These Come From Trees and New Roads

Ben from New Roads School took us up on our offer about complimentary These Come From Trees stickers for educational institutions.

All we asked in exchange was that he clear it with his facilities department, and that he send us some pictures when he had them up.

Well, the first pictures showed up today, and I'm happy to say this is the first time I've seen a TCFT sticker up in a chemistry lab!

Right on Ben!

Aragon High School Deploys These Come From Trees Stickers

Aragon High School in San Mateo, California has an "Environmental Impact Committee" the head of which came across the These Come From Trees blog. Jason reached out to us, asking if he could get a fixed number of stickers for a set price, rather than buying a bundle, because the Committee is on a tight budget. We, of course, offered the school complimentary stickers.
Jason has promised to report back on how the project proceeds at Aragon. And in the meantime, if there are any other schools out there, that would like to deploy These Come From Trees stickers into their bathrooms, the same offer we made Aragon applies: complimentary stickers for your bathrooms, to help your school be that much greener!

Ooops! Forgot about this one!

No sooner do I post about the benefits of Creative Commons licensing and an idea like These Come From Trees, than I remember that These Come From Trees had another meaningful open source moment a few months ago.

I got an email from this nice woman named Dina, who lives in Kuwait. She wanted to implement something like These Come From Trees, after reading about it some friendly blog who linked to us.

At first she bought some stickers, but then, a month later, circled back saying that while the English language ones were all well and good, she'd love to translate them to Arabic.

I provided her with the Photoshop EPS files, and she did her magic. This was the result:


I can't say for the life of me what they say, but they sure are pretty. Hopefully they're catchy too, and jibe with the basic tenets of the These Come From Trees project, which is that a non-judgmental, helpful reminder at the moment of consumption can really help reduce down the amount of unintentional waste we produce.

These Come From Trees has another copyleft experience!

Thanks to good old Creative Commons licensing, the These Come From Trees meme keeps spreading on its merry way.

The latest place it's shown up? Italy.

Luca emailed me asking if it was cool to use the logo and the tagline, and the general idea. I, of course, told him to go crazy, as long as he cited the original source.

Well, he has certainly taken it and run with it.

These Come From Trees stickers now add another language and distribution locale to its list, all the better for unintentional paper goods overconsumption the world over, eh?

Of course, I had to tell him in our email exchange that Venice's Marco Polo airport already has a couple TCFT stickers...sadly, not in Italian. He says he'll do his best to rectify that situation!

Social Media and Conservation

I'll be the first to admit I'm kinda a geek when it comes to using technology to do things day to day. You can see that on this project, in that it has its own blog, uses Paypal for payment processing, Google Analytics to see who's coming and going, Facebook to spread the word virally, and Technorati to see who's linking to this blog.

One of the big pieces of technology I was hoping to leverage is tagging on the photo sharing site Flickr. One of my favorite things on Flickr is the RSS feed I have of the tag "thisisbroken". People all over the world can post up a picture of something that's poorly designed, poorly thought out, poorly executed, or what have you, and tag it "thisisbroken" and I have subscribed to an RSS feed of all those pictures. I get to see the collective wisdom of people who are involved enough (or, hey, I'll admit it, geeky enough) to take a picture of something like that, and share it.

Similarly, I wanted These Come From Trees to be able to do that as well. As you can see, there's a Flickr widget on the right side bar of this blog that has a feed of the most recent pics tagged with "TCFT" (conveniently enough, These Come From Trees is the only project using that tag! It's good to be an early adopter sometimes....).

Well, up till now these pictures had mainly been me taking snaps of These Come From Trees stickers I had put up, using my Treo, and then text messaging them to Flickr.

Today, we had a milestone! Someone besides me tagged a picture "TCFT"! In this case, it was a picture of a trashcan overflowing with paper towels, taken in what looks like Denmark, by a gentleman from Germany:



I find that really cool! I hope to see more pictures showing up on Flickr with the "TCFT" tag in the future!

10,000 stickers and counting!

Hey everyone! We've been working on posting up stickers around the bay area, but wanted to share a fun stat with you.

We recently sent out our 10,000th sticker to a These Come From Trees project participant! That's awesome. Every time I put one up, I remember that that sticker on the paper towel dispenser will save more paper that day than it took to make, and in a whole year will save up to 100 pounds of paper--one whole tree.

It saves the store owner money, saves the earth some trees, and helps educate each other in our day to day when it's easy to forget where things really come from.

Thanks for making this a success!

These Come From Trees in the Enterprise

Like referred to in an earlier post, I started a new position at VMware recently. Well, given the fact that VMware's virtualization products help enterprises consolidate their server farms, which is a huge energy saver, in that each server probably costs about $500 in power to run a year, I figured that the company might be open to some "green" innovation of a less technologically advanced sort.

So I set up a meeting with Wally Hong, VMware's head of real estate and facilities, to brief him on the These Come From Trees project, and see if there was a place for the project in the VMware mix.

Well, the meeting went great. VMware's in the process of building a new campus too, called "Promontory" which Wally shared with me has a goal of being a truly green campus. So I figured that was a great opportunity. It's unclear what is happening at Promontory in terms of paper towel dispensers. If the bathrooms had yet to be outfitted, I encouraged Wally to use the sensor-activated paper towel dispensers, in that the "time out" they have keeps people from being able to pull a bunch of towels in quick succession. However, if they had already outfitted the bathrooms with "old school" dispensers (like in VMware's current building stock), I encouraged him to consider the stickers as a useful retrofit.

I told him about the idea behind the project, inspired by watching people eat at In N Out (mildly creepy, yes), and how it had evolved, and the preliminary results we got from testing at a local coffee shop.

I also encouraged him to pay attention the next time he was in the bathroom at how many paper towels are used per wash. My non-scientific observations have resulted in the same rough average of three towels per washer at VMware as at movie theaters, coffee shops, and restaurants. I have a feeling it really has to do with the ease with which C-fold paper towels can be pulled from the dispenser.

Anyway, we ended the meeting with me giving Wally some stickers, and him saying he would pass along the idea to his report who is in charge of facilities. So we'll see what happens next. I'll be sure to post about it here.

There's a big opportunity, to be sure. Based on what I saw, three paper towels a trip to the restroom, and maybe three trips a day per person, times 250 work days in a year, times 2500 people is 6 million paper towels a year. Wow!

A "pack" of C-fold towels has 175 sheets in it, so we're talking 35k "packs" per year. There are 20 packs in a case, so 1700 cases. Assuming we see a similar reduction of 15% to what we saw in our pilot test, that's 270 cases VMware could save a year.

Each case weighs 20 pounds, so that's around 5k pounds of paper towels. Good lord, that's 2.5 TONS! And based on our rule of thumb that you get 150 pounds of paper out of a tree, VMware could save 35 trees-worth of paper a year by deploying "These Come From Trees" stickers in their restrooms. Pretty cool.

And this is just one company with 2500 employees. If we get some traction at VMware, look out Cisco, Oracle, eBay, Adobe, and Google....!

Anyway, like I said, when I know more, I'll post it here.