It requires a little bit more get-up-and-go and time but it’s worth it to give eco-friendly or social corporate gifts instead of the regular run-of-the-mill-drain-the-environment corporate gifts that are the common gift fodder for numerous companies.

When you’re rewarding diligent employees and respected customers with environmentally friendly or socially friendly corporate gifts, you are also promoting a green lifestyle that indicates your company cares about our earth and the less advantaged people so more will naturally treasure the gift.

Of course the best type of eco gift is one where you do not in fact give anything! There are numerous such gift options now available such as Buy1GIVE1, Kiva and Change The Present.

When you use eco-friendly corporate gifts it’s always important to consider your recipient. You’ll want to choose a gift that represents the gratitude you feel. Whether its for saying thank you for remaining in the office late to meet tight deadlines or running that extra mile to close a sales deal, your team members committed their valuable time to the improve your company. So the extra effort involved to create a special eco-gift or social gift is fitting considering the reason why you want to give the gift in the first place.

Everyone likes diamonds and nobody looks bad in diamonds, do they? It is not actually within the scope of this piece to recommend whether diamonds are a good investment or not, but their perceived value is enormous. Instead, I would like to look at where the optimum place to buy a diamond is, since it is more importantant that you buy your diamond from a respectable merchant with a warranty than that you believe you got a decent trade on eBay by means of buying somone’s granny’s engagement ring, which may not be genuine.

Therefore, before you begin browsing for diamonds, think about dealing with a bonded jeweller. Bonded jewellers sell bonded diamonds and there are not many bonded jewellers in the world. In deed, of the jewellers in the world, only approximately 5% of them are bonded.

Buying a bonded diamond will cost more than buying a non-bonded diamond, but when you consider what you get with the bonded alternative, you will see that it is well worth the additional expenditure.

First, bonded diamonds have a buy-back policy for the life of the diamond. No matter how long you keep the diamond, you can take it back to the bonded jeweller and sell it back to him or her, for a 100% refund.

The Green Book, by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen, give the issues of our environment top drawer treatment. Looking at the way Americans use water and energy, and what we do with our waste, they offer useful and practical tips.

Star contributors, such as Robert Redford, Ellen DeGeneres, Jennifer Aniston, Faith Hill and Dale Earnhardt Jr. share their helpful hints for being a good partner to our world. The authors discuss 12 areas, including our home, work, and school, and show ways to make better decisions in keeping them green. The book keys on how little changes can add up to huge savings on our environment by using descriptions versus analytical numbers.

A few simple suggestions in The Green Book are:

* Say No to ATM paper receipts. If we all in the U.S.A. wrote the amount in our checkbook instead of requesting a receipt, the paper saved would be more than 2 billion ft. long.

* Use voicemail on your home phone. If you did this and disconnected your answering machine, in the USA alone there would be a savings of nearly 2 billion kilowatt hours.