Before explaining what this “top 50 worldwide” is all about, we’ll fill you in on what we’ve been doing lately.

The core of the faircompanies team (that is to say Kirsten Dirksen, Nicolás Boullosa and Inés Boullosa, the latter still too small to decide on her own if she follows her parents or does something more important) have spent several weeks preparing new material.

We have taken advantage of the months of June, July and part of August to interview people in different places in the U.S. and Canada, that we will be putting online little by little in:

• Videos, with the documentary tone that Kirsten Dirksen gives them (at times we call them micro documentaries), about businesses we’ve visited and the people with whom we’ve conversed. On some occasions, we ourselves have gotten in front of the camera (Nico in a hydrogen car and on an electric moped and Kirsten trying on a redesigned sweater). We remind you that we publish all our videos in the multimedia section of faircompanies.
• Reports and articles on diverse topics: fair trade businesses, tech schools that race solar cars, research centers working on a hydrogen future, a garage that will make anything- car, scooter, bike- electric, a coffee company roasting with the sun, a research center/school developing motorless-vehicles, clothes made from old pantyhose, sweaters and dryer sheets, trendy tapwater, stores with eco-friendly clothing and cleaning products, a cleantech conference, a celebrity chef who uses everything, a watchdog group on how to lower your pesticide intake, beer brewed with solar energy and dozens of other stories. The articles will be appearing in the sections news, fair trade and invest.

We have received the help of old friends, new friends and relatives in places that we have passed through, that have offered advice and very comfortable temporary workspace to continue updating faircompanies practically daily.

Besides Barcelona, we have been in Boston and other locations in Massachusetts, in various places in California, in Oregon, Washington (Seattle was our headquarters for July) and Vancouver (Canadian British Columbia).

We have tried to travel in the least contaminating way possible, which is to say: we used the least contaminating car available (a borrowed Prius), squeezing in 5 people and a carseat for the trip from Seattle to Northern California.

New to the site

Meanwhile, we are preparing some new technical functions for the site that will be arriving in the coming weeks.

All the improvements are focused on making faircompanies a faster, more useful and easier-to-use service for all of you.

Good press: Top 50 Environment Sites

We can assure you that the faircompanies team is, right now, more conscientious than when the project was just an idea two years ago. The first version of faircompanies was launched in April of 2007, and since then we have preferred to publish content at an easy pace, to put the quality and originality of the content above all else.

We can tell you that we love our work and hope you do too.

We thought that it would be interesting to share with you the good press that faircompanies has received since the end of April 2007. As many of you know, it is difficult to get good independent reviews (without paying anyone nor spending money on publicity).

• faircompanies was ranked among the top 50 environmental sites in the world, according to the ranking of the World Environmental Organization (Best Environmental Web Sites). faircompanies is number 47 in the list headed by Scorecard, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Environmental News Network y Environmental Defense Fund. On the same list, and not far from faircompanies, you find services like that of the environment of the BBC… we appreciate the mention.
• To access the ranking of the 100 Top Environment Sites (faircompanies is number 47): http://www.world.org/weo/environment.

How serious is this classification? Well, to us it is comforting that the board of directors of the World Environmental Organization, the group that creates the ranking, has members like Michael Dennis (a director with The Nature Conservancy), Andrew Keeler (a White House advisor with the Clinton administration), and Louis Salguero, from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

We have received other mentions in communications media, websites and blogs, the well-recognized as well as the homegrown, though all very well-done. We are especially pleased to be cited as an independent, quality information source in large scale media (like lime.com), as well as on websites of respected organizations and businesses:

• Worldwatch Institute highlights one of our videos with one of their studies.
• The Going Organic Network of Alberta mentions us as a source on their site (here and here).
• The shop Body Time, of San Francisco/Berkeley, includes one of our videos on its corporate page. Body Time is the original Body Shop. Basically, Anita Roddick bought the rights to the name (The Body Shop) and converted the idea into a multimillion dollar business, which was later bought by L’Óréal.
• In Citizenshift, it appears they appreciate faircompanies as a trusted source of information about sustainability and the environment.
• Buffalo Exchange mentions us on their press page.
• In the Foro de Reputación Corporativa (Forum of Corporate Reputation), they include us in their links.
• The chef Tony Maws (named one of the top in the U.S.) likes our video about the Craigie Street Bistro.
• Horturbà mentions us on their website.
• PublicGrade.org comments on our article “The shades of green investing”.

There are others, but we think this is more than sufficient. For the faircompanies team, it is a source of pride to continue working independently.

The faircompanies community seems off to a good start, despite only a few months of life (we launched the first version of www.faircompanies.com last April the 25th, 2007), and we are very pleased by that.