These Come From Trees Blog

University of Toronto Deploying 10,000 These Come From Trees Stickers

2010-11-29T22:06:00.000-08:00

We recently blogged about how the University of Washington is deploying 3,000 These Come From Trees stickers across its campus to help reduce paper towel usage.

Well, we totally forgot that earlier this summer, the University of Toronto purchased 10,000 stickers for use by their central facilities office to deploy throughout campus. How did we go and forget to blog that? So we're fixing it with this post.

According to an email conversation I just had with one of their facilities staff, the deployment went well, and they are happy with the results so far. I'm hoping to get some accurate numbers on usage impact, and hoping that it shows up in the 30% reduction range that we've seen before!

University of Washington Deploying 3,000 These Come From Trees Stickers; $180,000 a year in paper towel costs

2010-11-06T09:34:00.000-07:00

Sarah Keller, professor at University of Washington, along with the University's Earth Club, are working with the administration and facilities department to deploy 3,000 These Come From Trees stickers throughout the school.

There's a really great article in UW's newspaper about the project.

Some notes from the article: they're starting with campus classroom / lab buildings for now with 2,600 dispensers, as a pilot project. And last year, those 2,600 dispensers were responsible for $180,000 worth of paper towel consumption.

Very cool to see more and more institutions of higher education get behind this (like Seton Hall's project). Professor Keller, as a scientist, has promised to work with the facilities administration to track the impact of the program, so we can report it here! Hopefully it's in the neighborhood of the 30% reduction that has been seen by others.

It would be awesome if UW saved $60,000 in paper towel costs as a result of these stickers.

Seton Hall University's These Come From Trees Video

2010-03-04T13:28:00.000-08:00

The Ecology club at Seton Hall University just published a video about their These Come From Trees deployment at the school. It seems the Ecology club worked to deploy TCFT stickers across bathroom paper towel dispenser and napkin dispensers, and then documented the project!

What's more, they did some interviewing of people exiting restrooms to document the impact of the stickers. Very cool guys!

While there have been hundreds of higher education and professional organizations who use These Come From Trees stickers (well, in addition to thousands of individuals!), this is the first video we've seen!

Check out the video:

These Come From Trees goes to Turkey!

2010-01-24T16:22:00.001-08:00

Kemal Hadimli emailed me the other day, noting that he had seen These Come From Trees stickers up around the Google corporate campus (They're one of the hundreds of businesses that use TCFT stickers to reduce their paper towel consumption).

He was going back to Turkey, and wanted to see about getting the stickers localized into Turkish.

We sent him the proper files in order to translate them, and in no time, he had them translated, but even had his own website set up.

Way to go Kemal! Your Turkish translation joins the Italian and Arabic versions of TCFT stickers!

These Come From Trees in Germany: A Twitpic

2009-08-23T14:34:00.001-07:00

Was checking out mentions of "These Come From Trees" on Twitter today (here's the search I was using), and lo and behold, saw this great TwitPic post by Justin Küblbeck of Germany. Apparently some enterprising person in Germany posted these about...including on a toilet paper dispenser. That's commitment! Wow.

We don't do as good a job as we could in documenting the international locales that TCFT stickers end up at, but suffice it to say, roughly 15% of sticker purchases are from outside the US, even non-english speaking countries.

Off the top of my head, I can recall the Canada, UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Indonesia, Australia, and Brazil. I should go back and look at the Paypal reports and Google Analytics traffic, and do a post on the international footprint to date...

We haven't had anyone localize These Come From Trees stickers into German, like they have been for Italian and Arabic, but if anyone would like to, let us know, and we're happy to provide the Photoshop originals!

Wow! 29% paper towel use reduction at Hunt Valley Elementary School!

2009-08-22T17:29:00.000-07:00

About a year ago, an enterprising teacher from Hunt Valley Elementary School, named Ben James reached out to us to participate in the These Come From Trees K - 12 Education Challenge, and to apply for some complimentary These Come From Trees stickers for posting up around at their school.

Ben had seen TCFT stickers posted at the Denver Aiport (yay Denver TCFT-ers!), and was inspired to investigate on his own. He ended up posting TCFT stickers on all the paper towel dispensers in all the classrooms and bathrooms at Hunt Valley Elementary (a member of the Fairfax County School District in Virginia) and emailed the other teachers letting them know what the stickers were for, and to introduce them to the kids. (That's a picture of the dispenser in Ben's classroom.)

A year later...18 trees and $840 in paper towels saved!

Well, wouldn't you know it, Ben emailed us the other day to let us know that they were doing a post-analysis on their conservation efforts, in particular, looking at how their paper towel conservation worked.

The year before Ben posted the TCFT stickers, Hunt Valley used 129 cases of paper towels--with eight rolls per case and six pounds per roll, that's 6200 pounds of paper!

This year, the school ended up only using 95 cases--34 fewer than last year! Even better, 34 cases of paper towels equals out to 1800 pounds of paper towels. With about 100 pounds of paper coming out of a given paper pulp tree, that means that Hunt Valley saved around 18 trees worth of paper in one year, with the help of TCFT stickers. Not bad, guys!

What's more, according to Dotty Lin, Assistant Principal at Hunt Valley, that savings of 34 cases meant real dollars and cents too... $840 in total they didn't have to spend on paper towels. Not bad for 50 stickers--which were free to Hunt Valley as a K - 12 educational organization. (But even if they had paid...$10 for 50 stickers turned into $840 in paper towel savings in a year...wow! Not a bad deal!)

Real world testing, shared.

This well-documented case study was great news, because our own testing that provided the "15%" number that we quote on the site was a pretty lightweight, week-long test at a coffee shop--and while we've wanted to do a more meaningful study to gauge impact of TCFT stickers, well, the day job keeps getting in the way!

This data from the folks at Hunt Valley is great proof of These Come From Trees stickers contributing to a successful conservation strategy, whether at a elementary school, high school, higher education institution, or business organization!

I would encourage you to forward this blog post to your facilities team at your office, school, and so on, and see if they can't use TCFT stickers to reduce unintentional overuse of paper towels at your place of work / study!

University of Alaska Fairbanks Chilling Paper Towel Waste with TCFT Stickers

2009-03-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

I've never been to Alaska, though I very much want to go. There's something really attractive about the wild beauty of the last true frontier of the US.

In the meantime, though, it seems that I can take some pride in the fact that a whole passel of These Come From Trees stickers will be making their way up to the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

UAF already has a large Go Green Initiative, complete with its own website. When the head of dining services at the University saw a TCFT sticker up in a bathroom in his local coffee shop (posted, no doubt, by a guerrilla TCFT participant!), he ended up back on this blog, where he was able to read up on the the long (and growing!) list of Universities (and businesses, and K-12 schools!) deploying TCFT stickers.

He sent an email to the head of facilities for the whole University, and just like that, UAF will be posting TCFT stickers on all of their paper towel dispensers, throughout the University. How cool is that?

Talk about a perfect case study of how "It only takes one"--a single sticker in the right place, in front of the right person can totally blow things wide open!

When I finally make it up to Alaska, it'll make me happy to know that TCFT is already thriving up there in the great white north.

West Virginia University Deploying 1200 These Come From Trees Stickers Across Campus

2009-03-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to do a better job of posting examples of These Come From Trees being used in the wild, whether by individuals, companies, or higher education institutions.

One big success story that I've been remiss in noting has been West Virginia University. They were one of the earlier examples of a higher ed organization making a concerted effort to deploy stickers across their entire campus, and I want to recognize their efforts!

Barbara Angeletti, a facilities coordinator at West Virgina University, was tipped off by some stickers she saw up around campus, doubtless posted by an enterprising student doing his part. She started off picking up 200 stickers to deploy, and keeps coming back for more, currently up to 1200 stickers across campus.

Barbara noted to us that this is just one part of their larger initiative to green the campus, and that they're tracking things to see what sort of impact their various programs make. We'll be looking forward to hearing more about it!

Tulane Medical School Deploying These Come From Trees Stickers

2009-03-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

Tulane Medical School out in New Orleans, Louisiana is doing their part to save trees while saving lives.

Niels Olson, class of 2009, bought up a couple hundred These Come From Trees stickers for use at the medical school, and has reported that they've been gladly welcomed onto campus, and even better, match nicely with the green of the University's logo. Great fit!

They join dozens of other institutes of higher education like Stanford, and others in helping students, faculty, and staff to pause for a second and consider the resource they're about to consume.

Read more about other organizations, from companies to K-12 schools, and, of course, lots of individuals, who are spreading the word!

Stanford Blood Center Uses These Come From Trees Sticker to Stanch Paper Towel Waste

2009-03-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

I like to keep an eye on which organizations show up in the TCFT inbox, and the other day, one that's near and dear to my heart showed up.

The Stanford Blood Center is a subsidiary of Stanford Medical School, and has a couple locations around Palo Alto. It's also where I give blood as often as my schedule allows (every 8 weeks or so).

I like to do apheresis, where they pull your blood out, run it through a centrifuge to filter out plasma and platelets, which are retained, and then return your red blood cells. The plasma and platelets are really important for burn victims, folks with immune problems, newborns, etc.

One reason why I really like apheresis, is that even though it takes longer (an hour and a half), you get more "bang for your buck" than just donating a pint of whole blood (30 minutes), because an hour's worth of aphersis can result in something like 10x the amount of "blood product" as a pint of whole blood.

As folks who are familiar with These Come From Trees, I'm a fan of technology that force-multiplies individual effort. And plus, I just sit there doing email one-handed on the free wifi they provide at the Blood Center, and time flies! They have a location that's right down the street from VMware, so it's a slam dunk for me.

Anyway, I digrees. Michelle Harmon, a staffer at the Blood Center, recently ran across a TCFT sticker in the ladies' room at the Tied House Brewery in downtown San Jose. She liked the sticker, remembered the TheseComeFromTress.com domain, and ended up on the blog, where she read all about, and loved what she saw.

So she ended up ordering 200 stickers for deploying across their three locations to help make the Blood Center a greener place. How's that for a happy ending?

It Only Takes One

2009-03-16T21:57:00.000-07:00

The other day I blogged about how someone had noticed that there were These Come From Trees stickers up in the Boston Logan Airport bathrooms.

What I hadn't realized that the person who blogged it, Tamara Krinsky, had her own initiative she was popularizing: "Change the Margins" or a campaign to mildly expand the default margins on Microsoft Word documents to marginally reduce the use of paper. And Tamara's campaign has gotten some great publicity, as has her blog, which helped These Come From Trees when she blogged about the project.

It Only Takes One...The Right One

But what's especially fascinating to me, is that this kind of serendipity, the fact that some nameless These Come From Trees enthusiast out in Boston took the initiative, and as a result, Tamara Krinsky saw it, and spread it with her platform.

This is what's so inspiring to me: while I blog here and there about organizations that are picking up thousands of stickers to deploy in their bathrooms, it's the individual These Come From Trees team members out there, spreading the stickers onesie, twosie across the the world who are doing the amazing work.

You never know when that one sticker you put up in Starbucks, or your favorite restaurant, will be read by the Director of Facilities of some Fortune 500 company, or a reporter, or someone with the power to broadcast the message louder and and broader than ever.

NVIDIA Accelerates Conservation with These Come From Trees Stickers

2009-03-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

NVIDIA makes the fastest, baddest, raddest graphics processors on the market. They're the ones responsible for making games and 3D on your computer look realistic and, most important, FAST!

In fact, when Apple started including NVIDIA graphics chips in more and more of their Macs in October, it made my day job as VMware Fusion's lead evangelist a lot more interesting.

So it was particularly exciting back in December to see the name NVIDIA in the These Come From Trees inbox. Sure enough, NVIDIA's facilities department is always looking for ways of reducing their waste consumption, and were tipped off via an employee suggestion box, and some "rogue" stickers that had started going up in the campus bathrooms by unnamed contributors. Thank you, anonyous NVIDIA employees!

I checked in with them the other day, and sure enough, they've deployed all 200 stickers that they purchased across 12 buildings on NVIDIA's campus.

They join the ranks of other technology companies like SanDisk, Eloqua, Yahoo, Google, eBay and others using These Come From Trees on their campus.

You can read about other companies using These Come From Trees stickers here.

San Jose Tech Museum Greening Bathrooms with TCFT Stickers

2009-03-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

The San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation is this wonderful museum in downtown San Jose that chronicles the history of all things technology.

It turns out that they are having an Earth Week celebration that focuses on Green Technology coming up in early April, in honor of Earth Day. As part of this, they're looking at ways to use green technology to help green up the museum.

Apparently this also includes the relatively low-technology of These Come From Trees stickers, which they just purchased 200 of to post in all their bathrooms!

The curriculum organizer became familiar with TCFT stickers through seeing them posted up around her community in coffee shops and restaurants, from some unnamed TCFT participant. Like we always say: it only takes one!

Although, truth be told, These Come From Trees stickers are a fun, effective, mix of low and high technology. Low technology, in that the sticker is simply printing, language, and images. High technology, in that there is a call to action on the stickers to "Spread the word! Get yours at TheseComeFromTrees.com", which points folks back to this blog.

We actually see how much traffic comes to this blog via people typing in "TheseComeFromTrees.com" and also Googling for "These Come From Trees" or "These Come From Trees Stickers" and it's quite a bit! So clearly that part of the sticker is working!

Once on this blog (high technology, itself!), they can read all about the project, how it came to be, and how not only individuals are engaged, but also hundreds of companies who are deploying These Come From Trees stickers at their own offices.

Add to that the fact that we can take online Paypal payments to make it easy for the community to fund this program, with little to no human involvement (we didn't have to get any grants to get this off the ground: the participants funded it!), and you've got quite a bit of technology being used to force-multiply a single idea into something much larger.

So I suppose the TCFT stickers at the Tech Museum will be both functional AND an exhibit in themselves!

Clorox Renews Their These Come From Trees Initiative

2009-03-14T14:33:00.000-07:00

A little less than a year ago, I blogged about how Clorox had purchased 300 These Come From Trees stickers for deploying at their Oakland, California campus.

At the time, the gentleman in charge of the program noted that this was a "pilot project" to see how it worked, and that if they were happy with it, they would look to expand the program to other Clorox locations outside of Oakland.

I was very pleased the other day when I saw another Clorox order for 400 TCFT stickers sitting in the TCFT inbox. It looks like the program is moving ahead nicely!

Clorox was one of the first companies that we blogged about deploying These Come From Trees stickers, and since then, hundreds of companies (not to mention thousands of individual guerrilla stickerers) have purchased These Come From Trees stickers for use in their own offices.

As most folks know, Clorox is a chemical company, and those typically aren't looked at as very "green." However, Clorox looks like it's making strides, both in terms of greening their corporate campus through programs like These Come From Trees, and even through their own product mix, like the relatively new "Green Works" line of products that are positioned as lower impact on the environment.

Stanford University Deploying 1200 These Come From Trees Stickers

2009-03-14T14:23:00.000-07:00

I got the most wonderful note the other day from Jon McConnell of Stanford University's Haas Center for Public Service.

It turns out that an enterprising student who had seen guerrilla stickers up around Palo Alto, and here and there in some dorms around Stanford, applied for a mini-grant from the Haas Center to purchase and deploy These Come From Trees stickers across the Stanford campus.

That student and others will be working to deploy These Come From Trees stickers in bathrooms all across campus, from the dorms to the lecture halls to libraries and more. They ordered 1200 to start off.

This is especially exciting for me, in that I graduated from Stanford back in 2002. So this is a fun little home-coming for the These Come From Trees project...

Next time I'm back on the Farm, I'll be looking forward to seeing TCFT stickers up and about!

Stanford joins a whole host of other organizations deploying These Come From Trees stickers broadly, like Clorox, SanDisk, Palo Alto Medical Foundation, and many more.

These Come From Trees for Eco-minded Citizens!

2009-01-01T19:16:00.000-08:00

The original goal of this experiment was to create a way to politely, and subtly remind folks about accidental overconsumption. But one of the big parts of getting that message out to the world, was making sure that the message was built to spread by individuals.

How Individuals Make These Come From Trees Go

We like to call this a "guerrilla public service announcement." Why? Because it's a public service announcement that is spread by you.

A single sticker, here and there, which then tips of the next eco-citizen to the project. That eco-citizen then gets his own set, and the cycle continues!

And even though businesses and Universities and even K-12 schools are starting to get with the program, the main engine of this experiment is the individual who picks up 20, 50, 100, or even 200 stickers to put up in his own neck of the woods.

That's how new people find out about the project: by you putting them up in your neighborhood!

What can you do, as an individual?

Around town: Put them up in the restrooms at your favorite coffee shops and restaurants. It will help save the owner hundreds of dollars a year, while reducing needless waste. Win-win!

Airports, movie theaters, and other public places are great too! Anywhere with lots of people going through them is a great place make a difference by spreading the word.

At work: TCFT work great at the office too, both in the bathroom and on the copier. If you're feeling really enterprising, maybe even email the facilities staff, showing them all the companies who are deploying TCFT stickers across their entire business.

It only takes a single email in the right inbox to take TCFT stickers from a dozen around town, to thousands worldwide at a Fortune 500 company like Clorox.

With your friends: Give stickers to your friends to put up in their town and office too.

Online: Join our Facebook page and post pictures of your stickers in the wild on Flickr.

Why does your participation matter?

It spreads the word. We see it all the time, where someone purchases stickers in a given zip code that has never showed up in our inbox before, and then all of a sudden over the coming months, suddenly, that zip code shows up, more and more. That pioneering TCFT participant plants the seed, which spreads in his area.

Join the movement, grab some stickers, and let's get going!

These Come From Trees and K-12 Schools

2009-01-01T18:44:00.000-08:00

The idea of "education" is a big piece of These Come From Trees. That is to say, at the end of the day, the individual stickers themselves are a quick, polite piece of instruction that help us all say "Oh, yeah, that's right. How much of these do I really need?" So it only makes sense that These Come From Trees stickers and schools would make a great team!

The These Come From Trees Education Challenge

A little more than a year ago, an enterprising student from Aragon High School up here in the Bay Area sent an email to us asking if we could provide him with complimentary stickers, as his school might not have the budget to buy stickers (and he, as a student, might not be able to navigate the ins and outs of purchasing via the school).

We thought it was a great idea, and not only did we set him up, but we opened up the offer more broadly to any K-12 organization interested. We call it the These Come From Trees Education Challenge.

All we ask is that the interested participant:

Figure out how many stickers they need for their school (How many paper towel dispensers in how many bathrooms? How many photocopiers?)
Make sure that they get permission from their principal or facilities administrator.
Submit your information using this web form to get the ball rolling!

Since then, we've had hundreds of schools reach out to us to take advantage of this Challenge. With great success, with reports of up 30% reduction in paper towel usage!

Lesson Plans for These Come From Trees

At the same time, there are some opportunities that can take a good idea, like These Come From Trees at your school, and make it better.

I asked some of the teachers who had taken advantage of our Education Challenge what they did to make the experience even more educational, and these were some of the ideas that they came back with. Maybe you can take advantage at your own school?

Document your deployment of TCFT Stickers: Take pictures of your class deploying them. Maybe even video. Put together a video of your class deploying the stickers and publish it to YouTube. We'll embed it in this blog!
Or even create your own blog: Take the pictures you took, and publish them on your own blog. We'll link to you!
What about making a lesson out of the stickers, even aside from the deployment?
Conservation: Do a lesson around how "Reduce" can be as big a part of conservation as "Recycle." What else can be reduced even before we have a chance to recycle it?
Math: Can you do experiments around how much paper the stickers are saving? Test before and after they go up. Do estimations of how many paper towels get used at your school, in your district, in your state. Do estimations of how many paper towels could be saved in your school, district, and state. How many trees is that?
Business: Explain the idea of "return on investment" and how using some paper now (the sticker) can save more later. How long until the investment is paid back? How about for your whole school?

The more detailed writeup is available below. Most of all, let us know what you did, by emailing us at thesecomefromtrees@gmail.com or by commenting on this post! And when you're ready to put up These Come From Trees stickers at your school, let us know!

These Come From Trees Lesson Plans These Come From Trees Lesson Plans petekazanjy Lesson plans for using These Come From Trees in a classroom.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Science & Engineerin How-To Guides & DIY trees come

SanDisk Deploying These Come From Trees Stickers at Campus

2008-09-03T18:37:00.000-07:00

The other day a pretty impressive brand name showed up in the "These Come From Trees" paypal email bin: SanDisk.

For those of you who need refreshing, SanDisk makes the memory cards that make your and my cell phones run. I have an 8GB SanDisk chip in my mini HD video camera I got recently, and I love it!

One of SanDisk's facilities staff picked up 200 These Come From Trees stickers, and when emailed asking what they're planning on doing with them, he mentioned that they are going to deploy them across the campus as part of a larger greening intitiative they're working on.

Very cool!

You can see more examples of organizations using These Come From Trees stickers to conserve paper at their offices here.

Heart on Your Sleeve Clothing [Hearts] These Come From Trees

2008-07-13T21:36:00.000-07:00

The other day I was quickly looking through the purchases of These Come From Trees stickers (as I typically do, before shooting the download off to our pick n pack) to see what domain names showed up in the purchasers, and my eye was caught by "@heartonyoursleeve.ca".

I gave a looksee at the website, and sure enough it turns out to be a "sustainable" boutique based in Toronto, Canada that focuses on locally produced, renewable clothing.

I dropped a quick note to the purchaser, owner of Heart on Your Sleeve, Natalie Stephenson, regarding what she intended to do with the stickers. Turns out, she's going to hand them out to people who shop at her boutique with each receipt, asking them to spread the word, in that people who shop at her store are likely to be the best placed to help evangelize.

What it comes down to is that Natalie is helping to turbocharge the concept of "it only takes one."

That is, a single sticker in the right place at the right time, gets the message in front of someone who can really do something to move the message on its way.

Natalie's doing her part to spread the word not just to individuals, but people who themselves are well placed to broadly spread the message. And that's pretty great.

These Come From Trees and New Roads

2008-07-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

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!

Flyte Enterprise Cleaning Services Helping Their Clients with These Come From Trees Stickers

2008-06-28T11:55:00.001-07:00

Flyte Enterprise of British Columbia, Canada is a janitorial and cleaning services company that provides products and services to hundreds of businesses around British Columbia.

But Darin Sherpit, Flyte's head of marketing, sees their business less about just selling products to businesses, but instead, providing them with the services they need to have a safe, healthy workplace.
One part of that is focusing on keeping things "green," whether that means using less harmful cleaning agents, or helping his clients reduce waste .

Darin found the These Come From Trees project by googling around, and approached us to see about being able to purchase a large number of stickers for deploying at all the bathrooms they service, and on all the paper towel dispensers that they sell.

If you think about this for a minute, this is a pretty impressive statement. The traditional business model of janitorial service companies is to charge for the service, and the products deployed at their clients, plus a markup. So on the face of it, deploying These Come From Trees stickers in clients bathrooms wouldn't seem to be in the best interest of a janitorial services company.

This was exactly the sort of conflict of interest that we had thought about when first conceiving of the project: the right people to be deploying this message are Georgia Pacific and Kimberly Clark--right on the paper towel dispenser!

It certainly is impressive to see Flyte looking long term in their relationships with their clients, and as a part of that, deploying These Come From Trees stickers to help their clients cut down on overuse of paper towels.

Palo Alto Medical Foundation Deploying 1000 These Come From Trees Stickers

2008-06-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

We've talked in the past about how it's not just coffee shops, bars, and restaurants that can benefit from "These Come From Trees" stickers, but commercial enterprises too.

The other day, we were emailed by Melissa Stai of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a large healthcare organization based in the California Bay Area.

As Melissa told it, the Foundation is always looking for ways to make its operations greener and more efficient, and when she was walking around the Stanford campus, she had seen a These Come From Trees sticker up in a departmental bathroom, and wanted to bring the benefits of These Come From Trees stickers to the Foundation.

PAMF has more than 50 buildings around the Bay Area, so they decided to buy 1000 These Come From Trees stickers to make sure they would get great coverage and get the most value out of their conservation efforts!

If there are any Palo Alto Medical Foundation clients out there, and the next time you swing by, you see a These Come From Trees sticker up in a bathroom, snap a pic with your cameraphone and email us!

"Pause Points" and Conservation

2008-06-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

Melissa over at the Better Living blog stumbled onto the These Come From Trees project the other day, and has some great commentary on These Come From Trees and the concept of a "pause point" or a moment wherein a person is brought back to the moment to make them briefly think about what they're about to do, rather than just mindlessly going about it.

She had recently read the book "Mindless Eating," which is all about how the human body and mind, and the restaurant industry, is geared to encourage accidental, "mindless" overeating.

Melissa drew the connection between the techniques related in that book to dial back unintentional overconsumption, and those that she implements in her own life (she puts her paper towels way up on top of the fridge to make it more difficult to get to, thus ensuring she really needs one before she grabs one), and the sort of gentle reminder provided by These Come From Trees stickers to create a "pause point."

She does a great job of summing it up here:

We all know that paper napkins and towels come from trees, just like we know we shouldn't eat an entire bag of potato chips. But not all of us are mindful all the time, and these stickers create a pause point for us - they provide a physical, visual cue which remind us to stop and think before proceeding with our intended action.

I also love her comments on the design and phrasing of the sticker, in that that was something we put a LOT of time and effort into:

I like the way the message is phrased; it's not saying "Hey, I can't believe you didn't bring your own cloth napkins, jerk, why are you destroying the environment by using these disposables?" Instead, it's just a gentle reminder to consider the resources consumed in the item about to be used.

Great comments Melissa. A friend of mine had recently read "Mindless Eating" and told me about it, but I didn't even draw the connection. Thanks for connecting the dots!

Check out the rest of the post here.

Kisco Senior Living Deploying 500 These Come From Trees Stickers

2008-06-24T12:56:00.000-07:00

Kisco Senior Living is the award-winning operator of more than two dozen senior living communities all over the United States.

Kisco recently purchased 500 These Come From Trees stickers to help them reduce paper waste in their bathrooms at their facilities.

As Kathleen Davis of Kisco puts it, "We are going to put these stickers on paper towel dispensers, as part of a broader greening initiative."

In addition to the These Come From Trees deployment, and an exhaustive recycling program, Kisco's accounts payable department has implemented a 100% paperless invoices, with scanning and email substituted in place, as has the payroll department.

It's great to see These Come From Trees gaining traction in the most unexpected places. We've always talked about how organizations of all sizes that operate bathrooms, cafeterias, and copiers, among other paper-consuming projects, could find value in These Come From Trees stickers.

I never even thought about how senior living communities are a great fit, but in retrospect, it makes perfect sense, for much of the same reasons why offices and dorms make sense: lots of people in one place, lots of paper towels, and repeated messaging.

We're really excited to see how this work out for Kisco, and what sort of paper reduction they see!

Eloqua Software Deploying These Come From Trees Stickers

2008-06-23T22:01:00.000-07:00

Eloqua makes marketing demand generation software that my company, VMware, uses.

Well, it was a total "small world" moment when Joel Rothman who works at Eloqua, emailed in after buying a stack of These Come From Trees stickers, asking if I still worked at VMware.

Apparently I had mentioned this in a previous blog post (which, wow Joel, you certainly read far back into the TCFT blog archives!) that I worked at VMware, and Joel knew that we were a client, and reached out.

The cool thing is, I just circled back with Joel, to see how things are going at Eloqua with their These Come From Trees stickers, and sure enough, he says they're up in all the bathrooms at the offices, and that people like them, and they're seeing an impact.

Let's hear it for low tech solutions helping out even high tech companies!

Logan Airport? Wow! Beantown Loves TCFT

2008-06-23T21:51:00.000-07:00

I just saw this in my Google Alerts for "These Come From Trees".

Tamara Kinsky flew in to Boston's Logan Airport, and when she went to the wash up in the bathroom...well...guess what:

After an exhausting 6 a.m. flight to Boston this past Friday, I decided to freshen up in the bathroom before heading out to rental car hell. Every paper towel dispenser had a sticker slapped on it that said "Remember...these come from trees." Got me to immediately cut down on my paper towel consumption.

Pretty cool! Glad to see that they work in airports too! Read all about Tamara's thoughts on the project in the rest of her post!

Clorox Deploying 300 These Come From Trees Stickers

2008-06-22T13:09:00.000-07:00

Clorox is a big household cleaning agent and chemical producer--an idea that doesn't really strike most people as being all that "green."

However, more and more they've been changing their tune it seems. They recently launched a line of plant-derived cleaning products called "Green Works" and have been sponsoring interesting "cleaning" and "greening" projects lately, like this really neat "dirt removal mural" project in San Francisco.

Within the Clorox's organization they're making changes too. They have a newly formed "Environmental Sustainability Office," located at their offices in Oakland, California.

Their office approached us, and ended up purchasing 300 These Come From Trees stickers to deploy at their corporate campuses all over the bay area.

Good thing These Come From Trees stickers are laminated to hold up to cleaning, because something tells me the Clorox bathrooms are pretty spic and span!

Let's hear it for a big old enterprise stretching its green muscles!

We have a new Facebook Page! Come be our "Friend"!

2008-06-22T12:43:00.001-07:00

I put together a new "These Come From Trees" Facebook page, to replace the Facebook Group that we were using before.

The goal behind doing this is that Facebook Pages allow people to become a "fan" of something, and when they do that, the fact that they did so shows up in their friends' "News Feed."

This project has benefited greatly from online viral transmission, and we'd like to keep that up.

So take a second, and become our "Fan" on facebook! Just click through, and look in the upper right hand part of the page for a link that says "Become a Fan."

Thanks!

Community Generated "These Come From Trees" Stickers

2008-06-22T11:54:00.000-07:00

I was in Noe Valley in San Francisco yesterday, and was surprised to see a handful of "Community-created" "These Come From Trees-style" reminders next to paper towel dispensers, napkin holders, and what not.

I have to be honest, I was pretty impressed by the level of artistry involved in some, and seeing them next to a These Come From Trees sticker made me really appreciate the difference between something that is designed for mass reproduction and scale (that is, the These Come From Trees sticker) and something that is done as a custom, one-off design.

I think both approaches really have their place and are valuable, and we've always said from the get go that when going through the design process of the These Come From Trees sticker, we kept store/coffee shop/restaurant owners in mind as much as possible.

Beyond even realizing that a friendly remind can help people reduce their unintentional overuse of paper product, not everyone has the time, skills, or inclination to go and create a custom-designed reminder.

If you do, though, wow, more power to you! But if you don't, then it's nice to have another option, like the These Come From Trees stickers.

I guess, not to get all "business school" on this topic, it's a classic "build versus buy" issue.

Variations on a Theme

Some of the approaches taken in the signs were interesting to note, because they diverged, or cranked up, elements that we have in the These Come From Trees sticker.

The first one pictured above was interesting, because it thanked customers for conserving napkins, not really making an overt environmentalism argument, beyond the term "conserving" which connotes that, and the cute little birdie. There's no explicit connection between the napkins and the environment--but I think the message gets across just fine. Plus, that's a cute little bird.

This second one was also interesting, because it took a more stern tone. It was at a Starbucks on 24th street--and clearly was present with the blessing of the Starbucks employees, because it looked like it had been there for a while.

It was more overt, because it correlated paper towels and trees (which is obviously something that the These Come From Trees sticker does), but it also makes a strong instruction to the reader to "Please take only what you need."

And really, I don't think that's over the top. It's certainly more vocal than the These Come From Trees stickers, but I don't think it goes too far. Plus, because of the neat graphic on the sign, of the tree embedded in the towel.

That is, it's nothing like the tragedy of a sign at San Francisco airport, that we talked about previously when describing the differences between "Ask versus Tell" and how a nice reminder, in situations where the viewer/reader has choice whether to comply or not, will win out over a stern admonition.

It was also neat to see that the person had laminated the sign as well: something that we discovered in our initial alpha testing at my house--paper stickers don't like cleaning solution! This is why These Come From Trees stickers are laminated. We don't want them to turn into nasty-looking graffiti, because that doesn't help anyone.

Get Viral to Get Out There

One thing that really stood out while looking at these custom signs, was that they didn't have the secondary, viral call to action that the These Come From Trees stickers do.

That is, the message in addition to "Hey, don't forget, these come from trees, my friend" is aimed at people who want to dig deeper. That is "Help spread the word. Get yours at thesecomefromtrees.com"

That call to action, of course, coupled with the publishing and hosting platform afforded by Blogger, and the payment platform service afforded by Paypal, is what really makes this project interesting, in my opinion, because it's self sustaining through that viral message.

Every day we get a couple hundred visitors to the site, and because we have Google Analytics set up, we see how they get here. About 50% come either by keying in "thesecomefromtrees.com" straight into their browser, or by doing the same in Google.

The offline+online component has really made this more than just a plaything, but instead something that could be much bigger, of which I'll do my best to blog about soon.

And that doesn't have to do with us so much as with YOU, all the people who come visit this site, email it around, join our Facebook group, and get stickers of your own for your community.

Aragon High School Deploys These Come From Trees Stickers

2007-11-11T19:13:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-10-08T20:01:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-10-08T19:53:00.001-07:00

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

2007-06-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-04-28T09:32:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-26T07:03:00.000-07:00

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.

We're open source now!

2007-03-17T08:28:00.000-07:00

The "These Come From Trees" project has now had its first meaningful open source experience. Witness, our new sticker.

To explain this process, a little story. Not too long ago I was at a speaking event at Citizen Agency in San Francisco, an internet company consultancy with a specialty in community. The event happened to be a speaking workshop, organized by Tara Hunt, and given by Lura Dolas. And though the speaking workshop was great, another really interesting thing I came away with was this discussion I had with Chris Messina, another Citizen Agent, about trademarks versus "community marks."

Chris was one of the founders of "BarCamp," which initially started out as a one-off "un-conference" in which the attendees set the agenda on the first day, and where the attendees are also the presenters, in contrast to the typicaly conference model of a series of single speakers presenting slide decks to large audiences.

Chris and I were talking about how when a trademark is freed, either through a Creative Commons license, which we have on the TCFT slogan, or through being designated a community mark, while the original creator loses some control over it, and as such would have more difficulty capturing part of the value created by their idea for themselves, this downside can often be made up for by a variety of things that can help spread the idea that much faster and make it that much better.

These Come From Trees now has its very own example of this. The original "These Come From Trees" sticker was heavy on research and thought, but admittedly light on graphic design. This is largely because Pete is good at research, good at thinking things through, but not all that great on Adobe Illustrator.

Furthermore, Pete's a big fan of fast prototyping, and iterating a design over time to get better as it interacts with the market. Well, the first instantiation of the "These Come From Trees" sticker worked well enough to prove its value in the pilot test, so we went with it.

Well, the other day, out of the blue, we received this email:

Hi Pete,

I came across your blog the other day, brilliant idea. Really like it.

Coincidentally, it’s a case of right time right place for an idea I’d had too. I’ve recently started a blog called Brand Boggler, and one of the ideas I’ve had is something called “Random Acts of Designess”, where designers do random acts of design for an unsuspecting cause they’d like to help.

More importantly though, I wanted to help you, so have done some work on your sticker for you to improve it’s standout and message – self explanatory really. I hope you don’t think this rude, and if you don’t like what I’ve done then no problem, just ignore it. If you do like it, I can easily send you the artwork or make some amendments, whatever you like really.

You can find out more about me and my blog here: http://www.brandboggler.com
Hope you like the sticker, and look forward to hearing from you.

Guy Paterson

Guy had gone and re-factored our design. He had take what was an amateur attempt, and recognized the value in it, and put his own talent into making it look at good as it should.

It wasn't yet perfect, for example, Guy's from Australia, so he had changed the part that talks about how much paper can be saved a year into metric! But it certainly was a step up from the previous incarnation. So Guy and I continued to iterate the design he had come up with until it got to the point where it adhered to all the requirements we had come up with for the product.

At this point, we've ordered some new stickers, a small batch of 500 of this new design, to make sure that they look as good in sticker format as they do on the screen.

The big takeaway has been how fortunate we are to have licensed this project with a Creative Commons license, because it has let people all across the world interact more meaningfully with the project, and in this one case, have a big input into where it is going.

Now, with this sort of professional design, it makes it all the more acceptable for a large organization to deploy these all across their bathrooms, copiers, and printers. In fact, one of my tasks this weekend is to craft an email to the head of VMware's facilities department to see about getting together to get an officially sanctioned implementation going at the six or so VMware building locations throughout Palo Alto--servicing some 2000 employees, day in, day out.

Should be fun!

TCFT in your Inbox!

2007-03-11T14:28:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a product by the company FeedBlitz, you can now subscribe to have our posts show up in your email inbox, so you can keep up to date on the project!

Cool, eh? It's right over there to the right. You can just pop your email in there, and you'll get our posts in your inbox, rather than having to come back here to check in.

Of course, this blog also has an RSS feed that you can use with your feedreader, but not everyone uses one of those, so we thought we'd add this!

We have some exciting news coming up this week, so we want to make sure everyone can keep up with it!

These ALSO come from trees! Part deux

2007-03-10T10:23:00.000-08:00

Gail comments over on Tod Brilliant's blog about how she is going to use a "These Come From Trees" sticker on her printer to help her think for a second about how important her print job is before she prints it.

Great idea! hadn't even thought about that for home printing use. I have a sticker on my paper towel dispenser at home, and some on the outer case of my laptop, but not on my printer or keyboard! I'll have to fix that immediately.

In the spirit of "delivering the message at the point of decision making" I would recommend putting one on your computer monitor or keyboard, in addition to the printer. While the one on your printer will be helpful to internalize the message more broadly, you're not looking at it at the moment you hit "print."

This is why we encourage people to put the sticker on the paper towels dispenser right where the eyes fall while pulling out towels--so the message can be delivered right at the moment that the reader can actually do something about it--like one of those digital speed limit signs with the radar gun in it, it flahes to grab your attention, shows you the speed you're doing RIGHT NOW such that you can do something about it RIGHT NOW: take your foot off the gas. Which is kinda what we're encouraging: people to take their foot off the gas for their printer, copier, or paper towel dispenser!

Good thinking Gail! Keep 'em coming everyone.

These ALSO come from trees! Part trois

2007-03-10T09:51:00.000-08:00

I just started a new job at VMware, a big software company. I now work in a cube-land, with lots of knowledge workers typing away on their machines, and, printing stuff out on their printers, and copying lots of copies.

Well, this last week has been somewhat of an eye-opener. When I was a consultant, I used an HP deskjet printer for all my printing needs, which weren't a whole helluva lot, but not zero either. But what was important there was that it was Pete paying for those spendy little inkjet cartridges. As a result, you think twice before hitting the "Print" button on that 50 page PDF document.

That dynamic changes when you know that your workstation is mapped to a burly Toshiba copier that can print that 50 page report in the flash of an eye--all on someone else's dime...

The other day, my friend Erin, who also works at VMware noticed a stack of "These Come From Trees" stickers on my desk, and pointed out, "Hey, we should put those on the copiers too." I thought it was a really good point, and bore looking into.

I'm a little conflicted about it, because this project was initially aimed at what I like to call "unintentional waste" of paper resources, like with napkins at fast food restaurants, and paper towels in public restrooms. That is, where people accidentally use too much, just because they're not really paying attention. The goal of this project has never been to tell people to not use resources that they feel they need. That might be someone else's project, like projects that work to get people to stop driving SUVs, or what have you, but it's beyond the aim of this project.

I'm not 100% sure if this idea of discouraging "unintentional waste" applies to business copying and printing to the same extent. I mean, a lot of the stuff that gets printed is very important, and helps the company make money--if it didn't, they wouldn't have printers and copiers.

And whereas I could sit and watch nearly every group of people at In N Out throw out multiple clean napkins, or sit in the bathroom (hidden in a stall!), listening to how many paper towels were pulled per hand-wash (they make a "shoonk! shoonk! shoonk!" sound as they are yanked out of the holder! It ended up averaging like three and a half towels--most people used two, three, or four but occasionally you'd here someone, literally, pulling ten in succession. It was fascinating--but this is for a separate post), it's harder to know the size of the opportunity for reduction in a business printing / copying context.

But at the same time I have to feel that a lot of the time big ol' powerpoint decks get printed out, placed on a conference table "just in case" attendees, who have been emailed that same deck, want a paper copy right there because they didn't bring their laptop. Or big ol' PDF reports getting printed out for "reading later" but ultimately just get dumped. So while I know the opportunity for reduction is non-zero, I don't know how big it is. Haven't done the homework yet.

Also, I wonder to what extent this would have an impact? I tested the initial "These Come From Trees" sticker in a coffee shop bathroom, measuring impact on paper towels. But this is different. Maybe I should do a test at VMware and report back.

What do you guys think? I suppose this is kinda the goal of this being an community driven, "open source" guerrilla public service announcment. Ultimately, it relies on the judgment of those using the sticker to be wise about where to deploy them to get the point across, but without damaging the cause. I'm sure if we all just make sure to be thoughtful about it, we'll make the right move.

Cognitive Dissonance, and how not to be Gored

2007-03-02T09:15:00.000-08:00

Having watched the incipient (and likely planned) backlash against Al Gore for his family's own electricity usage in the face of his work on Inconvenient Truth , got me thinking about how important it is for the "whole package" of a given product / service to "hang" together in the right way.

This is true with "These Come From Trees" as well, and I thank my buddy Noah, whose RA I was in college, for pointing this out in a message he sent me from the TCFT Facebook group. Noah's a journalist, so he spends a lot of time thinking about words and communicating. To quote him:

"If I were trying to really clarify the message though, I'd print recycled stickers. "

Totally good point right? After some research, custom-printed recycled stickers don't really exist as far as I could tell. Secondly, if they did exist, they would like come at a cost premium. Don't know how much, but as a fairly niche product, it would probably be appreciable.

This might be problematic, because we want to make sure that the costs of the stickers are as supportable as possible, such that as many people as possible are willing to buy them. Their inexpensiveness helps make the message more pervasive, which is the point. The more stickers out there, the more "costless waste reduction."

But Noah's point leads to a broader point, which is: the performance has to match the expectation, and this means anticipating questions like that, and dealing with them.

So, I've been trying to make sure that the "whole product" here jives with the intent. But I've been having a hard time. So many people have ordered stickers, which is awesome, that we've been scrambling to get all the infrastructure in place to get those orders out.

When I went to Office Depot yesterday, I specifically set out to find small footprint, recycled envelopes in which to send the stickers to people who got them. But mirabilis dictu, they didn't have any. Not a single one. Amazing huh?

We had to get some envelopes to start sending out stickers, so the first batch isn't recycled. However, going forward, we're going to make sure that all components of the project adhere to this guideline, as long as it doesn't impede the larger goals of the project (for example, not going to be making handmade stickers out of scraps of old envelopes--defeats the goals of the project).

Our next batch of envelopes will be coming from here.

Thanks for the food for thought, Noah, and everyone else who has been commenting.

Print-at-home problems, and Creative Commons solutions

2007-02-26T15:40:00.000-08:00

Doc Sanchez had a great question in a comment, that deserves its own post. He said:

"Why not make the graphic downloadable? Then any schmo like me can print them off at home on a standard set of Avery labels from Staples (or wherever).

It'd only take a few minutes to set it up for easy home printing and would save everyone some money and time."

Exactly. If indeed this project is not-for-profit, and the point is solely to spread the idea as quickly and broadly as possible, why not enable print-from-home? It's a fantastic question, Doc.

The answer lies in the whole concept of win-win "costless conservation." That is, when conceiving of the product that could hit all the requirments necessary to make sure all stakeholders in this would win (paper towel users, environmental crusaders, and bathroom owners), we had to test, test, and test again to make sure the only stakeholder bearing the cost here was the paper towel producer.

We actually initially used Avery labels to do the prototype of the sticker. And the fact that we could do it, meant that anyone else could. So we were excited that this could help spread the idea quicker.

But while we were thinking through the full lifecycle of the sticker, we hit on "hey, bathrooms get cleaned. These things need to stand up to cleaning solvent. We should check that."

Well, we broke out the bottle of Simple Green, and gave the paper towel dispenser a squirt, and proceeded to wipe that sucker down. And as we wiped across the sticker, sure enough, the HP InkJet ink was no match. In fact, neither was the initial set of stickers we got from Contagious Graphics , the company that makes the stickers. We have 500 of our initial label run that we can't deploy, because their ink would smear when cleaned. The good news is, the second revision of the stickers, which are now laminated, stand up to cleaning.

However, the reason why this is important, is because the bathroom owner is just a part of this project as the label sticker. She's the one who decides whether it stays or goes. And if the ink is smeared, it ceases to provide value to that bathroom owner, and simply becomes another bit of graffiti for that poor business owner to deal with. And that is the opposite of the win-win proposition we're trying to achieve here.

So, as of now, in that we wouldn't want the "These Come From Trees" concept associated with stickers that degrade and are ugly, we aren't offering the image for download and self-print.

However, what we are doing is releasing the "These Come From Trees" design and slogan under a Creative Commons attribution license.

And we've notified Contagious Graphics that anyone can email them (paperlabels [at] contagiousgraphics [dot] com) and order the 2/19/07 proof version of the These Come From Trees graphic, in any quantity (their minimum order is 500 pcs), so long as they are laminated, and the 3" x 1.5" size.

Right now, the only reason why we're selling the labels is because not everyone may be excited about shelling out $120 for 500 stickers just yet. We're hoping that you order 20, 50, or 100 to start, and once you try it out, you realize how many you can put to work (I'm amazed when I find that I've put up 10 in a day, but it happens!), and call up Contagious Graphics on your own to get a big ol' order.

All we ask is that you post picture on Flickr, and tag them "tcft" and report back on your successes!

UPDATE: Henriette points out that I should be more specific about the Creative Commons license. The slogan and image can be used for anything non-commercial with attribution. Go forth and have fun with the slogan and image!

Welcome Seth Godin Readers

2007-02-26T13:05:00.000-08:00

To everyone showing up thanks to the Seth Godin link, welcome to the These Come From Trees Blog!

This site is set to be the online pivot point of this project, the goal of which is to do some "costless conservation" with a viral sticker campaign that encourages people to think twice as they use paper towels and napkins.

As I said to Seth in my email, this project entails a lot of what he talks about on his blog: enthusiasm, candor, authenticity, and respect. So I'm looking forward to see what his readership has to say about it.

Check out the background of the project broken out below, and please provide comments, criticism, and feedback as they come to you! And subscribe to our RSS feed, and you can see updates and traction on the project as we post about it.

And if you think this is something you'd like to try out in your neck of the woods, stickers are for sale in the right sidebar!

~Pete

Ask Versus Tell, and other marketing realities

2007-02-26T09:20:00.000-08:00

This was touched on a bit in the previous post, but I thought it was worthwhile to expand on.

A big part of the idea behind this project was predicated on my belief that all things being equal, most people want to do the right thing. And this extends to conservation as well. As long as it's not terribly costly (like giving up your car, or riding to work in the rain), people are usually open to an environmental message.

But the question is, how is that message delivered? In our society, there are few times when someone can tell you what to do, and you're ok with it. Your parents (hi mom), you girlfriend, your boss, the police, etc.

But even then, are you really all that happy about it? "Move along sir," "clean up your room, Pete," all of these aren't exactly fun messages to hear. But you get over it, because you know that the alternative to non-compliance isn't exactly fun.

However, compare this to when someone asks you a favor. Especially when done in a friendly, considerate way. Most people have zero problem doing a small something if asked nicely about it. "Can you watch my bag while I'm in the bathroom?" "Excuse me, would you mind moving over one seat, so my friend and I can sit next to each other in this film?" and so on.

So, it was based on this thinking that the "These Come From Trees" message was adopted. The idea was that people didn't need to TOLD. That's why that sign in SFO airport was annoying enough to be that I took a picture of it with my cameraphone.

Or this sign that was in the men's bathroom at the Stanford Book Store (the fact that it was in the men's room is another topic). "Thank you for your cooperation."? That's a little harsh sounding. Sounds like the IRS or LAPD talking. How about "Thanks for your help in keeping the bathroom nice for everyone"?

In situations where we're the customer, we typically expect a little more deference. When you call tech support, they don't tell you "I need you to wait while I get rid of this other person" they say "Could you hold please?" or "Sir, I'll be right with you in a moment while I take her order." That's the right kind of tone to make someone receptive to your message.

Even with the "These Come From Trees" message, I really wrestled with whether or not "Remember..." should precede the message. I was very concerned that it could be construed as pedantic, and make it less likely for someone to consume, subscribe to, and execute on the message. And in this case, the difference between a pedantic message, and a respectful one could mean a tree's worth of paper over the life of the sticker.

Ultimately I went with it, because the message "These Come From Trees" without the "Remember" sounds like a statement, as opposed to an implicit request, and this message is, after all a request.

But still, it's important to think about how to ask nicely.

The Right Message at the Right Time

2007-02-23T09:23:00.000-08:00

Because I'm a recovering grammar nazi, and all around writing wonk, I kinda nerd out on effective versus ineffective communication. It's one of the things that makes me laugh, and enjoy life that much more.

For example, on the theme of bathrooms, those signs posted above sinks or paper towel dispenser that say "Washing your hands is good for your health, and required by law for employees". Those signs crack me up, because they're great signs, in the totally WRONG PLACE.

In that I'm a guy, I'll look at this from the male user's perspective: the decision of whether or not to wash your hands--the very decision that sign is trying to influence--isn't made at the sink! If you're at the sink, guess what, you've already been convinced! It's called preaching to the choir. If the sign-posters really wanted to affect hand sanitation, they'd post those signs over each urinal and the backs of stall doors, where I have nothing else to read! The advertisers have certainly already figured it out....

Anyway, so that's an example of BAD textual communication. Right message, wrong context. But what makes me even happier than the giggles out of seeing bad examples of communication is finding really GOOD ones.

And I had a feeling that the right message in the right context could be helpful reducing "costless" paper waste (more on "costless" in another post) that I had been paying attention to lately.

As such I figured that the message had a couple requirements:

1.It needed to be friendly. No one likes to be lectured. In the situations where I saw this message being deployed, the relationship is between a customer and service provider, and most customers don't like to be lectured. Further, because this was likely going to be a guerrilla message--not sanctioned, at least initially--by the "bathroom owner" the message needed to be costless to him too, and not insult his customers. That picture was taken at SFO, where even the bathroom signs display the dictatorial tone only possible by a government agency or other massive monopolist. Ick.

2. It needed to be portable. The collective action issue of having to convince, say, the VP of Operation for Starbucks, or whatever, was too much for a side project like this. Also, going to Kimberly Clark or Georgia Pacific (paper manufacturers) was going to be a non-starter--you think they want to see their sales fall? No. So this message would likely need to be added to a paper dispenser by a viral agent--you, me, whoever. That means that it had to be smallish, so you could carry it around and stick them on appropriate. This pointed towards stickers. Just as portable as graffiti, but nicer looking. Which leads us to...

3. It needed to look nice. Because these messages were going to be hosted in a venue that was "owned" by someone who wasn't the message transmitter (the good samaritan who posted the sticker), there was a duty on our part to make sure that the message didn't create problems. Again, we were shooting for joint value here: the only results for the bathroom owner should be that his paper towel costs fall, and he gets to feel like he's doing his part to help conserve resources. As such, we figured that a nice, well-designed sticker, with nice colors would be the right way of going about this.

4. It needed to be memorable. We needed the message itself to be "sticky", to add to its propensity to stay with the reader even after he left the place where he read it. So we shot for something that had a rhyme to it.

5. It needed a viral call to action. We already pointed out two audiences that the message needed to serve: 1. People using paper products and 2. the bathroom/venue "owner." But there was a third audience too: people who would be interested in helping with this project on their own, beyond using one less paper towel. This meant that we needed a viral call to action on the sticker. Something that told people why this was important, that their help was requested, and what their next step was if they chose to do so.

Ultimately, what we came up with is what you see above. We settled on a paper roll label as the most cost effective and portable medium to use, which would allow a well-designed, visually appealing message, in a mass-produce-able format. Vinyl stickers are too costly $.25-$.50 each just to buy, and are hard to get off (if someone really wants to remove the sticker, we don't want to make it terrible for them to do so).

We decided on the "These come from trees" message in that it evoked the value we wanted communicated to the viewer: using less of these helps save big, leafy, natural things. Its internal rhyme was nice, and had nice alliteration too. It hints at why the user might want to think about how much paper they're consuming, but it doesn't TELL them in a nasty "USE ONLY WHAT YOU NEED, YOU'RE A BAD PERSON IF YOU USE PAPER" fashion. I'd seen messages like that, and they're just gross. This was trying to be helpful, and non-judgmental. Kinda like a friend warning you just before you step in a puddle.

As for the viral call to action, we figured there was no better way than to leverage the memorable "These come from trees" than to buy the thesecomefromtrees.com domain, and use that as the pivot point for this project.

Hence, as you can see, it's a blog, with pictures from people who have stuck stickers and snapped pics of them, and more. It also provided the venue whereby people could buy stickers to help promote the message. $.20 per sticker, each of which saves a tree's worth of a paper a year (more on that statistic later).

So that was the design process behind the These Come From Trees sticker. We're still evaluating to make sure it's the best way for everyone involved (paper users, sticker stickers, and venue owners) to get the message out, and we're always open to comments!

These ALSO come from trees!

2007-02-21T15:29:00.000-08:00

In the previous post, I touched a bit on how this whole project was set in motion. But once I had been awakened to pervasiveness of what I saw as unintentional, and costlessly avoidable, waste, I was really curious: where else is this happening? Where else are we accidentally, unintentionally wasting paper, but for the want of a helpful hint?

The answer was that far away from really. Just around the bend really.

Have you ever been washing your hands in a public bathroom, and when you're all done, it's time to dry them? Well, you sidle on over to the paper towel dispenser, and proceed to dispense paper towels to get your hands as dry as possible as quickly as possible. No one likes that icky cold water feeling, so usually this means pulling three, four, five paper towels. I've even seen someone pull out a good dozen or so, I guess each one picking up a eye-dropper of water. If we're talking about one of those roll dispensers with the spring-powered lever, you whale on that thing a good four or five times to get a nice paper towel shawl.

And I'm not saying this is what OTHER, unconscientious people were doing. No, this is EXACTLY what I was doing. I found myself doing it too, using three, four or more paper towels to dry my hands. I had never really considered it. But then when I thought about it, how much paper towel was I really "using" of those three? Because In N Out had helpfully awakened me to the These Come From Trees concept, I took a closer look.

What I realized was, of those two, or three, or four paper towels, I probably ended up using only about 30% of each. That is, rather than using up all the "dry"--to use a really bad coinage--in just one towel, I was using up just a little bit of the "dry" usually the "dry" right in the middle of the towel, in like three or four towels. Of course,along with this, meant that I was throwing away three 70% dry towels. Yikes. How many people use this bathroom a day? How many in a year? Oh goodness. That's a big number...

"But come on, Pete!" I thought to myself. "Surely you get something out of those extra paper towels!" I decided to do an experiment. Rather than doing the typical "pull three towels and rub" move, I would pull one, and see how it worked.

I was really conscious of seeing if this actually affected my experience, because everyone knows that hand-dryers are more environmentally friendly and all that, but at the end of the day, they suck because they take like a minute to use. I don't want to sit around in the bathroom for an extra sixty seconds! Come on! So I was very aware of whether or not using only one towel had a meaningful effect on my hand drying experience.

The amazing thing was, it didn't. Really. One towel, which then got like totally wet, did more or less the same job at three or four. It didn't take longer. My hands weren't colder. Nothing. So then I thought "I'll splurge" and tested using two. At this point, my hands were REALLY dry, really fast. So then I tried three. At that point, i couldn't even tell the difference between two and three towels. Not to mention four.

Based on all this testing, I concluded that I had found another instance where a lot of users, completely unknowingly, and for god knows what reason, where totally overusing a resource, and for no additional benefit. And the flip of that was that they could reduce that use, WITHOUT any cost. No performance hit. No nothing. Just pure, tree-saving goodness.

I had found something else that came from trees! But there I was again: what to do about it?

These Come From Trees Elevator Pitch

2007-02-19T18:21:00.000-08:00

If you're here, you may have heard about this on the web, seen a sticker in a coffee shop / restaurant near you, or just might be a friend or family member of our dear Pete.

So, for those who don't know, the These Come From Trees concept was originated while having lunch at In N Out, that bastion of tasty burgers. The way that In N Out works, you order your food, wait for it to be made, grab it when your order is called, and then head on over to the ketchup and napkin dispensing island. Well, the thing is, because the ketchup and the napkins are centrally located, and you don't want to have to get back up to get more, you typically end up taking more than you really need.

Now, usually that sort of thing would just go without saying. But when I was at In N Out, looking around, I couldn't help but notice the napkins. Everywhere. Stacks of napkins on people's tables, out of which one or two would get used during the course of the meal. But here's the catch: when people are done, they don't leave the napkins. I think anyone would agree that the idea of using some random napkins on your table when you sit down would be rather, um, icky. So most of the people, as I watched, did the conscientious thing to reset the table to its base state for the next group, which means scooping up that stack of unused napkins, putting them on the tray with the other trash, and into the garbage they go!

This was amazing to me. Here we all were, me too, going about our business, not really thinking about the impact of our actions because, in this case, the resource was "free" to use.

Further, this wasn't an example of someone calling into question whether the use or misuse of a resource was "justified." This wasn't the same as someone saying "Wow, you shouldn't drive that Hummer, because you have no use for it" or making some other value judgment. Any reasonable person, when asked "should unused paper goods be thrown into the trash" would probably look at you sideways before saying, "Duh, no Pete."

That's what was amazing about this situation. If actually made to think of about these actions, everyone would be in agreement. I think if you asked anyone in there dumping napkin after napkin into the trash if they cared about conservation and the wise use of resources, we'd all say "yes." Of course we would. It was just that the thought process to intervene wasn't immediate, and internalized. But maybe there was a way that it could be.

I was truly curious how pervasive this problem was, and if there was a way we could all just "snap out of it" at the moment of consumption, and somehow reduce our waste. As I started noodling on it, I resolved to research how extended this problem was, and put my mind towards seeing if there were any good ways to deal with it.

Hello World!

2007-02-19T15:38:00.000-08:00

This is the first post of the new These Come From Trees blog.

This blog, which will probably be replaced by a more customizable site in the near future, is the online home of the "These Come From Trees" project, an experiment in viral guerilla marketing, both online and offline, in the service of reduced consumer waste.

We welcome comments, praise, and constructive criticisms all. Thanks for stopping by.

Pete