Companies selling everything from organic milk to recycled-glass countertops to furniture made of reclaimed wood each have their own "why it costs more" story to tell. Taylor Maid Farm's certified organic coffees and teas cost more in the raw, so they have to cost more on the shelf; the company buys tea from small organic farms at $1.95 a pound, whereas conventional tea is available from big suppliers at 35 cents a pound. Zwanette Design, a sustainable furniture company in San Francisco, pays $179 per four-by-eight-foot sheet of fast-to-regrow bamboo, while a sheet of maple costs only $120. Stonyfield Farm - whose president and CEO, Gary Hirshberg, has been a poster boy for the organic movement - explains in its publications that it's not just the higher per-hundredweight cost for unprocessed organic milk that makes its yogurts, cheeses, and other dairy products more expensive. It's transportation too. "We are able to pick up conventionally produced milk from neighboring farms, often just a few miles down the road from one another," reads the company brochure A Practical Guide to Understanding Organic. "Our organic dairy farmers may be as much as 50 miles from one another, so our organic-milk transportation costs are double that of the conventional." Earth Weave Carpet Mills, which makes environmentally friendly, pure-wool carpet, spent big bucks developing a non-urea-formaldehyde adhesive for its carpet backing, so its cost of doing business is higher than that of others in the carpet industry that are still using the readily available urea-formaldehyde adhesive.

"When I look at the companies in our network, they're charging a premium if ingredients or the cost of doing business is more," says Deborah Nelson, executive director of the Social Venture Network, a coalition of socially and environmentally conscious companies. "If they can do their business at a better price, that's a competitive advantage."