For some entrepreneurs: 'Green is (clearly) the new black', as they use the challenge of 'going green' for business oppportunity. Here, Sam Parker - a recently graduated journalist - has compiled a list of Female Eco-Internet Heroes who are joining this new wave of Eco-Entrepreneurs

Stephanie and Sharon Banfield - sisters and founders of Pink Robin

“We aim to offer you the highest possible quality from companies striving to bring about changes in the way women care for the their bodies – and the environment”

According to Pink Robin, a website set up by sisters Stephanie and Sharon Banfield to promote high quality, reusable sanitary products, the UK alone throws away over one and a half billion tampons and sanitary pads each and every year. Most of these, they say, will be sent to landfill sites or to our oceans via sewage treatment plants, potentially damaging marine life and eventually washing up on beaches.

Their solution has been to set up pink robin, which markets ecologically friendly alternatives to Tampax and strives to provide women with a resource of up-to-date information on women’s health and gynaecology.

It may seem a large leap of faith to many women, but the sisters are convinced that a move to reusable pads can and will alter the menstrual cycle from a negative experience to a positive one – and say many initially sceptical customers have written to them to enthusiastically agree.

The site stocks and advocates Natracare products and focuses on providing women with reliable health advice, meaning that education and welfare is core to Stephanie and Sharon’s part in the ecological internet revolution.

Deirdre Bounds – founder of Parties Around The World

“We now have a way to ask our friends and families to give a gift that is good for our planet's future and for our children's future too.”

For anyone with a young child, the story of how the idea behind Parties Around The World came to light will paint a familiar picture. After hosting a successful birthday party for her son, an exhausted Deirdre Bounds looked down over a gigantic pile of gifts bought by the parents of each of the guests and felt frustrated. Convention had squeezed a present out of everyone, even though no child could find the time to appreciate so many things.

And so Deirdre began to think of an alternative to that oft-repeated, but always (kindly) ignored phrase: ‘honestly - please no gifts’, a way that would enable parents to give, whilst teaching their children about the world they live in, and all the while helping to raise money for charity projects.

Using the Parties Around The World website, parents can set up a birthday party for their children that adopts an ethical cause as a theme: from building homes for endangered frogs to buying footballs for the Homeless World Cup. Best of all, instead of buying gifts the birthday boy or girl doesn’t need or want, parents can contribute a small piece of project which the children can then see come together. The web-based alternative means that a day of excessive indulgence can be replaced on our children’s calendar by a day of education and positive change.

Sheena Cooper – founder of the Secret Seed Society

“We engage children, and through them their families and communities, in a move towards fresh, local, organic food that they have grown themselves whether they have an urban balcony or a rural allotment.”

Whilst still a small spot on the World Wide Web, Seed City is growing. Living there are a group of fantasy characters who are plotting to inspire children across the UK to discover the fun involved in growing and eating their own food.

Creator and Founder Sheena Cooper has just lead her team of a teacher, an anthropologist, a film maker and a sustainability strategist in producing their first online adventure pack for children. As ‘Seed Agents’ – children can receive fun missions via email as well as a pack including an illustrated storybook, seeds with growing instructions and a recipe for what to do with the vegetables once they’ve grown.

By engaging children at an early age in the process of growing and caring for crops, Sheena believes she and her team can make a positive difference to our communities – particularly in a recession when the idea of ‘growing your own’ feels pertinent once again.

So far the site has produced the first in a planned series of educational stories from Seed City – a beautifully illustrated book by Chrissie Cress called ‘No Hens In The Pen’. It is clear to see that social media marketing through the likes of Facebook and Twitter, will only give the site new allies, and partnerships with other online communities who have gardening, food and the environment at heart.

Tessa Hill – founder of Kids For Saving Earth

“I knew the best way to educate and inspire children was through interested teachers and parents. Now as a result of KSE, there are hundreds of thousands of kids and grown-ups all over the planet working to protect the Earth"

Tessa Hill, along with her husband William, were inspired not by their son's death to cancer at the age of eleven, but by his life. Clinton Hill used his short years to start a club for kids dedicated to performing peaceful Earth-saving actions, and since 1989, his Mother has worked hard to create Kids for Saving Earth (KSE) in his honour.

Since then KSE children have given speeches at the UN, influenced environmental legislation, greened their schools and organised hundreds of grass roots green activities, and now they have a website that matches their achievements. Logging on to www.kidsforsavingearth.org is a delight: beautifully sketched and presented, it also operates effectively as a way of opening up access to educational posters, guidebooks, CDs and a bi-monthly email that provide teachers and parents with E-Pal challenges and programmes – all for free.

While world governments meet to hum and har over their response to the clamouring nightmare of climate change, Tessa and KFE are providing direct, effective channels of education on the environment to those whose attitudes and actions matter most: tomorrow’s leaders, sat in living rooms and classrooms across the globe. All from the internet.

Lianne Ludlow – founder of Fashion-Conscience

“We decided to create a one-stop, eco-fashion e-tail boutique”

Lianne Ludlow was once Marie Claire's fashion and celebrity editor until a sleepless break in Southern India worrying about climate change, coupled with a passion for ethical clothes, lead her to set up Fashion-Conscience, an online boutique that seeks to shake off the hemp-bags and sackcloth image of ethical fashion once and for all.

Thus the store, in addition to profiling the world's finest ethical fashion designers, also follows ethical fashion trends and news from around the world.

The site is doing for ethical fashion shopping what Net-A-Porter did for designer fashion shopping on the web. It's bringing new ethical designers to the fore, presenting items, looks and trends against a high fashion backdrop, and generally making it easier for women to shop for eco fashion- best of all online. Along with Penny Dowling, founder of Equa Clothing and Sindhu Venkatarayananan, founder of Devidoll, Lianne is blazing a trail for a new way of kitting out your wardrobe from the comfort of your home.

Ariane Rocher – Online ethical jewellery pioneer

“I believe that jewels are more than just precious objects: they have a life of their own and each one tells a story. The internet is a tool to avoid compromise.”

The true price of jewellery is an often uncomfortable reality, something that we have slowly begun to face up to in recent years with Hollywood movies such as Leonardo Di Caprio’s ‘Blood Diamonds’ and hit songs from rap stars like Kayne West exposing the brutality behind the precious stones industry. Which is why contemporary designer Ariane Rocher and her sparse, beautifully-designed website represents such a timely and refreshing online option.

Educated as a child by celebrated jeweller Boucheron, Ariane’s childhood passion and talent for jewellery design blossomed into a jewellery business with a difference: it uses the internet to avoid having to make the kind of ethical compromises it would take to gain a presence on the high street, and to showcase pieces that are as responsible as they are beautiful.

Ariane’s approach to jewellery design is one that chimes with her view of how the materials that make them should be sourced. Ariane believes each piece is an individual with a life and story of its own - just like the men and women across the developing world whose job it is to source them. Each handmade piece is therefore comprised of conflict-free metals and stones, making Ariane a true ethical internet pioneer in an industry where the price of beauty is often deadly.

Sarah Woodhead, founder of ethical internet media business Delightful Media, publisher of Green my style and QueensOfVintage

"We create glossy style magazines on the web for mainstream shoppers who love style but want to be greener. There simply wasn't anything out there for these women, and there are lots of them."

From its launch in September 2008, daily eco glossy Greenmystyle, the first outing from Sarah Woodhead's Delightful Media stable, has been nicknamed the green Grazia, a huge and fitting compliment. With 15 years' experience as an award-winning digital media creative director, editor and journalist behind her, Sarah's goal was to transform ethical press in the UK by giving it a huge injection of glamour, social networking and entertainment.

The idea, she says, is to use the internet to take the most desirable and stylish ethical and vintage fashion, beauty, interiors and lifestyle products to a mainstream audience, in a glossy magazine format they are already familiar with, rather than try to drag a stylish mainstream audience over to a deep green experience as others were doing.

Sister site QueensOfVintage, a magazine and a global social network, has caused huge waves recently with the launch of the world's first flashmob. Celebrating the timeless style of Chanel, in a bid to persuade women to be "green by accident" by treasuring long-lasting vintage pieces rather than disposable fashion, and to encourage the use of the train over the plane, QoV hosted a Chanel flashmob at the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras International this week. Groundbreaking, and one to watch. Details of the flashmob were circulated in true flashmob style, via the internet.

With so many women joining this wave of online eco-business, it will be interesting to see what new ideas this most recent chapter in the world of web 2.0 will bring.