Inside the Sustainable Studio: creating a great (and green!) home office

As both the proprietress of a green business and one of the lucky thousands (maybe millions now?) who are able to work from home, I've been thinking a lot about ways to green my office. Some are fairly obvious: recycle paper, don't print as much, use CFLs, blah blah. But both the challenge and the blessing of the home office is that it's completely yours - you get to do whatever you want to it, and set it up in the way that works best for you. This, oddly enough, is a pretty tall order.

After three years running the zen kitchen out of various home offices (and two years before that moonlighting in Cranston, RI), I've learned the following about balancing sustainability with form/function:

• Natural light is essential. Working in a place with plenty of windows (like my current office, which is basically a closed-in porch banked with windows) not only helps the environment by reducing the amount of energy you need to run lights, etc. it's good for the soul. I can't imagine working by office light anymore. 

• Create a pretty space, using low-VOC paint. It's amazing what a coat of paint will do, and using a low-VOC paint (they're all over the place now) costs a bit more, but it gives you the advantage of being able to actually breathe while you're painting with it. I painted my office on the hottest weekend of the year and there was no paint smell whatsoever while I was doing it. Not only is this better for the environment, it lets you get back to work quickly because your house doesn't reek of fresh paint.

• Make meals in advance for the week. It's hard to get motivated to cook a meal in the middle of the day, which makes the temptation for take-out (and all the containers!) a bit too hard to resist. I've found that having things like brown rice, lentils, etc. handy in the fridge makes it much easier to throw something together. Not only does it save plastic, it saves money.

• Print as much as you can on an as-needed basis. Business cards are important to have on hand (and designed/printed professionally!) but there are certain things, like letterhead, envelopes, etc. that you might not need a lot of. These, I've found, can fairly easily be worked into templates to print as-needed on an inkjet or laser printer without hampering your professional image. That said, it's important to assess your actual stationery needs before embarking on a process like this; short-run printing is expensive, and if you use a lot of letterhead or envelopes on a daily basis, definitely get them printed.

• Gang up errands and meetings so you drive less. This is as much a time-management tip as it is a green tip - traveling to meetings and such is an enormous time suck. I tend to group weekly appointments or meetings with my trips to the gym or other errands, so I block specific periods of time to be out of the office, and bring my gym bag along with me.

Any other telecommuters have green tips to share?

How do you differentiate when "green" is no longer enough?

This week on the Co-Op America Business list, one of the members brought up the question of green going mainstream. How do smaller green businesses compete now that corporate America is riding the green train?

My question is: Is being green enough of a reason to convince people to use your company? Personally, as I've mentioned before, I don't think it is.

Last year, I decided to adapt the zen kitchen's business model to the rising trend in green design/marketing by making green a non-issue. My clients know I'm green, they know they're going to get the greenest product I can provide for them and that I *get* what they're trying to do. However, most of my clients come to me because I'm a great designer and I specialize in helping women entrepreneurs and green businesses create their brands. They're looking for my brain and my talent - the fact that I'm eco-friendly is just gravy.

In my mind, if the green movement is really going to gain momentum, it has to move from a conversation to an expectation. This doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about being green; but it should be an "also" rather than a sign of uniqueness. As such, green businesses need to stop trying to justify their decisions, or explain why it costs so much more to make a green product; instead, make it clear that you have a better product that works just as well if not better than the conventional product.

If there's one thing I've learned in three years of running the zen kitchen, it's that it's much more effective to treat the green thing as a given than it is to try to justify it to your clients. The moment you start justifying, it erodes consumer confidence because it seems like *you're* not confident in why they should choose you over the competition.

Another thing I'll mention is that competition doesn't just come from the big corporations who are just getting the hint that green is good. Every green business, no matter how small, has competition from other small businesses who sell very similar products and have a very similar mission. I'm certainly not the only designer in the world who works with women entrepreneurs or with green businesses - I've met and become friends with some who could be considered my direct competition. This is why differentiation beyond green is so important - you're not the only green company in the world, and even more rarely are you the only green company who sells XYZ.

Green Design: Where did that paper come from?

Yesterday, at a seminar on FSC certification and paper held by Kirkwood Printing, several paper companies and a representative of the FSC (Forestry Stewardship Council) got together to discuss paper's impact on the environment. The discussion focused around such issues as responsible forestry, the paper companies' renewable energy initiatives, and why recycled paper isn't always the greenest option (1. there isn't enough fiber to meet demand; 2. the fibers downgrade over repeated recycling, which means you have to add new content to make it strong enough; 3. the recycled content gets sourced from all over the place). But all of this helped me realize something rather striking: a piece of paper's carbon footprint goes a lot deeper than the paper company itself.

This is the deal: Papermaking isn't just "have tree-make paper." It involves cutting down the tree, turning it into pulp, making paper from the pulp and then distributing the paper. Each of these steps requires a seperate set of trucks driving to a separate facility where each step happens, and most paper companies don't handle every step of the process. They buy their pulp from an outside source, which means that the pulp needs to be shipped to them, after being shipped from the forest. But for the life of me, I can't figure out where it gets shipped FROM.

Finch paper and Cascade (who specializes in recycled) was the only company at the event yesterday that mentioned that they source locally. Cascade actually collects and pulps the paper themselves for their sheets (they're in Quebec). Finch owns the forests that provide much of its pulp, and they buy the rest from small landowners in the New England area (mostly Maine and Vermont). Crane's, Mohawk, Monadnock, Neenah and Sappi were also there (among others), but they didn't have time to speak to the issue in detail. Although many of the companies' sites have extensive information about their environmental stewardship (and most are doing some seriously impressive stuff), I can't seem to find information specifically about where they buy their pulp.

What all of this means is that we now have yet another consideration as green designers: not only do we need to think about how much recycled content, where the paper itself comes from, etc. but we have to think further back along the supply chain: where did the pulp come from? Where were the trees harvested from? How were the rights of the workers and inhabitants of those forests impacted?

FSC certification helps with this by making sure that the forests paper comes from are being managed sustainably, and with respect to the rights of the workers and inhabitants of the forests. But what about the carbon footprint of the two steps prior to paper becoming paper? How can we make sure our paper is coming from responsibly-managed forests while also minimizing the carbon footprint all the way down the supply chain?

I don't have an answer. But I want one.

By the way, what can you do when you're choosing a paper for your next project? Here's a couple of ideas:

• Find paper companies that are as local to you as possible, and look for sheets that are FSC-certified, preferably with a significant amount of postconsumer recycled content.
• If you can, talk to the paper company about where they get the materials for their paper.
• Explore alternative-fiber papers, like cotton, kenaf, sugarcane and bamboo. These have their own carbon-footprint issues (after all, they don't grow sugar in New England, right?), but much of the alternative fiber used in these papers is taking material directly out of the landfill. Crane's sources its cotton from textile industry byproduct (i.e. cuttings that can't be used), and Neenah's sugarcane pulp (in the Environment line) comes from the material left over from the sugar refining process.
• Talk to your printer about what mills are closest to your area, and ask them for advice on the best sheet to use for your project.

Palm and E-Waste

Recently, I ran into an issue with my Palm TX. I'd been having issues syncing it with my Daylite software for weeks, and finally it just stopped. No reason, just stopped. When I tried to reset it, it stopped again. When I did a hard reset, it stopped again. Just froze. With this little bar flashing across the top.

After trying a number of things to get it to work, I called Palm to see about repairing it, and the lovely customer service representative informed me that if I wanted a repair, since I hadn't bought the extended warranty when I purchased the Palm two years ago, would cost me $150.

$150. About $100 less than just buying a new one.

Now here's my issue: what kind of message is this sending? You create a product that's going to fail around two years after you buy it, and then charge almost as much to repair it as it would cost to just buy a new one? In my mind, you're basically telling the consumer "we really don't care about the e-waste that's filling up the landfills; we just want you to keep buying our products." It's creating a situation where the average consumer is just going to say "forget it, I'll just buy a new one." Good for the company's profit margin, maybe - but bad for the environment.

In my mind, we need to find more incentives to repair instead of replace. We need things that last longer, not things that break down and have to be replaced after a couple of years.

For the record, I had to replace my Palm with a Blackberry Pearl - mostly in the interest of combining my phone with my organizer, and also in the interest of moving away from Palm products that weren't working with my computer. But I am using earth911 to find a place to recycle my Palm.

Whole Foods to Stop Offering Plastic Bags

A friend of mine forwarded me this article by the New York Times which indicates that Whole Foods (where I just picked up some stuff today, in fact) will stop offering plastic bags to their customers by Earth Day, April 22, 2008.

From the article:

The Whole Foods Market chain said Tuesday that it would stop offering plastic grocery bags, giving customers instead a choice between recycled paper or reusable bags.

A rising number of governments and retailers are banning plastic bags, or discouraging their use, because of concerns about their environmental impact. San Francisco banned plastic bags last year unless they are of a type that breaks down easily. China announced a crackdown on plastic bags a few weeks ago, while other governments, including New York City’s, are making sure retailers offer plastic bag recycling.

The rest of the article is here.

For me, this is great news. Plastic bags are notoriously difficult to recycle, and although many supermarkets will take them back for recycling, not enough communities actually have recycling facilities for these types of bags, which means that many of them (despite our best intentions) don't actually GET recycled. So go Whole Foods!

I just hope that this will entice people to bring their own bags more often.

Dani Nordin in the Huffington Post

As part of the Ladies Who Launch series on the Huffington Post, I shared the REAL reason I started the zen kitchen, and my thoughts on entrepreneurship and sustainability.

An excerpt:

For me, "freedom, control and flexibility" means a number of things. Of course, it's important for me to wear what I want to work -- but it's also important for me to take on projects that truly appeal to me, and to work with people that I genuinely like. Not only does this result in better work for my clients, it just makes life a lot nicer. It's also important to me that my business fits around my life -- not the other way around.

The full text is here.

Avoiding "Green Marketing Myopia"

In a followup to my recent post about whether being green is enough of a reason to hire someone or buy a product, I happened across this great article on what the author calls "avoiding green marketing myopia."

In other words, people won't buy a product JUST because it's green. They have to LIKE it, too. So your marketing messaging should, yes, include credible information on how/why your product is green, but it also has to answer the ultimate consumer question: "what's in it for me?"

A quick excerpt:

Green marketing must satisfy two objectives: Improved environmental quality and customer satisfaction. Misjudging either or overemphasizing the former at the expense of the latter is what can be called "green marketing myopia."

In 1960, Theodore Levitt introduced the concept of "marketing myopia" in a famous Harvard Business Review article that is still studied by business students. In it, he characterized the common pitfall of companies' tunnel focus on "managing products" (i.e., product features, functions, and efficient production) rather than "meeting customers' needs" (i.e., adapting to consumer expectations, anticipating future desires).

Levitt warned that a corporate preoccupation with products rather than consumer needs was doomed to failure because consumers select products and new innovations that offer benefits they desire.

Similarly, many green products have failed because of marketers' myopic focus on their products' "greenness" over the broader expectations of consumers or other market players (such as regulators or activists).

You can read the full article here. It's really quite interesting.

So what are your thoughts on the subject?

Green Design Dialogues at Green Options

Green Design Dialogues on Green Options

Recently, myself and a bunch of other designers got together for Green Design Dialogues, an article series that my fellow HOWie Megan Prusynski is putting together for the green blog Green Options.

Along with myself, Bryn Mooth from HOW magazine, Eric Benson from renourish. Eric Karjaluoto from smashLAB and Design Can Change, Jess Sand from Roughstock Studios, and Megan talked about our experiences with green design, as well as our thoughts on where design needs to go in order to really head in the right direction.

A quick excerpt from the article:

Each designer's journey to sustainability is unique, and we've all had our stumbling blocks along the way. We discussed that each person approaches green living and green design differently, making different tradeoffs and decisions. It was certainly apparent to all of us that our industry was changing, and the green design movement was certainly getting traction. Eric K suggested that the surge of interest in green design stems from An Inconvenient Truth. What began as a grassroots movement has become a mainstream dialogue that is leading to action and change.

Check out the full article here.

"Being Green" as a Marketing Tool: is it Enough?

The other week's discussion of Dreamhost's decision to purchase carbon offsets being marketing-driven got me thinking about a recent discussion I had with Mike Harder, one of the founders of Boloco (which, by the way, is doing some really cool things) about the whole idea of marketing oneself as a green company. The question raised: is being green enough of a reason to convince people to use your company? Oddly enough, I don't think so.

Here's the thing: the zen kitchen is a green company with a fairly strong social mission, and I want to work with companies that have similar values and missions, both as a service provider and as a customer. But beyond the values lies another key component which, in fact, actually comes BEFORE the company's mission and values - do I like what the company does? Are they providing a product or service that a) I genuinely need, and b) is good quality?

The same holds true for my clients' expectations of my business; I can be as green as I want and they love me for that, but the main reason clients work with me is because a) I'm a great designer, and b) I get really excited about their business, and they pick up on that. It's that extra level of commitment to their needs that gets me the business - the green thing is just gravy, and helps me weed out the clients that aren't in line with where I see the zen kitchen going.

Mind you, I'm still green, and I wouldn't have it any other way.