The enviro-buzz started a few years back when Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio were spotted driving Prius hybrids rather than Escalades or Ferraris. Then, when Al Gore’s film/PowerPoint extravaganza An Inconvenient Truth captured the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature this past February, green hipness went truly mainstream.

Now saving the planet is big business. We recently heard from an executive at Philips Lighting that the company was working its way out of the incandescent lightbulb business. Wal-Mart is also basking in the fluorescent glow, hoping to sell 100 million of the energy saving bulbs. The Home Depot is creating an eco-friendly endorsement label for a growing number of its products. I even saw an eco-themed window display at luxury retailer Hermès when walking through Knightsbridge this week. For those of us who have been environmentalists long enough to remember the first Earth Day, it seemed we might actually have reached a tipping point. Green is turning to gold and real change is in the air.

That, of course, attracts people who are looking to cash in on the trend rather than actually make a difference. I recently read about new green media enterprises that are hoping to capitalize on resurgent environmentalism. Included in this write-up was Sprig, a Web site for women who want to make their lives more Earth-friendly. But not that Earth-friendly.

“We’re targeting this to the 95% of people who want to be 5% green,” said Jeanie Pyun, Sprig’s editor in chief in a recent New York Times article. “Not the 5% of people who want to be 95% green.” Well, at least she’s honest about her cynicism.

5% green. Does one need a whole Web site for that? How else would I find out about the $160 CHANEL eye cream with a key ingredient that’s “organic and sustainably harvested on Madagascar, where CHANEL provides the local employees with education and health care.” It’s good to know we can look great while shopping our way to a sustainable future. (And I do applaud sustainable harvesting and health care for the locals.)

As a recovering marketer, I can see the temptation to get on the bandwagon quickly. And perhaps the demand is for eco-super light. But I also have seen a greater insistence on authenticity from consumers. I don’t think that the majority is looking for the equivalent of the fat-free food craze from a couple of years ago, when consumers gorged on jillions of calories of low-fat and fat-free food -- only to be surprised when they gained weight.

Maybe it is just unfounded optimism, but I get the feeling that most people want to be more than 5% green. I know we’re not all ready to embrace Sheryl Crow’s facetious “one sheet per trip” approach to toilet paper. But it seems that more and more people believe that the threat of global warming is real and they want to do something meaningful about it.

Businesses that want to benefit from the new environmentalism have to get it right. Enough companies are making what appear to be significant efforts -- Toyota, Honda, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Patagonia, Philips, and many others -- to raise the bar on what it means to be green. Those that bet on 5% might just be underestimating how real this market really is and missing the opportunity to finally live into the promise of “doing well while doing good.”

How are you trying to do well by doing good?

HARVARD BUSINESS ONLINE RECOMMENDS:
Competitive Environmental Strategies: When Does It Pay to Be Green? (CMR Article)
Harvard Business Review on Business & the Environment (Paperback)
Where's the Green in Green Business? (HBR Article)