These Come From Trees Campaign
About the Campaign
Clean Energy Center has teamed up with the “These Come From Trees” Initiative in our efforts to help save the environment one paper towel at a time. These Come from Trees was started by Peter Kazanjy in Silicon Valley as a fun side project that he hopes can do some good in this world. With this sticker we hope to save a couple hundred thousand trees every year. Amazing how the right message at the right time can make the difference.
These Come From Trees started out as an experiment in environmentalism, viral marketing, and user interface design with the goal of reducing consumer waste paper. From field testing we found that each sticker deployed saves about a tree’s worth of paper (~100 lbs.) a year. Crazy, isn’t it?
Check out this case study where $10 in stickers (50 stickers) saved $840 (34 cases of paper towels) in one year at Hunt Valley Elementary School. That is some serious paper towel conservation!
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 Educational 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 Airport (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!
Posted by CEC on 27-July-2010
Original Post by Pete Kazanjy on 22-September-2009
Originally Posted at thesecomefromtrees.blogspot.com
