Greening is a long journey. It can often feel intimidating, especially in an industry like silver jewelry where so many factors are out of our control. In our office, we have made a commitment to move forward steadily. We are hoping that even the smallest steps will add up. When we remodeled our building, we added skylights and staggered our lighting on two grids. Now we can keep half the lights turned off during the day. We carefully separate all of our trash for recycling and composting and we shred paper waste to use as packing material. We have not found a way to eliminate the ubiquitous zip lock plastic jewelry bags that the city won’t recycle but we found a Bag Guy who recycles them for us. The number of people in our office bicycling to work has increased to the point where we need to purchase a bike rack. We also use Soy Based Ink on all of our catalog inserts.
Erin Waits for Recycling Pick Up
Last month, I purchased a metal mug to use at the local café. It sounds almost silly, but I calculated that I will save 250 paper cups with plastic tops in one year. According to Hillary Feldman at About My Planet, Americans use 16 billion paper cups a year. “The real cost of 16 billion paper cups is nearly one million tons of wood, 4 billion gallons of water, and 253 million pounds of waste. Every tree used for paper cups is also removed from the ecosystem and can no longer absorb carbon dioxide, produce oxygen, or filter groundwater.” So maybe its not so silly….. We’ll keep you posted as our greening journey continues! Any tips?
Fantastic. The info re paper cups is quite shocking, especially the water used. The mind boggles too re where the cups end up after use, i.e. landfill! These are important issues here in Australia as well. Well done to all of you.
Comment by Suzie — March 22, 2010 @ 5:20 pm
I think I may have mentioned this on another post, but you might want to check out Axiar Green at http://www.papersavingsoftware.com, which is a company that can help you greatly reduce the amount of paper you waste. While recycling is a major step forward, it’s even better to reduce the amount of paper used in the first place
Do you know if there’s a place I can send my gold-filled scraps to for recycling? I’ve found places for silver scraps, but haven’t been able to find one that’ll accept gold mixes. Thanks!
Comment by Scheherazade — March 31, 2010 @ 1:09 pm
Thanks for the tip. We’ll look into it. I’m not sure, but I think Rio Grande will recycle your gold scraps.
Comment by juanita — April 2, 2010 @ 1:44 pm