You’ve been reading for a while now and the time has come, GLAD WORKS friends, for us to get intimate. 

We…we want to show you our recycling bin.

At GLAD WORKS, we like to tread as lightly as possible on the earth because in addition to being a bunch of kick butt designers and computer nerds, we’re also tree hugging hippies, dedicated to being as green as possible. So, we thought it might be fun to take a little break from our usual blog topics to give you a behind the scenes look at the sustainability practices we’ve implemented here at the GLAD WORKS studio.

Let us ask you something, GLAD WORKS friends. Do you see stylish looking people walking around Providence? Guess what?  That’s US!  Many members of the GW team live close to the studio and opt to either walk to work when the weather is nice, or take public transportation. We frequently walk to do errands on our lunch breaks, too. So, now that you know it’s us, HOLLA!

But we don’t always walk to work. Sometimes we beam ourselves there by using  innovative workflow tools like instant messaging and teleconferencing to telecommute!   Aren’t we fancy? Plus, we really like working in our sweatpants sometimes. 

Who doesn’t, really?

In addition to occasional telecommuting, our team members are also encouraged to take online classes and attend webinars. Both of these things help cut back on the time and energy spent on commuting. Plus, working from home saves on the use of office supplies like paper products and electricity, which is not only earth friendly, but it also reduces the cost of running the office and it makes our pets happy because they can sit at our feet as we work.

The pets love it so much, in fact, that they’ve started a campaign to close the studio altogether. So far, nobody’s willing to abandon this kick a** place.

Most of the paper products we use have a high percentage of post-consumer content and a minimum amount of chlorine bleach. Even our regular copy paper contains 30% recycled content. We try to use as little paper as possible, but when we do print, we print in black and white if we can, we use both sides of the paper, and we re-use single sided paper as scrap for taking notes before we toss it into the recycling bin. Paper at GLAD WORKS looks like a few miles of bad road by the time we finally give it up!  Not only does it save the environment—it also saves us money!

Our printer uses a different color printing process that uses less toner than regular printers, and we always recycle our cartridges. Speaking of the printing process, we are dedicated to educating our clients about green printing practices. We commonly work with FSC (Forest Stewardship Council Certified) printers who use sustainable papers, recycled content, and low VOC (volatile organic compound) inks such as soy-based ink.  Some of our clients even opt to do email campaigns as opposed to print—again, not only is it earth-friendly, but it’s also economical.

In our area, the recycling program doesn’t take #5 plastics. But that doesn’t stop us from recycling them anyway!  We save all those yogurt cups and frozen dinner trays to bring to our local Whole Foods where they collect them for recycling. There’s always a weekly entourage heading over there, so this is a regular practice and we don’t mind doing it in the least. Besides, there’s an informal contest going on to see who can buy the most inedible, bizarre food from Whole Foods.  So far, there’s a tie between fermented tea whose name we can’t pronounce and some kind of weird tofu thing…

We don’t usually have too many of those #5 plastics because most of us bring our lunches to work in re-usable glass containers. Not only is this a green way to eat at work, but it’s healthier too, since most experts suggest heating items in inert glass or ceramic containers. Well, it’s not exactly “healthy” when we have leftover pizza for lunch—it’s just green and not quite as healthy. We can’t always be angels, you know.

When we do order out, we like to place group orders, which uses less packaging than many separate orders. We order from local small businesses, and we always walk to pick it up.  And to wash our lunches down, we replaced our plastic jug style water cooler with a filter that filters our tap water.  That means no plastic bottles and no trucks delivering to our office!

Aside from all of those detail-y things we do to keep Mother Earth smiling (and usually save a few bucks in the process), perhaps the most important thing we do is make full use of technology to reduce our paper usage. We’ve digitized many common documents such as invoices and human resources paperwork, and we also review documents on screen instead of printing them out whenever possible. Even though it’s nearly impossible to go entirely paperless, we have reduced our paper usage dramatically.

Now if you’ll excuse us, we have to go dig little Bella and Dolce out of the recycling bin.  They’re really into it…

PS: next week, we’ll talk about some fabulous web-based software we found for you that can help reduce paper use and save you a ton of time!