TESS
The Environmental Solutions Store
A multi-stakeholder co-operative supporting small, sustainable businesses. Home of Atlanta Green Market—a marketplace featuring local, sustainable goods and services.
Advancing market-based solutions to environmental problems.
The Environmental Solutions Store (TESS) aspires to make buying “green” easy and convenient by curating local, sustainable alternatives to polluting goods and services.
We do this by establishing and communicating clear, science-based standards for sustainable businesses that help you make informed purchasing decisions.
Our methodology and operating values are inherited from long-time ecology and business writer, John Thompson.
John wrote the book on “environmental enterprise” in 1992 with The Environmental Entrepreneur: Where to find the profit in saving the Earth (Longstreet Press).
He has written for numerous Atlanta-based companies, including IBM, Coca-Cola USA, Southern Company, Georgia Power Co., AFLAC, Equifax and Randstad North America, Parents magazine, Georgia Trend, Atlanta Magazine, Florida Trend, Living Green Online Magazine and others.
In 2005, John was selected a CDC Knight Journalism Fellow and spent three months at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) exploring connections between public health and environmental decline.
Two new books which compliment his long career covering environment and business topics are nearing completion: Escape Plan: The one way out of ecological destruction and The Horizon Children: Lessons for the Last Environmental Saviors.
In 2019, Tyler Thompson (John’s eldest son) was inspired to bring his father’s ideas to life. That is, to find a way to coordinate collective consumer action to advance market-based solutions to environmental problems.
Tyler is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Albania 2013-15) and cross-continental cyclist (7,000 miles from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Key West, Florida). He has worked in government, for-profit and civil society sectors, including a corporate stint at Delta Air Lines.
Tyler and John’s work to ignite a green-consumer revolution begins in Tyler’s hometown with Atlanta Green Market events and a corresponding online marketplace for local, sustainable goods called The Environmental Solutions Store (TESS).
We believe that consumer-driven, market-based environmental problem-solving is the only practical strategy for achieving rapid deceleration of anthropogenic environmental decline.
The taproot of the environmental problem tree is consumer spending on polluting technologies, products, services, processes and practices (TPSPP).
Consumer advocacy that redirects spending towards non-polluting / low-polluting (NPLP) alternatives is all that’s needed to kickstart the green-economy, ignited by competition for market share, fueled by innovation, and sped-up by economies of scale.
We are doing the work behind the scenes to transform your purchasing decisions into daily actions that help to advance market-based solutions to environmental problems in one of seven key areas.
Our eco-labeling methodology is used as a quick and easy visual reference to specify what makes our curated products and services “green”.
Promoting re-greening and/or avoiding de-greening
Utilizing clean energy sources & transportation fuels and/or avoiding polluting energy sources & transportation fuels
Using natural chemicals and/or avoiding harmful chemicals
Restoring freshwater resources and/or avoiding freshwater loss
Generating or restoring topsoil and/or avoiding topsoil destruction
Repurposing waste streams and/or avoiding waste
Promoting and/or providing environmental education