Green Options

This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of ProformaGreen, an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy. John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.

A number of clients and readers have asked us about ideas for eco-friendly customer gifts and I wanted to write a couple of blogs talking about items that have done well in the past for clients or that are new for this year and doing well so far.

Our first blog was on BAMBOO. Now let us move to ORGANIC COTTON.

1) Organic Cotton Towels - Unbelievably soft and absorbent with natural colors like Stone Green, White and Natural Tan, these towels make great gifts. Embroidered with your company or organization’s logo expect to pay around $24 per unit. Towels work because they will end up in the home of your customer and likely be used for a long, long time. Organic cotton towels and robes also make good employee gifts.

2) Organic Market Bag Set - These heavy duty organic cotton bags look and feel great, so they have a high perceived-value but an honest price at $16 for the set, including placement of your logo.  Employees and customers will use the bags for a long, long time and they use them in public so each time your customer uses the bag in public your company or organization is on display. We also like the large print area on these bags. This is a lot of space to display your message and/or contact information. This market set helps the environment by reducing the need for plastic or paper shopping bags with this beautiful organic cotton set. The set includes a storage tote and 2 full-size grocery totes.

This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of ProformaGreen, an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy. John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.

A number of clients and readers have asked us about ideas for eco-friendly customer gifts - it’s the season after all. I wanted to write a couple of posts talking about items that have done well in the past for clients or that are new for this year and doing well so far.

I also wanted to break this blog into categories so I will start out with BAMBOO.

Top 3 Bamboo Ideas.

1) Flash Drives - Bamboo flash drives, along with their less green brethren in maple, cherry and walnut have been very popular as client gifts this year. At about $9.50 for a 1GB drive with your company or organization’s logo they are a low cost high perceived-value gift. Some clients have gotten very creative and recorded greetings or short videos to their customers and placed them directly on the drives. Again, no one ever throws away a flash drive, they are very useful for office and home, business and recreation.

Editor’s note: No, not paper or plastic… we’ve been there. David Shaw takes a look at the environmental impact of hand-washing, and finds there’s a better way… even better than “Press button. Rub hands under warm air. Wipe hands on pants.” David originally published this post to Professor Simran Sethi’s Media and the Environment course blog on Wednesday, March 5, 2008.

I drink at least a liter of water a day, which means I end up using the restroom at least five times a day. In the bathroom at work, we have the fairly standard stack of single sheet paper towels that you pull from the holder one at a time (although sometimes a clump comes out, if they’re packed too tightly). It takes two paper towels to dry my hands thoroughly.

So, on a daily basis I use at least 10 paper towels, or 50 paper towels a week, or 200 paper towels a month, or 2,400 paper towels a year! That is a lot of paper. But, I have to wash my hands and I have to dry them. Yet, every time I grab the paper towels, I feel a tinge of guilt. So, I started trying to find ways to conserve paper towels.

First, I decided to cut down to just one paper towel. Yeah, my hands were still a little damp when I left the restroom, but they air dried within a minute or two. Still, with one paper towel per hand washing, I was using at least 1,200 paper towels a year. Not good enough.

We do it for business, we do it for pleasure - when travelling, a hotel stay is usually a must. Often, we have many choices to choose from, and we make our decision based on cost and assumed quality. There is, of course, a new factor coming into the picture, and it's green-ness. Today we'll tell you how you can green your hotel stays.