Today I picked a favourite out of my RSS feed of var­i­ous blogs that I have started to fol­low. The title ‘How Green is your Office? Eco-Friendly Host­ing’ by Fam­ily Friendly Work­ing / Anto­nia Chitty (which I really rec­om­mend to all you Mumpre­neurs out there to check out, lots of good posts and use­ful advice) caught my eye. Anto­nia gives some good tips on how she has built up a good ‘green pol­icy’ : using fair trade tea and cof­fee, not print if it can be avoided it, get the kids to draw on the back of paper that is only printed on one side, re-use pack­ag­ing and and use eco-friendly office sup­plies (which appar­ently are pro­moted in the UK — well done! Are they plan­ning to open a Dutch branch as well??).

A new idea that she pro­motes via her blog is eco-friendly host­ing for your web­site — now, that seems to be an easy way to save energy with­out com­pro­mis­ing qual­ity or even feel­ing any ‘sacrifice’.

The post inspired me to add a few tips myself:

Check out a a Dutch inven­tion called Eco­font. It’s a clever, ‘hol­low’ font, where the let­ters are per­fo­rated by lots of small, almost invis­i­ble, empty cir­cles. This means less ink, about 20%, is used when print­ing! It’s free, just down­load, install and start sav­ing. Smart think­ing, don’t you agree! The font is very clean and neat, so should not bother any­one. Because let’s be hon­est: the entirely paper­less office is still a bit of an utopia, in any case to me. Espe­cially since my email (pri­vate) host crashed about a year ago, delet­ing all email cor­re­spon­dence from the about 18 months of my startup time for my busi­ness in the process. Now… I use Gmail.… and.… I am glad I have stuck to the habit of print­ing out the most impor­tant emails for pos­si­ble future ref­er­ence. You never know when you will need them, because you never know in busi­ness when some­one you think you could per­fectly trust shows another face.

My sec­ond tip is to check out a cool new Swedish com­pany called Cre­at­a­bles. They  develop smart prod­ucts from indus­trial sur­plus mate­ri­als and waste — and make great toys from it; not to men­tion mag­a­zine hold­ers and note­boards from used ten­nis courts (!)  and they have won a prize for a clever clotes-pin. And watch out, these guys are going global!

Find­ing Antonia’s blog­post also inspired me to think about the green pol­icy of Mum­my­Mug as such. Of Mum­my­Mug as a com­pany, as a prod­uct. After all, we are going to sell a plas­tic prod­uct, albeit one made out of an advanced mate­r­ial that more feels like ceram­ics than plas­tic. But I can under­stand if it might not appear as the biggest con­tri­bu­tion to human­ity to put one more plas­tic thingamy in the market.

Well — we do care! And we do have a plan. Let me explain:

* We will make the best pos­si­ble, con­scious choice of mate­ri­als that are as climate-friendly as pos­si­ble. The mate­r­ial we plan to use for man­u­fac­tur­ing of the Mum­my­Mug has been cho­sen for its stur­di­ness, so the mug does not shat­ter if it falls. That is of course essen­tial for safety. It has also been cho­sen for its ceramic look-and-feel: it is about as heavy as ceram­ics and feels ceramic to the touch, as I really believe that you as a user would pre­fer some­thing that is as close as one can get to your reg­u­lar, hug-me ceramic mug. Of course we had to reckon with the resis­tance to high tem­per­a­tures (at least 100 degrees) and of course the user has to be able to clean it with reg­u­lar deter­gents — noone wants a tea­mug with brown per­ma­nent stains, right? Last but not least, we obvi­ously had to work within the short-list of food approved mate­ri­als, by all applic­a­ble stan­dards. Thus we ended up with some­thing quite sturdy. It made it impos­si­ble to go for a bamboo-plastic or some­thing sim­i­lar. Nev­er­the­less, the mate­r­ial is still recy­clable, that I do want to point out. And the real good news are: the man­u­fac­turer of that mate­r­ial is in the process of mak­ing what they call an IQ-version, which has only a 25% car­bon foot­print com­pared to the cur­rent ver­sion! As soon as this mate­r­ial is ready for com­mer­cial release, we will switch to it to make sure the Mum­my­Mug is as lit­tle of a strain as pos­si­ble on our planet.

* We will con­sider sell­ing ‘spare parts’. The lid of the Mum­my­Mug con­tains a kind of vent. After pro­longed and inten­sive use, the per­for­mance of this vent will even­tu­ally dimin­ish, and should at some point be replaced to make sure safety is not com­pro­mised. That is after all what the Mum­my­Mug is there for. But to buy a whole new cup and a lid would of course be a waste — as the cup will still be in per­fect order. Instead, we are con­sid­er­ing sell­ing replace­ment lids, so that the life-time of the mug becomes… basi­cally end­less. And hey, then you can even pimp your mug in the future, by choos­ing a lid with a dif­fer­ent colour ;-)

* We will con­sider a pro­gramme for return­ing used mugs for re-use in pro­duc­tion. Now, imag­ine the sit­u­a­tion that your kids have got­ten older, and you feel you can safely start using open cups again. We’re still work­ing on the logis­tics, but the aim is to pro­vide ou could then choose to recy­cle the Mum­my­Mug in the reg­u­lar recy­cling for plas­tics — or send it back to us, so we can grind it and sim­ply.… make new Mum­my­Mugs to make other moth­ers happy. Trust me, this will not save us that much money, I realise that, but I feel would be a great way to feed back into the loop what belongs in the loop.

* The Mum­my­Mug will lower the need for expen­sive health care. You hope­fully know by now that the Mum­my­Mug is about safety: it is about pre­vent­ing that yet another kid ends up spend­ing two weeks in hos­pi­tal and gets enor­mously expen­sive, not to men­tion painful, treat­ment and skin grafts there, because of a scald from hot bev­er­ages. I believe that keep­ing that kid, happy, safe and at home instead of locked up in a process of enor­mously expen­sive, whater-it-takes kind of treat­ment and val­i­da­tion, is surely going to make a con­tri­bu­tion to a more sus­tain­able soci­ety.  And — a hap­pier one! ;-)

* Last but not least: we will cer­tainly make every ‘green’ choice we can in the office. Inspired by Anto­nia, I here and now vow to hunt down green office sup­plies in the Nether­lands, to choose a hybrid car when­ever there would be enough rev­enue to get a lease car for this busi­ness, to keep on bik­ing as often as that is fea­si­ble, to keep on print­ing with Eco­font and use double-sided print­ing.  We already have a very flex­i­ble organ­i­sa­tion, which means we do not keep an expen­sive large, energy con­sum­ing office, nor do we engage in exten­sive trav­el­ling, but for exam­ple arrange a lot of the work via Skype. And I  do believe one of the the green con­tri­bu­tions we can achieve by build­ing a net­worked society.

In other words, we will do all these lit­tle things, and strive for achiev­ing the big things and contributions,

to make our con­tri­bu­tion to  our joint effort to cre­ate a bet­ter cli­mate. I think being very con­scious is the best start, and that I believe I am

- hey, who arent’ these days?!?! Which leads me to the last, log­i­cal ques­tion: what are your best tips?  Look­ing for­ward to lis­ten and learn!

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