-inspired idea that we can help poor victims of AIDS in Africa by going shopping. See, for example, the pointed parody at www.buylesscrap.org, which says, among other things, “Join us in rejecting the ti(red) notion that shopping is a reasonable response to human suffering.”Then again, there’s this number: $110 million. That’s the amount of money that (Red) partners have generated for the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to provide AIDS treatment in Ghana, Rwanda, Swaziland and Lesotho. Bono and Bobby Shriver created Product (Red) a couple of years ago, and now you can buy (Red) phones from Motorola, (Red) iPods from

I’m growing tired of reading (and writing) about companies that are “going green,” except if the company is named Wal-Mart or GE or has an outsized influence on its industry. Far more interesting is the question of how entire industries and markets can be transformed so they become more sustainable. This is happening, albeit slowly, in several industries—fishing and forestry come to mind—but what’s caught my attention lately are some significant changes coming to the TV industry. I’m not talking about trends in TV news or programming (which I covered for many years) but about recyling old TVs. Last week, LG Electronics USA, the North American unit of the big Korean electronics firm, and Waste Management announced a nationwide recycling program that should make it

CEO Neville Isdell is an environmentalist, but making The Coca-Cola Co. sustainable is harder than it looks.