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Green is my favorite color. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering the surroundings here on the blog, but sometimes I feel the need to express the statement anyway. I own green heels, purses, a few too many sweatshirts and I have abstract green canvases hanging here in the apartment… heck, even my image hard drives last year were called Kermit and Jolly Green Giant (this year they’re Kiwi and Lime)!

I think it’s pretty cool the whole environmental movement is called being green. And even if I didn’t care about the planet, just calling it Green would make me more interested. Luckily we do care about the planet! And so, this post is all about how we do our best to keep our business low impact, especially in the office. Besides keeping the majority of our office paperless, we’re moving towards more environmentally friendly products as well.

Packaging:
All of our packaging is either recycled or dual purpose. Seriously, that pile of boxes we keep in the workroom isn’t staying there for aesthetics! We keep the boxes our lab, album suppliers, and even the boxes my tea supplier sends so we aren’t wasting cardboard every week. We also keep all those little packing peanuts, an always messy task that we may one day win. When we wrap our prints in tissue paper it is recycled paper and when we wrap our albums in pretty papers, they’re also recycled.

Albums:
Some of clients still love the traditional feel of a leather-bound album, so we aren’t getting rid of them by any means. But this year we’re adding silk and brocade-covered albums to our lineup. In addition, two of our album options are printed on fine art papers and not adding to the pile of chemicals from photographic prints.

Prints:
Starting soon, we’ll be offering only prints smaller than 8×10 as traditional luster prints. 8×10s and larger will only be available as fine art prints on environmentally friendly paper. We’re currently testing papers with our lab made from sugar cane and bamboo, and will soon be offering our favorites. In addition to this, we have a few framing options made from 80% recycled materials.

In the office:
In December we changed energy companies! We’re now using Energy Plus, which generates electricity solely from wind power domestically produced.

We’re getting better at the whole paperless office thing. We’ve been using on online client management system for two years, do all contracts electronically, and email for about 98% of our business communication. All of our credit card statements, bank statements and utility bills are electronic statements. I still think a hand-written note is warranted for some things and won’t be giving that up anytime soon, though.

We keep our heat to a minimum in the winter, and use fans rather than A/C in the summer as much as possible. We use compact fluorescent light bulbs. We sleep our computers when not in use and turn the displays off if we’re running batches but not otherwise using the computers. Also, Joe yells at me all the time about leaving lights on and I promise, I’m getting better about it.

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