For those of you looking to re-upholster that charming antique love seat set or chaise lounge, and want to do it right, try Rubie Green upholstery fabrics.

Rubie Green (homepage images above) is an eco-upholstery fabric company with the creative philosophy:

“It’s a barefoot walk in the sand; it’s a lazy afternoon nap, and it’s your first sight of the Mediterranean coast. It’s life at its simplest, and nature in its wordless beauty. Here at Rubie Green, our mission is to dress your surroundings in fabrics that represent vitality, energy, comfort and style, all while maintaining respect to the environment by using only 100% organic cotton. We believe in classic designs that are familiar to every decade, re-vitalized in an eco-friendly manner. We know that natural does not mean boring, and that interiors make a house a home.”

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This week, greenwash fatigued bloggers (Gawker describes it as improbable a real news item as ‘the hot dog industry going vegetarian’) and non-profit spokespersons turned a skeptical eye on a group of direct marketing companies called the Green Marketing Coalition (GMC). Corporate clients, including Microsoft, Washington Mutual and OptimaHealth, are also in on the initiative.

GMC’s goal? Altruistic enough. According to the New York Times article “Direct marketing goes green. No, really”, these marketers are joining hands and taking small, albeit very conservative, steps to make an inherently unsustainable practice (i.e. sending wads of personal junk mail) at least a little bit greener. We have already written about junk mail solutions and naughty, catalogue-sending companies before and so we were curious about what best practices the industry funded group came up with.

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A Green Printer dispatch.

According to Patricia Calkins, Xerox vice-president for Environment, Health and Safety, being smarter about paper use is a win for the environment and for the bottom line, so it is no surprise businesses would zero in on improving their performance in that area.

While long an “evangelist” for greener operations, Xerox is, at its core, a global document management company, which manufactures and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies.

And so, the question that Jeff McIntire-Strasburg asked in April still hovers: “can a company that manufactures copy machines, and sells more paper than any other single brand, really walk the talk on sustainable business practices?”

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What does a leader in business that moves us “far, fast” towards our sustainability goals look like? It’s a relevant question to our pressing need for solutions and Nicola Acutt, Ph.D. writes a “bang on” response to it.

Borrowing from a recent Al Gore speech, Accult asserts that “as people grasp the magnitude and speed of change needed to address the environmental, social and economic issues that we face, there is a growing need for leaders who take us ‘far, fast’”.

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You’ve started a green team and seven weeks later, your once ecstatic committee of cubicle warriors by day, green champions by night (a.k.a your green employees) begin to dwindle in numbers. Even the most eager employees look like they would prefer to be idling in traffic than be here listening to your green pitch.

Preston Koerner wrote a valuable article in Green Biz on how to prevent “green fatigue” and separate it from the “green noise” amongst customers in response to a recent commentary on eco-overload in the New York Times.

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Image source: it all skyrocketed with Gutenberg’s printing press…

A Green Printer dispatch.

Ever wondered how much energy and thought it took to produce that shiny brochure your marketing staff handed to you this week? And no, it’s not just the brand and visual design genius we’re talking about.

Let’s face it: making a few pieces of paper look pretty takes up some pretty hefty resources and the paper and pulp industry is there to meet our paper hungry needs (so much for the paperless office).

In fact, the OECD Environmental Outlooks calls the pulp and paper industry the single largest consumer of water and the third greatest industrial greenhouse gas emitter, right after the chemical and steel industries and the oil and gas industry.

And, that rank, as echoed by Co-op America is not set to go down anytime soon.

The Environmental Defense Fund further attests that paper use is on the rise with paper and packaging still making up one third of municipal landfill waste. And, producing all those nice brochures (or manuals or contracts or….) takes up a lot of energy. In fact,

• Producing paper uses 11.5 percent of all energy in the industrial sector.
• One third of all wood harvested in the U.S. goes into paper products.

Thus, on the bright side, paper use presents the potential for enormous environmental savings. Citigroup took up the challenge of using post-consumer waste paper and saved 43.8 billion BTU’s of energy, enough to supply 430 homes for a year.

But then, what about those cool, “a must” coloured graphs and charts on the company brochure?

More than likely, it was made using inks containing volatile organic compounds (VOCs). That’s short for those nasty major pollutants linked to the deterioration of the earth’s protective ozone layer and, consequently (some researchers suggest), to accelerating climate change.

So what are we to do?
Let’s begin with the water used to print those brochures. Waterless printers have been able to dramatically reduce water consumption. For example, a printer in Switzerland, operating one of the world’s first waterless web presses, eliminated the use of approximately 250,000 liters (about 66,000 gallons) of water in one year. That water would normally have come from a nearby lake, which is a source of drinking water for tens of thousands of people.

The invention of water-washable inks has allowed the waterless pressroom to be virtually VOC-free. Water-washable ink technology takes out the need for solvent-based press and blanket wash solutions, which typically account for a large portion of a printer’s VOC output.

So, have your cake and eat it too. We all love handing a cool looking brochure to a client. It just doesn’t need to cost the Earth.

More resources

• No piece of paper is completely environmentally invisible, even the recycled kind, so choose check out these guidelines for environmentally preferable paper by the Environmental Paper Network.
• Handy printable signs to encourage better office paper use by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).
• Ever wondered where to even start to buy greener paper? The first step starts with asking the right questions and this Paper Supplier Evaluation PDF by the EDF is about as thorough as it gets.
• Recycled paper purchasing article from GreenBiz.com.

Get these brands and more, all while tracking how much CO2, trees and wastewater you’ll save with the Eco-Widget, at Green Printer.

A Junk Mail “Sculpture” a la http://antiadvertisingagency.com

A http://greenprinteronline.com dispatch.

We’ve come this far in our exasperation with junk mail-apalooza and now people are luring us with cold, hard cash (or the beauty of planting a tree) to get us to stop receiving virgin-forest-eating junk mail.

We’re in love with Green Dimes (thank you to Nate Burgos of Design Feast for the gread tip), which not only offers a widget that claims to track, in real time, how many:

i. trees are saved;
ii. Victoria Secret catalogues are stopped and;
iii. (tongue in cheek style) “people helped”,

but also offers a really convenient online service to cut out those annoying credit card application forms.

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Image source: http://timblair.net | Lights out for Sydney, Australia 2007

An http://greenprinteronline.com dispatch. 

Earth Hour is tonight, March 29th from 8 to 9 pm. The idea is to turn off the lights as a symbolic gesture that us citizens, business owners, uber-corporations (hello, Google’s black screen, hello McDonalds in Toronto saving 10 000 kilowatt hours) local governments and non-profit groups are taking climate change seriously.

Despite gripes that Earth Hour falls on the NCAA basketball regional, it’s lights out for over 23 major cities worldwide like Toronto and Bangkok.

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Image source | www.jiinjoo.com

An http://greenprinteronline.com dispatch.
When asked: how “green” are you, the brains behind accounting, IT and architectural firms who, kudos to them – both the closet greens or eco-warriors who proudly bear their eco-badge on their sleeve – jump up to say that they are helping their clients drive sustainability solutions.

Even lawyers are realizing their impact on their environment. No seriously, lawyers are sharp enough to know that using all that virgin paper cannot be good to the environment.

But when it comes to driving internal sustainability initiatives? Many still respond by: “we recycle”. Period.

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Photos by Chris Jordan | “Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption”

Design Goes Green - The first of a series of articles by Green Printer on the cross-section between the environment, business and the creative communications industry.

According to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, used or unwanted electronics amounted to 1.9 to 2.2 million tons in 2005, with most of that ending up in landfills. We did a post earlier on the how the chemicals that seep into the soil, even decades later, can have harmful human health effects and the fact that heaps of the stuff are often left abandoned in developing countries.

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Image Source: http://www.replate.org

We ask design guru Nate Burgos, named Fast Company’s debut “Fast 50 Champions of Innovation“, to reflect on how the Internet changed how designers ‘make connections’ and why government and ‘big business’ should care about environmental sustainability and design activism.

Our take: major organizations should take a cue from the incredibly creative and nimble ways designers (who often, historically speaking, have a pulse on how online mediums work faster than business) are using the Internet and multi-media platforms to attract highly engaged users - not to mention high web traffic rates.

Here are nine websites to watch and more on what the ever quotable Burgos said on design activism, the Internet and sustainability…

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Image source: www.futureproofnola.com.

Design Goes Green - The first of a series of articles by Green Printer on the cross-section between the environment, business and the creative communications industry.

At some point, one comes to the inevitable conclusion that in order to “green” your marketing material, one needs to take a little extra time to plan ahead and live a “slow food” version of marketing. Yes, I hear the snickers and yes, even marketing speed demons can learn a thing or two from the slow movement.

So, for all you energizer bunnies out there, here are a few tips from Montreal based Vivace Design‘ s Karine Himbeault that, incidentally, we found take 60 seconds or less to actually carry out.

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Image source: www.inhabitat.com

Design Goes Green - The first of a series of articles by Green Printer on the cross-section between the environment, business and the creative communications industry.

Today, I caught the “story of stuff“: a 20-minute, fast-paced look at the dark underbelly of our consumption patterns. The clip exposes the links between a host of environmental and social issues while showing you the real cost of that $5 radio (metals from South Africa, 14 years olds from the Congo dropping out of school to work in factories…).

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Image Source: World Wildlife Federation - caption “15 km squared of rain forest disappears every minute”

A Design Goes Green Series by www.greenprinteronline.com.

Kevin Thompson of Rising Phoenix Design shares easy tips to green your advertising and marketing material in 2008.

Less is more.
If you’re smart, you can say a lot with very little. Thompson swears by low ink coverage for all Rising Phoenix Design printed pieces to create the sexy white space that you saw the big name ad firms use in their 2007 marketing material (the “Dear Ketel One Drinker. Can you find the subliminal message in this advertisement?” Followed by two-thirds of a page of white space ring a bell?)

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Image source: www.greenpeace.org

Design Goes Green - The first of a series of articles by Green Printer on the cross-section between the environment, business and the creative communications industry.

The market for sustainable goods and services is gigantic – an estimated $209 billion or 35 million consumers in the U.S. alone, according to a Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) study.

Think jumping on the “environmental-Armageddon-is-upon-us-we-are-doing something-about-it-hear-me-roar” business bandwagon will be easy? Think again.

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An http://www.greenprinteronline.com dispatch.

LATEST in CFL Debate: No Actual Data on CFL migraine scare in The Daily Green

Conservative bloggers denounce US Congresses’ move to CFLs as a mercury health hazard and a “High Priest Al Gore of the Church of Global Warming of Modern Day Idiots (MDI)” falsity while of course, sourcing the “science” behind their claim as, what else, another conservative blogger’s opinion.

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Image source: http://blog.americanfeast.com

Strategies: Manage your supply chain

Just tip #8 of 10 tips from the Greater Vancouver’s Regional District’s “Smart Steps Strategies“

Your supply chain is made up of the companies that help your business secure materials and distribute products to the right place at the desired time in the quantities needed. The supply chain thus offers a unique and relatively easy opportunity for your firm to influence suppliers to the benefit of the environment.

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Image source: http://blogs.zdnet.com

A http://greenprinteronline.com dispatch

If your post-holiday cheer and spending has put you in a slump about how to jumpstart your New Year’s resolution to make your business run more efficient and tree-friendly for less (and who doesn’t?), Ilana DeBare from the San Francisco Chronicle has the solution. The Chronicle green business reporter provides a few tips to increase your retail business efficiency in the long-term and “walk” your sustainability talk in 2008.

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