Tile Plus has been promoting and marketing itself quite heavily since the downturn of our economy which is great for building up our customer base but, what about cutting costs and helping the environment by going green?
Well, we actually have been a pretty green office for several years. Here's why:
Over 96% of the bulbs in our office are fluorescent and they were recently replaced with Philips bulbs which contain less mercury than earlier models. The few halogen bulbs we have are used in our bathrooms and those are usually off.
We recycle our ink cartridges which we think everybody should do, especially based off of the facts below.
"An average toner cartridge, used in laser printers, faxes and copiers is made of 40% plastic requiring up to 1 gallon (3.7 liters) of oil. The rest of the cartridge consists of 40% metal and smaller amounts of rubber, paper, foam and toner.
"Over 375 million empty toner cartridges and ink cartridges are thrown into the trash every year in the US. Most of these printer cartridges end up on landfill sites or in incinerators.
"The plastics used in printer cartridges are made of an engineering grade polymer that have a very slow decomposing rate ranging between 450 to 1000 years depending on the cartridge type. Ink cartridges may also leak printer ink polluting the surrounding environment.
"By recycling printer cartridges, we conserve natural resources and energy by reducing the need for virgin materials. Up to 97 percent of the materials that make up a printer cartridge can be recycled or reused if taken care of. Printer cartridges can in extreme cases be refilled up to 15 times before reaching the end of their life most though averaging between 5-7 refills."
Source: inkguides.com
More actions we do to stay green are: Using both sides of our sheets of paper, setting all of our computers to an optimum power saving mode when they are not being used and our power is supplied by PG&E which produces more than 50% of its energy from renewable sources such as wind, hydroelectric and geothermal energy.
We have aerators on all of our faucets, they are the little mesh screens cover the faucet. Well, recently we installed new aerators which reduce water flow to 1.0 gallons per minute (gpm) which was the lowest gpm supplying aerator our nearest Home Depot carried. Typical aerators may have a gpm of 2 gallons per minute. If one sink is turned on for 1 minute by 15 employees each per day for one week, we saved ourselves 105 gallons just in that single week!
Finally, we recently dug up some tile in our warehouse which we used in commercial bathrooms a few years back. The product is produced by the company, Terra Green Ceramics. All of their tile is manufactured with a minimum of 55% recycled glass and is certified by the, Scientific Certification Systems (SCS). A bit about SCS, they were established in 1991 and their vision is, "To be a global leader in providing third-party environmental, sustainability and food quality certification, auditing, testing and standards development."
We think it would be a great idea for green products to be become more popular in the San Francisco Bay Area such as the tile where the metropolitan area is the 6th largest in the country and the 46th largest urban area in the world. There are over 7.4 million people living here, we sure can create a large impact through setting a good example. Our area is a large opinion leader since we are within the Golden State, we've got Silicon Valley and host such a large computer industry.
Oh, and one more fun fact, "San Jose is not only recognized as the capital of Silicon Valley, it is the safest big city in America according to findings by Morgan Quitno Press based on 2003 FBI crime statistics."
If you have any comments or recommendations on us going green, please jot them down on the bottom of this blog, you can click on the blue word "comment". We would love to hear from anybody and everybody.
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