Next time you have to provide drinks at a corporate event, offer your clients refreshments, or find something hydrating on a hot day, consider this: tap water provides a safe, cost-effective and environmentally-friendly alternative to bottled water. Manufacturers have worked to convince customers that paying a premium for a disposable, plastic container full of water is worth the expense. Yet a growing body of research holds that bottled water might not be worth the hype—and that your business is better off without it.

Disposable water bottles are fast becoming a serious environmental hazard. In the United States alone, 30 billion water bottles are sent to landfills every year, and every bottle takes a shocking 1,000 years to decompose. That adds up to a lot of trash. Simply producing the plastic bottles themselves generates waste: it takes 3 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water, the Sierra Club reports, and a United Nations study concludes that producing bottled water for the U.S. market requires 17 million barrels of oil per year.

Bottled water generates much more waste than tap water, and generates little heath benefit in return. In fact, because of the structure of federal regulation, most tap water might actually provide a safer and cleaner alternative. Regulation of bottled water is patchy at best. Between 60-70% of the bottled water sold in the United States is exempt from all FDA regulation, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) reported in a four-year study. The same report revealed that about one fourth of bottled water is actually just bottled tap water.

Switching to tap water makes sense, both for the sake of the planet and the sake of your account book. In New York City, for example, an individual’s consumption of eight glasses of tap water per day for a year costs only 49 cents. Eight glasses of bottled water per day for a year, in contrast, costs a whopping $14,000.

Whether your business is a restaurant, a tech startup or a hair salon, offering employees and clients tap water rather than bottled water can add up to big savings over time. Providing pitchers of water in elegant glasses or reusable mugs can even serve as a marketing tool, and signal your company’s commitment to environmental responsibility. If you’re worried about the purity of tap water in your area, inexpensive water filtration systems provide a safe and easy alternative to water coolers. Encourage your employees to use reusable mugs and bottles, and if not, to recycle any bottled of water they purchase. As part of a Green Business Makeover, your local Green Irene Eco-Consultant can introduce you to many other water purity and waste reduction ideas, as well as to Green Irene’s full line of business products, including a premium 10-stage countertop water filter, reusable water bottles, modular recycling receptacles, and much more.

Sustainably yours,

Green Irene

The City of Seattle is leading the way to a more sustainable future, making history by becoming the first municipality to implement a ban on one time use food packaging.  The ban affects the entire food service industry in Seattle—restaurants, coffee shops, supermarkets, delis, and even private cafeterias. Starting on July 1^st 2010, they must provide customers with packaging that is either compostable or recyclable. That means no more disposable paper napkins, coffee stirrers, clamshells, cups, or lids.  This is a monumental step on the path toward a zero waste future.

In addition, food service facilities must also provide their customers with the proper recycling and compost receptacles, and they are required to manage this waste properly. Seattle has partnered with Cedar Grove Composting to provide food service facilities with guidelines and an outlet for the gigantic outflow of compost. Cedar Grove processes the used organic material within a few months, and then they sell it back to consumers to use as a natural fertilizer. Already about half of the city’s 1700 restaurants have signed up with Cedar Grove to manage their compost collections.

There is still a temporary exemption on utensils, straws, and food wrapping—these items can be made from conventional plastic or foil, for the time being. By next July, they too will be included under the ban, which takes effect in phases. The significance of this is that it gives businesses time to adjust to the new rules, under which they can’t offer single use disposable products.

Businesses and restaurants in other cities might want to take notice, too. The Seattle Ban may be an indication of municipal action soon to come from other progressive cities, such as New York, San Francisco, or Washington D.C. As the country grows, more waste is produced, putting a greater strain on the landfills that large cities export tons of trash to each day. Waste reduction will become an ever more attractive option to solve this impending issue. On top of this, increasingly environmentally conscious consumers will look to businesses to be responsible. This is a trend that won’t ease up until it becomes more economical to dump garbage onto the Moon.

Some businesses might see this trend as a burden, but others might see it as an opportunity to appeal to a new market of consumers. By reducing waste passed onto customers and helping them manage this waste in a sustainable manner, they can attract new customers and hold onto others. Green Irene now provides top of the line waste receptacles, which are stylish and customizable to fit any waste reduction strategy, such as composting or recycling or both! We also have a line of compostable tableware made from bagasse, a derivative of sugar cane. Small to medium-sized businesses in need of an environmentally friendly image can also look to Green Irene to be their outsourced chief sustainability officer.        During a Green Business Makeover with Green Business Bureau certification, businesses can count on our local eco-consultants to help them anticipate new rules and trends by taking the initiative to be more sustainable.

Waste reduction can make a difference in your company’s bottom line and its environmental impact, but for California, commercial recycling is also becoming a legal requirement.

Most states already have laws in place governing the proper disposal of commercial hazardous waste like old electronics and fluorescent lighting. California is now taking the requirement one step further with AB32, a bill which would institute mandatory commercial recycling state-wide.

Under the rules currently being finalized, all businesses would be required to recycle all materials collected in their locality (or demonstrate that they do not produce waste with recyclable content). Each town or municipality would be responsible for working out the program’s details through local ordinances, and would also have responsibility for enforcement with fines for non-compliant businesses.

The program will be rolled out in California over the next two years, coming into full effect in July 2012.

So what are the implications for your business now? For those in California, get a head start by coming into compliance before the new regulations take effect. Your local Eco-Consultant can be a great resource in helping you to design and implement a company-wide recycling initiative as part of a Green Business Makeover. Your Eco-Consultant can also introduce you to Green Irene’s full line of waste reduction and recycling products, including modular recycling receptacles that can be customized to fit the needs of your business, and a durable “smiley” receptacle that will encourage employees and customers alike to recycle.

For businesses in other states, be certain that you understand the environmental regulations for your area. Making sure that you are in compliance with local regulations is important for avoiding fines or liability, and it also confirms your good stewardship of the local environment and your community’s health.

Using paper wisely is the easiest way for any business to cut back on its environmental burden. It’s also a great strategy to reduce budgeting costs. It’s simple, and any business—small or large—can do it! Here are ten practical tips for getting started:

1. Print only when necessary. Encourage your employees and coworkers to think about the environment before they print and to print only what needs to be printed. It’s hard to break the habit of printing everything, but with PDFs, unlimited email accounts, and large hard drives, many documents can stay in digital format, never reaching paper. Consider adding an eco-friendly signature to your emails.

2. Reuse scrap paper. Scrap paper is great for small bits of information like notes, phone numbers, and URLs. Simply collect scrap paper in a bin and then cut it up into smaller, note-sized pieces to be reused, or it can be reused to print draft documents on the back. A great place to keep a collection bin is near a printer or a copier. Just be careful not to reuse confidential business documents that require shredding.

3. Keep PDFs. Instead of storing important records as paper files, keep them as electronic files such as PDFs. They’re also easy to find and share (via email or shared folders). The beauty of PDFs is they will always be viewable in the future, unlike say, an old WordPerfect file.

4. Scan documents. You can scan documents to your hard drive instead of making photocopies, and then email them to customers or employees. New inexpensive scanners upload large documents automatically and can save them as PDFs.

5. Use electronic forms. Use online and electronic forms for anything from job applications to inventory management to purchasing records. These documents take up very little digital space and can be kept much longer than paper documents. Google Docs is a great free application for forms that save data into a spreadsheet, for example.

6. Issue electronic receipts. Allow your customers to opt out of printed receipts and instead receive electronic receipts via email.

7. Use online banking. Pay invoices, transfer money between accounts, and monitor all your expenses online. Save the web pages as PDFs to keep permanent bank statements and records.

8. Select ‘Print Preview.’ Whenever you print, be sure to do a preview to avoid printing more pages than you think you are going to (i.e. web advertisements). You can also select specific pages or highlight the exact text or paragraphs you want to print, instead of printing the entire document.

9. Choose an Online Fax Service. You no longer need a dedicated fax machine receiving and printing junk faxes all day. Use eFax or other electronic fax services that reroute your incoming faxes and send them to your email. Outgoing faxes can be sent from your desktop or scanned.

10. Use both sides of the page. This can be done either by printing double-side or copying double-sided, or it can be done by reusing the backs of scrap paper. Consider placing a bin for scrap near a centrally located printer used specifically for draft documents.

In addition to these simple guidelines to reduce excess consumption and waste of paper, you will also want to develop a plan to recycle any paper your business can no longer reuse. The combination of some of these these prudent paper practices are part of achieving a Green Business Certification with the Green Business Bureau, in-person verified by Green Irene. A great way to encourage recycling is to purchase recycling bins for employee workstations and highly trafficked locations, such as shared printers. Green Irene now carries recycling bins that are perfect for such business applications. Ask your Green Irene Eco-Consultant for help creating a recycling strategy and implementing the recycling bins today.

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.