A new ethic?

A new ecological guide will promote eco-friendly providers of goods and services in Mexico from September. The directory, similar to the traditional yellow pages of telephone books, includes 22 categories, including food, health and ecotourism.

"We realized that there was a lot to offer. If we wanted those businesses to do well, we had to connect them to the demand for sustainability," Dania Martnez-Parente, coordinator of the non-governmental New Ventures project Pginas Verdes (Green Pages), told the Latin American website Tierramrica.

The project, that began in 1994 as a result of an alliance between the World Resources Institute and the Mexican Fund for the Conservation of Nature, received information about 1,720 products from 1,200 companies, many of which were small and medium-sized businesses. The companies that offer basic information about their products or services appear in the guide free of charge, but those that want to include a larger advertisement or photograph pay a fee.