Hey folks, it’s Earth Day. The first Earth Day I remember was when I was a young kid back in New York City. I recall it being a big deal Earth Day Celebration, probably the 15th anniversary or maybe the 20th, in Central Park.
It was a disaster. I can’t find links to articles about it easily, but I remember walking through the park that day and the day after. The images that remain in my head are really pretty scary: another kid breaking a sapling off to use as a walking stick, adults dropping garbage on the ground, and the trucks and trucks full of garbage driving down the street I grew up on taking stuff to the dump.
Here at CiloGear, we’ve got a slogan that says Ethics + Action. We want to leave a world behind that still works when we’re gone, either from this business or from this earth. We want to add action to our ethics. That said, CiloGear is a manufacturing company, and so the following is at least in part sophistry.
Folks often ask us about recycling packs, but we’ve yet to come up with a decent solution to that. Even with our annual production of about 2,000 packs here in Portland, we’re too small of a business to be able to demand more recycled content in our packs. CiloGear works hard to reduce our environmental impact in our supply chain. We are in an old, green building with lots of natural light. We buy most of our materials from US manufacturers so we’ve got short supply chains and (probably) very clean suppliers.
In memory of the 100 tons of garbage that people left in the Central park of my childhood memory, CiloGear is going to examine our garbage today and see if there is anything we can improve. Even though we make more than 5 packs a day, we generate only 33 gallons or so of garbage every other week. We keep pretty much all of our scrap and turn it into packs. Some scrap goes to a local puppet company, and what we throw out is basically dust.
This Earth Day, CiloGear is going to start seeing what we can NOT throw out. Either we’ll reuse it, or we’ll recycle it, or we won’t even use it in the first place. How about doing the same thing? How about trying to reduce your garbage by half by next year.
We’re going to try…
