Was disgusted by this story in the New York Times where clothing retailer giant H & M routinely rips holes in brand new clothing and throws them in the trash to be put in a landfill. I certainly understand they don’t want people coming into the store and returning them for store credit (with no receipt), but they could cut the tag out or put a “X” on the inside tag in red marker and donate to local shelters so kids and adults can get free clothes.

They must spend a lot of money on “sustainability” and may do a lot of great things but be careful that something like this can really set back your customers image of you. ACTIONS must mesh with the WORDS.

Read the excerpt below and the full article is at the link.

PJ Stafford
Green Irene Eco Consultant
New York

http://bit.ly/7zEVN5

It is winter. A third of the city is poor. And unworn clothing is being destroyed nightly. Each piece of clothing had holes punched through it by a machine.

They were found by Cynthia Magnus, who attends classes at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on Fifth Avenue and noticed the piles of discarded clothing as she walked to the subway station in Herald Square. She was aghast at the waste, and dragged some of the bags home to Brooklyn, hoping that someone would be willing to take on the job of patching the clothes and making them wearable.

During her walks down 35th Street, Ms. Magnus said, it is more common to find destroyed clothing in the H & M trash. On Dec. 7, during an early cold snap, she said, she saw about 20 bags filled with H & M clothing that had been cut up.

“Gloves with the fingers cut off,” Ms. Magnus said, reciting the inventory of ruined items. “Warm socks. Cute patent leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor. Men’s jackets, slashed across the body and the arms. The puffy fiber fill was coming out in big white cotton balls.” The jackets were tagged $59, $79 and $129.

H & M, which is based in Sweden, has an executive in charge of corporate responsibility who leads the company’s sustainability efforts. On its Web site, H&M reports that to save paper, it has shrunk its shipping labels.

“How about all the solid waste generated by throwing away usable garments and plastic hangers?” Ms. Magnus asked in a letter to the executive, Ingrid Schullstrom. She volunteered to help H & M connect with a charity or agency in New York that could put the unsold items to better use than simply tossing them in the trash. So far, she said, she has gotten no response.

UPDATE: After a flurry of publicity following the New York Times article, H & M has promised to stop the practice of destroying discarded clothing, but the damage to their image is done.

According to the EPA, the average office worker in the US uses 10,000 sheets of paper each year, which equates to about 2 pounds of paper and paperboard products every day from every worker.  That’s a total of 4 million tons of  paper used annually in America’s offices, and equates to the use of 465 trees per person over a lifetime.

Yet, of that amount, only about a third is recycled. Paper and cardboard still make up almost two-thirds of the waste found in landfills, and two-thirds of paper overall is composed from virgin wood material.

I can never understand why the 50% or 100% recycled printer paper costs MORE than the paper made from virgin pulp as, after all, you aren’t cutting down trees and processing them to get the raw material. But when you see numbers like this you have to think that a buck or two extra per ream for 100% recycled content makes sense… and that is why we only use that in our offices. Combine that with a paper reduction strategy and you are really on the right track to reducing that 465 trees per person number.

Recycling one ton of paper would:

• Save enough energy to power the average American home for six months.
• Save 7,000 gallons of water.
• Save 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space.
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one metric ton of carbon equivalent (MTCE).

Your local Eco-Consultant can work with your business on steps for paper reduction, and they can even help you in developing a sustainable paper procurement policy. Contact them today and start shedding some weight from your company’s paper usage.

I try to limit my use of disposables as much as possible. Reusing something is, after all, the greenest option. But it’s not always practical. For an office kitchen or corporate event, it may not make sense to have reusable plates that could be broken or lost.  At the same time, all those boxes of plastic plates won’t biodegrade any time soon. In fact, they’ll probably still be around for thousands of years. On top of it all, they’re made from oil, a nonrenewable resource that requires intensive processing. Some plastic plates can technically be recycled, but most recycling facilities will ultimately reject and trash plastics that are greasy or oily. That makes for some pretty dim prospects for recycling plates that have come in contact with any food. All and all, while it’s really convenient, disposable tableware is basically an eco-nightmare all around.

So, I was intrigued when I found some “eco-friendly” alternatives to disposable plastics. But at the same time, I was skeptical. Could something that’s disposable ever really be eco-friendly? After digging deep into this question, I think the answer is a clear yes. In fact, I feel so good about these products that Green Irene is now offering a line of disposable tableware.

So what is this magic material? In a word, sugar – the source of many wonderful things. Green Irene’s plates, bowls, and cups are made from bagasse, a byproduct created during sugarcane processing. Before it was used for tableware, bagasse was burned as waste. Turning this waste product into something useful is much greener than cutting down forests to make paper plates. These products can be torn up and put in your indoor or outdoor composter. They can also be sent to a municipal compost facility, or recycled along with your paper products. Green Irene’s bagasse items can handle hot and cold foods, and they’re even safe for microwave use.

For more information about Green Irene’s disposable tableware, check out Ask Green Irene entry #1204. If you are not a member (which you are when you get a  Green Home Makeover or Green Office Makeover), your local eco-consultant can help you select and order Green Irene’s recommended eco-friendly plates, bowls, cups and utensils.

Rosamaria Caballero
The Original Green Irene Eco-Consultant
rosamaria.caballero@greenirene.com

Let’s face it. Your business probably gets some form of junk mail every day. Vendors offering non-related products, banks offering loans or credit cards, and catalogs pouring in non-stop. Junk mail not only costs dearly in trees cut, but also in money wasted for no particular reason. And these days, it’s not just in the mail; junk mail is now also moved around electronically, wasting a lot of server bandwidth that requires energy to run.

Reducing unwanted benefit can have several benefits to your business. First, of course, you’ll be reducing your business’ footprint as paper use and delivery-related carbon emissions will be cut. Your employees will also save a great amount of time checking junk mail, which can instead be used to increase productivity and therefore earnings, in addition to reduce your waste bill. All of these things can help towards reducing the more than 100 million trees cut down each year, 4.5 billion gallons of water used, and billions of dollars wasted to create 4.5 million tons of junk mail in the U.S.

Here are five tips to reducing junk mail:

1. Sign up to a junk mail reduction service. There are a few services online that work for you to reduce your junk mail. They provide easy steps for you to opt out of junk mail, phonebooks, and even telemarketing. Some will even go as far as to do it all for you for a fee. Check out the EcoLogical Mail Coalition (free), EcoCycle (free), and 41Pounds (not free).

2. Omit your address online. Try to online include names, phone numbers, and e-mails on business cards and websites, but not your office address. When signing up for services, deals, and promotions, don’t include your address. If you need to include your address, put in a random one or just put an X.

3. Opt Out of Catalogs. There is a free service called Catalog Choice that allows you to opt-out of many catalogs listed online. They also help you indicate how junk catalogs can reach you, making it almost impossible for them to send you anything. Check it out to learn more.

4. Opt Out of Phonebooks. Similar to the National No-Call Registry, there is a service called YellowPagesGoesGreen that allows you to opt out of local Yellow and White pages so you don’t receive unnecessary phonebooks.

5. Unsubscribe from Junk E-mail. You may have a spam filter in use to get rid of junk e-mail, but all this does is put junk e-mail in a different place. Spam filters don’t reduce server  usage, and therefore don’t do anything about reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from servers. To help stop even junk e-mail, periodically check your spam folder and unsubscribe from unwanted e-mails.

Paper use in offices is a big consumer of wood in the United States. Representing roughly 50% of the waste bill from the average business, paper and paperboard waste account for up to 40% of landfill solid waste. U.S. offices print about 12.1 trillion sheets of paper annually, contributing about 9% of the manufacturing sector’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Similarly, printing requires a lot of petroleum-derived ink, energy, and plastic materials like cartridges. These add another chunk to the huge green toll businesses have from printing alone. Clearly, reducing paper use can go a long way in helping businesses save money and go green at the same time.

Here are five tips that can help businesses reduce paper waste:

1. Use Eco-Font. The prints your business makes for ‘daily use’ not only use paper, but also ink. Your ink cartridges could last longer if your fonts required less ink to print. The Ecofont is a new font that allows you to do just that. The font has small circles removed from it, which are visible when the text size is extremely large but not when used at the normal size 12 or size 10. Click here to learn more.

2. Use Double-Sided Printing. Purchasing a double-sided printer will not only cut paper use in half, but it will also save you money. The initial investment is typically paid within a reasonable timeframe, and any savings after that are above your costs.

3. Edit, Read, and Write Online. Ask your employees to get used to doing most things requiring text online. They can edit documents online; read newspapers and magazines online; and send messages to others online. Switch your current subscriptions to online versions and begin cutting down on paper waste.

4. Promote Reuse. You don’t have to necessary recycle used paper right away. If you print on just one side, use the other side as scrap paper. You can also use used paper for many other purposes. Click here to learn about ways to use used paper.

5. Recycle! Make sure you not only recycle paper that you can’t reuse, but also cartridges! Most manufacturers today take back used cartridges. Just take it to a local retail store and hand it in there. Finally, make sure your business is recycling paper. Place recycling bins around marked with flyers for employees.

What is green air filter and how does your air filter choice impact your building and the environment? Simply put, a green air filter provides a high level of filtration efficiency for improved air quality while providing low airflow resistance to minimize energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Green air filters also provide long life for fewer changeouts and use minimal components to reduce source and waste streams. Overall, green air filters can be effective in reducing building operating expenses as well as protecting the environment.

Indoor Air Quality

Air filters are no longer simply used to protect HVAC equipment. Effective air filtration provides the primary defense for building occupants against pollutants in a building. Now more than ever, air filters play a critical role in the indoor air quality of the building itself. Better indoor air quality can reduce absenteeism and has been shown to improve employee productivity.

Energy Efficiency

HVAC systems consume approximately 40% of the energy used in commercial buildings. Air filters play a significant role in the energy used to operate the HVAC system. The higher the filter’s resistance to air passing through it, the more energy is consumed to operate the HVAC system’s motor.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The resistance of an air filter is directly related to the amount of energy consumed by an HVAC system. Greenhouse gas emissions are directly related to energy consumption, and more specifically, electric power generation. Simply put, minimizing energy consumption reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

Source and Waste Stream Reduction

Since some filters are disposable products, they have a significant impact on the waste stream of a builiding. By extending the life of a filter, or by using filters with fewer or lighter weight components, both the source and waste streams of a building can be reduced. Permanent HVAC filters can be washed and reused, reducing items sent to the landfil. Green Irene sells MERV 13 HVAC air filters for homes and small businesses that improve indoor air quality, as well as permanent air filters that can be washed and reused.

In the United States, the average person uses 50 pounds of tissue paper per year, using up about seven trees worth of paper. Paper represents over one-third of all municipal waste and roughly 9% of greenhouse gas emissions in the country. With increasing concerns for the destruction of forests, it has become more important to reduce paper waste.

You will typically find paper towels in the bathroom or the kitchen, These paper towels gobble up not only a lot of carbon, but also a lot of waste. In your office’s bathroom, in particular, a lot of paper is probably being wasted as people choose to take a new sheet to dry hands. However, there is another option that saves both energy and paper.

The XLERATOR, a fast hand dryer, not only dries hands quickly, it also will result in more than a 95% savings vs. paper towel costs. In addition to paper towels, the following costs are also eliminated: ordering, storing, replenishing, collecting, and disposing of bacteria-laden paper towel waste.

If you want reusable paper towels, check out Green Irene’s Twist Sponge Cloth at ShopGreenIrene.

Our offices are some of the biggest producers of waste. While there’s a lot that can be done with waste after it leaves our offices, there’s a lot that can be done in the workplace to prevent waste in the first place. Waste is pretty much everything that we no longer want to use and is a result of something we used. It includes used paper, plastics, food, metals, cardboard, electronics, wood, packaging, water, and many other items we use in our offices. When you add it up, it translates to more than 250 million tons of solid waste collected in municipalities, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest assessment.

Everybody knows that recycling is critical to reducing waste, but what can you do to reduce waste generated at work in the first place? Here are five simple things you can do right away to have a big impact on waste production:

1) Avoid and Reuse Paper Products. Paper products are the biggest contributor to municipal solid waste, accounting for some 30% of all municipal solid waste when compost is excluded. To reduce paper waste: pay all your bills online, read your news online, and avoid having to print anything you can read online; reuse paper for packaging or as scrap paper instead of recycling it right away; opt-out of junk mail using MailStopper; and use reusable towels instead of disposable paper towels.

2) Compost. Believe it or not, food and yard trimmings are some of the biggest contributors to individuals’ ecological footprints (representing some 25% of all municipal solid waste). Instead of sending food to the landfill, why not put it to use by compost it? Food waste in offices can be regularly collected and taken to a composting operation. Green Irene offers two composters for outdoor and indoor application at ShopGreenIrene, so be sure to check them out. You can also donate food to local organizations that provide food to the homeless and very poor through food banks.

3) Conserve Water. As you may know, water is going to be one of the most precious resources this century as its supplies dwindle. The wasteful use of water is actually a big contributor to our ecological footprint, especially in water-stressed areas like the Southwestern U.S. As a result, one of the best things you can do is to help conserve water by avoiding bottled water; cutting shower time to five minutes; changing your showerheads and installing aerators (see ShopGreenIrene for these); and conserving energy (read here to learn why).

4) Stick to a List. When going shopping for office supplies, make a list of items you actually need. Don’t be tempted to buy items that later on you won’t really use. A list not only allows you to purchase items you really need, but it will also save you money and space at work.

5) Recycle Electronics. Typically, offices tend to recycle the traditional items, such as paper, cardboard, glass, and plastic containers. Not too many think about electronics, and as a result a huge amount ends up in our landfills or shipped overseas. The problem of electronic waste, or e-waste, is that it may contain very toxic substances that can harm human health. As a result, make it a priority to reduce electronic waste by first donating it for reuse (you can do this with cellphones and many other electronic items) and then ensuring that the rest is recycled (many manufacturers will take electronics back for recycling or reuse).

Reducing your office’s waste is an important step to going green and reducing your footprint. You can go further by learning about what else you can do to reduce waste and your general ecological footprint through a local Eco-Consultant.

After starting my own eco-consultant business this past year, my eyes opened up at the amount of waste Americans go through each year. I wanted to see how much paper my company used. After doing a little research, I was amazed at the amount of office paper we consumed last year. We used approximately 9,700 reams of 8 ½ x 11 paper last year. That’s equivalent to $31,008.29. That’s a lot of paper. Below are some astonishing facts about office waste paper.

- If you were to eliminate office paper from your waste stream, you could cut your waste bill by 50% or more.

- For every ton of recycled paper it can save up to 17 trees.

- The paper industry ranks 4^th in contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, and contribute 9% of the manufacturing sector’s carbon emissions.

- If the U.S could cut office paper use by just 10% it would prevent the emission of 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases (the equivalent of taking 280,000 cars off the road).

- One year’s worth of the New York Times newspaper weighs 520 pounds. To print a Sunday edition of the NYT it takes 75,000 trees.

- With all the office paper we waste every year we could build a 12-foot high wall of paper from New York to California.

- The average American attorney uses 1 ton of paper every year.

- Recycling 1 ton of paper saves 682.5 gallons of oil (think about that next time you’re standing at the pump).

- American consumers receive 41 pounds of junk mail per year.

- US offices create 12.1 trillion sheets of paper per year.

- 40% of the solid mass in landfills is paper and paperboard waste.

- More than 100 million trees are destroyed each year to produce junk mail.

- Paper usage is rising by around 20% every year, with the average office worker using approximately 50 sheets of paper every day in the typical office.

Your mind is probably swirling with the amount of info I just provided, but ask yourself one simple question: What can I do today to reduce the amount of paper I use at home and at the office?

Luckily, Green Irene is here to help you figure out simple steps that you can take to help your office significantly reduce paper use. You can learn more by signing up for an Ask Green Irene membership. By becoming a member, you’ll have access to a wealth of green knowledge, including specific things you can do to substantially reduce paper waste. So, what are you waiting for? Ask Green Irene today!

Jim Armbrust, Green Irene Eco-Consultant in Harrisburg, PA

jim.camphill@greenirene.com

717-215-4030

www.GreenIrene.com/1034