And we are STILL kicking!

Lol. Someone just emailed in to say "Are you guys still sending these stickers out?"

Yes indeed! Send them out twice a week! So order away, and they'll show up to you lickety split!

Don't worry folks! We're still kicking!

Some folks have asked if we're still fulfilling these. We sure are!

Just ordered another 100k stickers the other day because we were running out!

Yay saving trees!

Whoa! 1,000+ K-12 Organizations Have Conserved Trees with These Come From Trees

I was just doing a little bit of housekeeping, and in the process, looked through the total number of requests that we've received and fulfilled via our K-12 Challenge.

Since the original idea back in 2009, when some nice teachers reached out asking for us to consider sending them complimentary stickers, because they didn't have budget with which to purchase them, we have received and serviced more than 1,000 requests.

That's really impressive!

Wow! 500,000 stickers to date!

We were just doing some internal account calculations while looking to do a big re-order, and it looks like we've sent out 500,000 stickers since the start of the project way back in 2007!

And that is, of course, both in the form of purchased stickers, and also in the form of the K-12 Challenge!

That's a lot of paper towels that haven't been used! Exciting!

It's Showtime! These Come From Trees Stickers Show Up In "Ray Donovan" Epsidoe

My buddy Pat Lee had an awesome find today.

On his vacation, he and the family were watching some episodes of Ray Donovan, a Showtime TV show starring Liev Schreiber, when lo and behold, there in a scene shot in a bathroom, there were some These Come From Trees stickers on the paper towel dispensers. How cool is that?

Unclear if the scene was shot on location somewhere that already had the stickers, or if the set dresser decided that they were must have additions! Either way, very cool.

These Come From Trees Animated across the USA!

I just love this visualization of the These Come From Trees purchase history overlaid by Zip Code on a map of the US.

Special thanks to my friend Jonah Berger, author of the awesome book "Contagious: Why Things Catch On", who thought that the viral nature of These Come From Trees stickers would be an interesting thing to check the virality of.

In the case of this animation, it's purchases since 2009, overlaid on their Zip Code, and weighted by purchase size.

So you can see when  large purchase shows up (often times for a University, like the University of Washington, in Seattle), and then how that is preceded by certain purchasing behavior, and then succeeded by what appears to be accelerated purchasing behavior.

Like check out how Wisconsin goes crazy after the initial large purchase in early 2011, having previously been more sporadic.

Neat stuff!

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:

These Come From Trees goes to Turkey!

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

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!

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

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

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?

It Only Takes One

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

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.