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15 Jul 03 - junk mail; cotton; Starbucks; McDonough; paperless; urinal ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive --------------------- Links to information on the Center for a New American Dream's campaign to reduce junk mail, following up on recent postings (forwarded by Paul Dunn): - http://www.newdream.org/junkmail/ - http://www.newdream.org/sbs/sbs25pres.html On this web page, people can send a message to President George Bush, thanking him for supporting the new DoNotCall.gov registry allowing people to get off telemarketing lists, and urging him to also support a similar national registry to allow people to opt out of receiving junk mail. --------------------- Excerpted from a message from Todd Sutton, Alameda County Waste Management Authority, San Leandro, CA: Reuse opportunities are being sought for 100,000 pounds of 100 percent cotton from a mattress recycler in Oakland. It's in bales. If anyone has any ideas, please send them along to Malia Langworthy, outreach specialist, County of San Mateo (CA) RecycleWorks program, at: Malia ( AT ) RecycleWorks ( DOT ) org --------------------- Excerpted from the Starbucks Corporation website: The Starbucks coffee chain currently has more than 6,200 stores worldwide. The philosophy of Starbucks is to continuously seek ways to reduce waste from its system in the first place, whenever possible. Waste reduction and reuse measures at Starbucks stores include: - Commuter Mug Discount. One way Starbucks reduces waste is by encouraging customers and employees to use reusable mugs. Customers who use their own mugs receive a 10-cent discount. In 2002, Starbucks customers used commuter mugs more than 12.7 million times, keeping an estimated 550,000 pounds of paper from landfills. - Waste Characterization Study. To better understand the composition and scale of the waste reduction opportunities in its stores, Starbucks conducted a waste characterization study in 2002. Results from the study indicated that five materials dominate Starbucks packaging waste at stores, by volume: Cardboard, milk jugs, paper cups, pastry boxes and milk cartons. Based on the findings, Starbucks is exploring additional ways to divert waste through packaging reduction, reuse and recycling. - Coffee Grounds Reuse. Coffee grounds make up the heaviest portion of the waste stream in Starbucks stores. In the "Grounds for Your Garden" program, Starbucks stores give spent coffee grounds to customers and parks that request them. The nitrogen-rich coffee grounds can be composted with other materials and added to gardens. For background on this program, see: http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/compost.asp --------------------- Link to the website for GreenBlue, a new non-profit organization that promotes the "cradle-to-cradle" design principles espoused by architect William McDonough: http://greenblue.org McDonough's "cradle-to-cradle" design philosophy embraces what he calls "eco-effectiveness." By learning from the design principles in nature, eco-effective design conceives industrial systems that emulate the healthy abundance of nature. --------------------- Excerpted from an article by Jeff Siegel in the 7/1/03 American Way magazine (the American Airlines in-flight magazine): THE PAPERLESS BUSINESS HAS ARRIVED The much-vaunted paper-free office never materialized - the average U.S. cubicle-dweller still prints dozens of pages every day. But look outside the office, and you'll find a world where paperless technology has caught up to its promises. Real strides in becoming paperless have been made, especially in the less obvious and less glamorous parts of the business world. Many - perhaps a majority - of warehouse, distribution, and fulfillment operations are now mostly paperless. Office Depot can track deliveries from manufacturer to customer, and the only paper is the cardboard carton in the back of the delivery truck. Meanwhile, a growing number of government agencies are moving toward paperless offices to cut costs and increase privacy protection. As is usually the case, the reality of the paperless business is somewhere between the lavish expectations of the past and the sometimes bitter reactions to those failed expectations. "It's very obvious that it's more efficient to handle information electronically versus on paper, but that doesn't mean everyone can do or wants to do it," says Adam J. Fein, author of "Facing the Forces of Change: Future Scenarios for Wholesale Distribution." "The difference is that it's easier to get rid of paper in simple, repeatable processes, like in a warehouse, than in an office. There, the work is usually unstructured and more creative. But where there is routine, like in finance, companies have been able to get rid of some of the paper." In the mid-1990s, shortly after the first surge of interest in the Internet and e-mail, the next logical step seemed to be what the pundits called the paperless office. No more standing over a copy machine. No more manila, interdepartmental mail envelopes. No more sorting purchase orders into color-coded piles. These advances in technology would make paper superfluous, allowing everyone in an office to communicate with one another electronically, saving time and money and making the business world infinitely more efficient. Some of that actually happened. Companies can send invoices and pay employees and suppliers electronically. Software programs have replaced accounting ledgers and checkbook registers. And does anyone really miss trying to read carbon copies? But despite these successes, paper seemingly became even more entrenched. In their book, "The Myth of the Paperless Office," Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper cite a telling number: The use of e-mail causes an average 40 percent increase in paper consumption. Earlier this year, a study by the Canadian subsidiary of the Lexmark printer company detailed the paper-hungry habits of workers in two Ontario cities. Employees at large companies printed 50 pages a day, while their counterparts at small companies printed 35 pages a day. Some 40 percent of all employees printed at least 60 percent of the information they received electronically. "Part of the problem was that companies saw this technology as an end to itself, and not as a tool to reach a specific goal," says consultant Arthur St. Onge, whose company has worked with Border's, Heinz, Sears, and the United States Postal Service. "Instead of saying, let's eliminate paper to do this or that, they just said, let's eliminate paper. But technology is never an end to itself." But if the paperless office is a myth, the paperless business is not. In dull, boring, routine-driven worlds - such as insurance companies, government bureaucracies, and the supply chain, where the goal is to move one widget from here to there - paperless operation has made far greater strides. In Springfield, Ohio, contractors bidding on a $166 million school construction job had to be paperless. The Social Security Administration is studying whether it's possible to transform all its files to electronic form. Even more impressive is National Semiconductor's 94,000-square-foot Singapore facility, built and operated by UPS Logistics Group. It uses a paperless system that features hand-held devices equipped with scanners that are so sophisticated they can guide employees through the warehouse from item to item. Says John Kenerson of ClientLogic, which provides paperless warehouse and fulfillment services, "I don't want to go back to the old days at all. We used to be able to pick 50 units an hour. Now, we can pick 250, and we can do it with more accuracy." In the old days, a warehouse was a mass of paper. When a package arrived at receiving, a foreman not only signed a receipt and kept a copy, but continued the paper trail by ticking the package off against an invoice (with copies routed to the requisite departments, such as accounts payable, which would then generate their own paper). The package then moved into the warehouse, where someone noted its location on another piece of paper, with copies again routed throughout the business. When it came time to ship an order, paper pick tickets and customer order forms instructed an employee how many of each item to collect and where those items were stored in the warehouse. Once the items were gathered, the order would be assembled - by matching the various pick tickets to the customer order form - and then sent to the loading dock, where more paper, including a receipt, would be needed to send it on its way. "Needless to say," says Fein, "there was a lot of room for error. But just as important, companies couldn't analyze the information they got. How did you know which products sold most frequently? How did you know what was in stock? You had to send someone to the warehouse to go see." By eliminating paper and substituting digital technology, companies gain many advantages over and above the obvious savings in paper costs. Electronic inventory and order information can be analyzed for trends: Which items are ordered most often? Which items are combined most often? The warehouse can then be configured accordingly. Instead of wandering through the warehouse picking one widget here and another several rows away, the widgets can be stored next to each other. This not only improves accuracy (warehouse experts say 99.9 percent is the norm in a system like this), but also saves time, in turn reducing costs. According to ClientLogic's Kenerson, three-quarters of the labor in a traditional warehouse is spent on travel time between items. -------------------- Excerpted from a 7/14/03 article by Roy Gault in the Salem (OR) Statesman Journal: PRODUCT ALERT - THE DISPOSABLE URINAL TravelJohn Products, of Irvine, CA, offers a product it calls the disposable urinal, which is designed for camping and long drives, among other uses. Compact and leak-proof, these plastic liquid waste disposal bags use a patented technology to solidify liquids into a spill-proof, odorless gel. The unit comes with a unisex adapter. The disposable urinal sells for $5.99 for three units. TravelJohn, which also sells a portable toilet and other related products, claims that its products are designed for maximum convenience, ease-of-use, portability and for preserving environmental health. TravelJohn says its products are biodegradable, nontoxic and use no active chemicals. - end -