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

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

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

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:

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

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!

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

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

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

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?

NVIDIA Accelerates Conservation with These Come From Trees Stickers

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

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

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

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.

SanDisk Deploying These Come From Trees Stickers at Campus

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.

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

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

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!

Kisco Senior Living Deploying 500 These Come From Trees Stickers

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

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

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

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!