via Sustainable Business Forum

"For Jeffrey Hollender, the longtime chief executive of Seventh Generation, business has always been about more than selling laundry detergent and paper towels...

"he’s looking at entrepreneurial opportunities, He referred me to this very interesting article in The Nation about the Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland, a network of worker-owned “green” cooperatives, including a industrial laundry and a solar-power installation company, that are supported by the procurement power of public  institutions.. The Cleveland cooperative experiment is inspired by the Mondragon cooperative in the Basque region of Spain, which employs more than 100,000 people.

There’s talk, he says, about organizing networks of cooperatives in other places, including the South Bronx.

“How do you create a business enterprise that is in the business of social and political change?” he asks.

Worker-owned businesses could be one way. In Cleveland, the flagship venture is the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, which serves the expanding health care industry and is said to be “thoroughly green in all its operations.”