Greening Your Business Can Make A Difference

I received a quick email from a company keen to show off how simple changes (not necessarily easy changes) can green a business.

Mountain Rose Herbs is setting a great example when it comes to sustainable business practices:

• They adhere as much as possible to producing “Zero Waste”– which means that materials which might be regarded as waste are recycled, re-used, composted, reclaimed, or brought back into the production cycle.
• Their staff of 60 people produces only about 80 gallons of waste each month–the equivalent of an average four person household.
• For their catalog, they use 100-percent post-consumer recycled paper and all their delivery trucks run on 100 percent locally produced biodiesel.
• They are one of the only US companies to carry Fair Trade Certifiedâ„¢ herbs–a certification that guarantees suitable working conditions and a fair price for labor.

To achieve the impressive stat about the waste they produce, they have a series of measures that you can read about here, and their guiding principles here.

Are You Up For The Zero Waste Challenge?

Rachelle Strauss (aka Mrs Green) and the three other members of her family from the UK are about to set about challenging themselves to creating zero waste!

By recycling all that they can and changing their shopping habits, they hope to be able to produce nothing for the landfill each week. The first week in September will be their official ‘zero waste week’. When they started preparing for this challenge, an ‘average’ week was about 100 liters (26.4 gallons) of landfill waste. Recently they put out just under 200 grams (7 ounces) – less than half a carrier bag.

They’ve launched a website to track their progress. As well as a blog, they have articles on how people can reduce the amount of rubbish they have, polls, competitions (22 prizes!), review products and discounts. Why not take a look and see how they’re doing?