These Come From Trees for Eco-minded Citizens!

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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!