By Olga Orda •
June 28, 2008
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.
By Olga Orda •
June 19, 2008
A few weeks back, I was writing about CO2-friendly supply chains and saw the hefty list of U.S. companies that the Environmental Defense Fund had helped switch to recycled content in a drive to reduce paper waste across the nation.
Now, paper is back under the public eye in fuller force than ever because of its significant climate change footprint.
“Paper is a tremendously resource-intensive product to produce,” explains project manager Victoria Mills, “and the decomposition of paper in landfills generates methane, a greenhouse gas with 23 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide.”
By Olga Orda •
June 15, 2008
A www.greenprinteronline.com dispatch
For all those days when you believe your green values aren’t aligned with your workplace but you can’t - or don’t want to - make the eco-entrepreneur step, here are some immediate action steps to try out at the office this Monday.
Remember: while many green teams start from humble beginnings, they can grow exponentially - pent up passion for green amongst employees can be powerful driving force.
By Olga Orda •
June 6, 2008
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 [...]
By Olga Orda •
June 3, 2008
Image source: Ecofriend.org
A Green Printer Online Dispatch
Do you scoff at company-made labels (i.e. internal labels) and only go for the non-profit, third party born eco-labels when buying green office supplies? Or do you take both with a grain of salt, comparing the merits of “private” and “public” labels?
If you’re the latter or if you are a green procurer, you probably want to streamline the “boom! done, I’m buying that product - not [...]
By Olga Orda •
May 20, 2008
Image source: National Geographic
A short, weekly “school of hard knocks” history of why paper supply chain management is not as easy as it looks - but can be. A Green Printer dispatch.
Deforestation hurts. Just ask Harrison Ford - he waxed his chest and demonstrated just how close forests are to his heart.
Sustainable management of forests, not simply trees or more recycling, is what Rainforest Alliance’s executive director Tensie Whelan recently advocated for in GreenBiz and she’s right: while recycling has its environmental limits, sustainably managed forests as a whole ensure the well-being of the forest ecosystem and biodiversity survival for generations to come. 
By Olga Orda •
May 9, 2008
The big names cannot help but pump out more sustainable paper products on an almost weekly basis. From biology college textbooks gone green to carbon friendly greeting cards, we’ve rounded up the top ten green papier goods that caught our eye.
7. So, the FSC is not perfect. But it’s a start and it speaks volumes when office supply giants like Staples start to sell what most of us want to start using already in [...]
By Olga Orda •
April 15, 2008
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.
By Olga Orda •
March 29, 2008
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.
By Olga Orda •
March 17, 2008
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.
By Olga Orda •
March 3, 2008
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.
