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.

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.