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!

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

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

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

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

Ooops! Forgot about this one!

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

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

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

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


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

These Come From Trees has another copyleft experience!

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

The latest place it's shown up? Italy.

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

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

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

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

Social Media and Conservation

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

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

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

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

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



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