Our Earth Day Eco-Pledge: Nina Designs will donate $1 to Seacology for every new person who likes us on Facebook by Earth Day, April 22nd. If you’re already a Nina Designs fan, share our Facebook Eco-Pledge with friends and family, then go to our wall and let us know you shared, and we’ll give $1 to Seacology for that effort too! Help spread the word so we can donate as much as possible.
A little bit about Seacology: They are a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the world’s islands and their cultures. Their efforts include 215 conservation projects on 116 islands in 45 countries around the world, protecting over 1.8 million acres of coral reef, rainforest, and other fragile island ecosystems, along with the wildlife they harbor. This includes 50 projects in Indonesia, protecting both marine and terrestrial habitat.
They do great things like building schools and health clinics in exchange for marine reserves, and setting up fresh water systems to villages that need it!
We think it’s wonderful that silver jewelry findings can help support the efforts to restore the Gulf Coast. Thanks so much to all you Nina Designs fans for inviting your friends to join us on Facebook and supporting the Environmental Defense Fund. We added almost 1000 new friends and fellow designers to our community as a result of your efforts. In return, Nina Designs is sending a check for $1000 to help support the Environmental Defense Fund and their team of wetlands experts in the Gulf Coast who are working so hard to repair the damage and restore coastal Louisiana.
We are currently working with a group of students from San Francisco State University to obtain Green Business certification from Alameda county. The program covers solid waste, energy, water use, pollution prevention, waste-water and other general conservation efforts. As we work through the extensive check lists it is gratifying to see that we are mostly doing things right already. (We get extra credit for the flooring made from recycled tires that we installed in our order pulling area). Even so, we are adding new measures and formalizing our green practices.
A few new policies include two double sided printers and bins set next to all printers for those extra papers that get spit out. Now we can reuse them every time for printing or scratch paper. We set up a Green Team to make sure our office supplies are made from recycled materials whenever possible, to monitor bills for sudden spikes in energy or water use and to keep an eye on our daily practices like turning lights off in empty rooms and keeping trash out of the paper waste bins.
I will keep you posted on our certification progress. Right now, I need to research refillable pens and a place we can donate our old electronics to be refurbished instead of recycled…..
How do you save energy and resources?
Please keep an eye on your energy use.
Please print on both sides of papers
Green Silver is a moving target but we are moving step by step to green our office. I recently presented our entire staff with designer commuter mugs to keep at work and use all day. I think we can save about 2,500 paper and plastic cups a year by using these cups when we head out for lunch or coffee. Plus, they are so pretty! We also hung individual towels in our bathrooms and kitchen. I think we will save about 30,000 paper towels a year using real towels. I know these are baby steps, but at least we are on the right track!
30,000 paper towels saved
Some Scrap to be Recycled
Recycled Silver is in high demand these days. Did you know that 60% of the silver used in all of our handmade Bali sterling silver styles is recycled from production scraps? We never publicized this fact in the past because it seemed obvious to us that every bit of valuable silver would be melted and re-used. However, I have recently seen companies advertise this practice as proof of their Eco-friendly, Green Business practices and I wanted everyone to know that we do it too! We also recycle all the rejects and scraps that accumulate in our California office.
Before we printed our recent insert, I did a great deal of research into recycled paper. It turned out to be a slippery slope! There is recycled paper made from paper mill floor scraps (I still don’t know how I feel about that. Did they really just throw it away before or did they always use it?) and recycled paper made from post consumer waste. The latter is about twice the price of regular paper stock. In addition, recycling post-consumer paper is very resource intensive, using lots of energy and water. Some people feel that using paper from sustainably managed forests is a wiser choice.
Instead of using the recycled paper, I decided to set a “greening” budget for 2010 and try to figure out where that money will have the greatest impact on the environment. It may be best spent on recycled paper but we might get more bang for our buck somewhere else, like supporting water restoration projects in silver mining towns. I will keep you posted……
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?
