Our company - going greener

Busy working on the list of how to be a greener company. We already do the basics like recycling our cardboard, office paper, plastic and aluminum.

It's easy to recycle the cardboard here as there is a large compactor in our facility to collect it. For all the others, I bundle up the paper, and have a large barrel for the plastic and aluminum and bring it home myself for pick-up. Our town has residential collection, but no commercial collection. They don't make it easy to be green...

We worked with our corrugated box manufacturer to ensure they use recycled content in their boxes. They indicated that just about all boxes these days contain some recycled content. The market is steady, producing a good reliable supply. We also switched all our paper stock over to 100% recycled content. It's amazing how much more recycled copy paper costs compared to traditional stock.

We are looking at some of the little things we can do as well. Like recycling the cardboard rolls from our tape along with the corrugated cardboard. We use rechargeable batteries in our digital cameras and make sure the sleep settings on all the computers reduce their power consumption when not in use. Every little bit helps - if everybody turned off one light bulb for 30 minutes in a room they just left, the overall savings would be huge, while the impact on one person is small.

We continue to lean on our suppliers to be greener. Some of their packaging methods are extremely wasteful. We are getting tag-on productions of what is going to the big companies and it's amazing how much packaging is used to get these products to market. At least we make sure to recycle what we can.

Sometimes it feels like an uphill battle as not everyone feels the same way about recycling.