Today is Earth Day so I will share what I personally do in my business to be more eco-friendly!

(from google: what would you do for earth day ‘08?)

Staging can be a wasteful industry, because we purchase, use and transport a lot of furnishing day in and day out. Here are a few things that I do to be more eco-friendly:

*Reduce garbage, reduce overhead– I plastic wrap most of my hard furnishing to protect them during transport, consequently we used to go through plastics like crazy. Moreover, we have a lot of cardboard boxes that came with the furnishing that we ordered. When I buy accessories, they also come with a lot of wrapping papers and plastic bags. I now reuse plastic wraps, re-purpose the cardboard boxes and reuse the plastic bags & tissue papers.

The Results worked toward my favor: less plastic wraps to buy, MUCH less garbage to throw away, much easier on the overhead. When the plastic wraps are super tired out, we use those as wrapping materials instead. I also cut apart cardboard boxes to put between the artwork to protect them. Moreover, I don’t buy trash bags at all, I just reuse the ones we got from the store. Oh, as a former yoga teacher, I also accumulated a lot of lost and found yoga mats from teaching. Those became the bottom layers of my artwork shelves to protect the frames from being scratched on raw wood.

*Build things consciously– I hired people to build custom shelves in my warehouse and we use screws instead of nails for putting the shelves together. Because screws can easily be removed with a drill, while nails are harder to remove and can split the wood. We also recently updated our home’s garage door (it’s about 15 years old, heavy solid wood doors) to new models which cost less power to run. Those old garage doors were cut up and became shelvings.

*File everything electronically –

On Staged4more’s company site, I started a Client Login for our clients to access all the documents related to their staging projects online. This way, it reduces of the paper we produce going back and forth, moreover, clients can access the information online at any time, even after the projects are completed. It also became a central way for me to archive all the conversations, messages, etc. in a central location.

*Encouraging clients to reduce waste by donating & swap: It’s very true that they say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. What may no long work for you may very well work great for another. By donating your unwanted items to GoodWill or Salvation Army (both do pick ups), you can not only reduce the amount of stuff ending up in the landfill, you can also help reducing the amount of dollars someone else is going to spend on purchasing the same thing.

Here are a few things that I have done for my business and to reduce my carbon footprints on earth, how about you? What do you do for your business?

(Here is How to Take Action to Reduce Global Warming by WikiHow)