Greening the Igloo

Our single car space, which houses up to ten bikes, a repair shop and three worm farms.

The rest of the garage has room for just five cars.

To celebrate the upcoming Bike Week at the end of September Digital Eskimo has unveiled its latest sustainability initiative: our company bicycle parking and repair station. We’ve converted our single car space into parking for up to ten bikes, with a bike repair station catering to the needs of Digital Eskimo’s fleet and the local Surry Hills community.

If you ride a bike and you work or live in Surry Hills, you know the bike stores have all moved away – making even a flat tyre a real hassle. Basic bike maintenance is also difficult when you live in an apartment (as I do!) and do not have access to basic tools and an area you can make a wee bit of mess in. A good set of tools should be shared as well, so by providing this service we’re hoping to cut down on the need for everyone to buy their own repair tools.

It’s a community initiative so as we launch we are asking our neighbours to contribute/loan any tools they have lying around that they’re not using. Spare tubes, tyres and bike parts are also welcome.

So if you need help with a problem with your bike just buzz the doorbell and a Digital Eskimo will come down and give you a hand. Oh, and air is provided at no charge!
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Furthering our efforts to be a sustainable organisation, Digital Eskimo have teamed up with Locavore who have installed a rooftop garden above our studio. The Locavore landscape gardeners designed and built a custom shade cloth ‘vegigloo’ and planted a range of herbs and vegetables, including mint, basil, lettuce, rocket, pumpkin, watermelon and corn.

The plants were chosen according to permaculture principles. Already surviving our Christmas break and a blisteringly hot start to the new year, it has started to produce a good crop. We shared our first harvest recently at our weekly friday night wrapup session, consisting of some green leaves – basil, mint and lettuce.

The garden is for nourishing our staff and is part of an integrated system at our studio. We collect organic waste in our kitchen and it is fed to our three worms we have in our basement garage (we’ve effectively converted our ‘car space’ into a ‘worm space’). Our worms produce very rich liquid and solid fertiliser, which is then fed into the soil in our rooftop garden and from that grows more food for our staff, closing the loop.

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Kristen Le Mesurier’s recent article on sustainable offices ran in the Sydney Morning Herald this week. It featured myself (with a 5 year old photo bless her heart!) and Rick Millen from Pri

cewaterhouseCoopers and Kate Noble from the ACF discussing the value and impact of sustainable business operations.

We, of course have been quite active and vocal in our efforts to walk the talk as it were; and continue to improve the way we do things. (Our current studio renovations project will feature many sustainability inspired innovations which we’ll share with you as they become reality). To her credit Kristen included a point i often raise in interviews (though it rarely seems to get through the editors) regarding the operational aspect of a company’s sustainability …

“… And while all of these sustainable operational initiatives are important and commendable, they are really just the tip of the iceberg. What is really important is the impact companies have on the world in terms of the actual work they do.”

“The actions we inspire, enable and facilitate are by far the biggest part of our ecological footprint, that’s the chunk of the iceberg under the waterline,” Gravina says.

When talking about design agencies in particular; the iceberg is the proverbial elephant in the room.

Read the full article here
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Laying down a challenge to other companies, Digital Eskimo recently carbon offset the entire history of the agency, dating back to 2001. We calculated our carbon emissions with our friends at Climate Friendly and offset the lot, effectively cleaning up the (relatively small given our ecological ways) mess we’d left behind on our way to becoming Sydney’s pre-eminent sustainability focussed design agency.

We now challenge other companies to do the same. As we all sit and wait for what looks like a pretty lacklustre response from the government to the Gaurnaut review, we as industry leaders can do a lot to set the pace.

So what’s your company doing about it’s past emissions?
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Seems everyone is doing a green issue these days and we’re more than happy to provide our own insights and experiences. Sunday Life spoke to us about the ways in which we minimise our footprint here in the igloo recently. There is a pretty decent list of tips and advice in the issue and you can read about one of our more quirky sustainability initiatives. It’s great to get the exposure and hopefully inspire more businesses and design agencies to do more in their daily operations.

Check out the full article here.

Meanwhile our friends over at the ACTU are asking for your green tips in your workplace too so check that out and send them in some ideas.

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Digital Eskimo’s search to create the most environmentally friendly studio possible started from the ground up. The space we found needed a new floor and so we set about researching what would be the best option. We looked at carpets, hardwood floors, veneer floors and bamboo floors.

The bamboo option from Bamboo Flooring was an easy winner. We used a natural rubber underlay and bamboo boards with a snap-lock systems that meant we used no adhesives when laying down the carpet. What’s more it’s designed for dissassembly – you can pull it up and install it again somewhere else if you like.

More …

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This months, Nett magazine includes an article on Digital Eskimo’s day to day operations as a (hopefully inspiring!) example of how to run a green business. We’ve been dreaming up and implementing a unique set of approaches for years now so as you can imagine we had a bit to say.

The article mentions an initiative we are very excited about which is our decision to buy carbon credits to neutralise the entire footprint of the agency since we began in 2001. We see it as a way to cleanup the mess we’ve left in the atmosphere (albeit while doing mostly sustainable projects!) rather than just offsetting recent or current emissions and we’ll be challenging other companies to do the same.

Go buy the magazine or Download the article (PDF).
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The results from Digital Eskimo’s first (personal) waste audit were quite encouraging.

Digital Eskimo’s staff were to keep all the waste they generated in a week inside a bag on their desktop (except compostable waste). We compared the contents of everyone’s bags at the end of the week and made some interesting findings, the most interesting being that you can in fact generate no waste at all.

No-one had excessive amounts of rubbish or recyclable materials, but our Executive Producer, Penny Hagen, collected only a single bent paper clip. Had she not been so distracted during a conversation she might not have absent-mindedly bent it out of shape and she could have been scott-free for the whole week.

Most of the waste (about 70%) was able to be recycled, which was pleasing to see. But Penny showed us that, with some planning, some tupperware, eating in and remembering to refuse what you don’t need at the till, you can drastically reduce your resource consumption and waste to landfill.
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As a company, possibly the largest component of our carbon footprint is in energy use. Even though we don’t have air-conditioning, the computers we use consume energy.

We’ve been running GreenPower long before it was fashionable to reduce this footprint. In keeping with the “Reduce, Renew, Offset” philosophy, we also use energy efficient computers wherever possible. Many staff use energy efficient laptops iMacs and our file server is a Mac Mini – basically a laptop in a cute desktop package.

So we’re glad to see the IT industry as a whole starting to make significant moves to improve energy efficiency in the computers that now are essential in running much of Australia’s, and the world’s, economies.

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We recently upgraded our old colour printer and purchased at new Xerox Phaser 8560 multifunction printer for our studio.

We seek to use every opportunity we can to reduce our impact on the environment and the first step to doing so when it comes to printing is to simply print less.

But given we cannot reduce our printing to none at all, we had a number of questions about our new printer’s environmental impact that we hoped would guide our choice (apart from the crucial question of whether it produced high-quality prints).

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