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!

Related posts:

1. Bike Fleet and Repair Shop
2. September greenUps – For the Love of Bikes!

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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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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1. Solidariti Q+A with Papercut Media

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.

WWF also have a few of our tips on the Future is Man Made blog so feel free to add ideas there too!

One that isn’t ours but is cool is PlayGreen – they are building the biggest book on green living – send them your ideas while you’re at it too.

Related posts:

1. Nett magazine showcases Digital Eskimo
2. Sunday Life magazine feature article 2008
3. Digital Eskimo shares the love …

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 …

While we could have gone with a carpet tile solution from the sustainability pioneers, Interface Flor, but wanted our studio to be spectacular and few things say “boring office” as well as carpet tiles.

There were some good hardwood options from Forest Stewardship Council approved sources, but they were up to triple the cost of the carpet, representing money that we would have to take from other sustainability features in the studio and so, on balance, was not the best option.

The veneer option turned out to be a photocopy of woodgrain printed on paper, glued to an MDF board an covered with a PVC laminate.

The bamboo flooring was laid in just two days, saving time, energy and money, and it looks fantastic. It complements our bamboo desks perfectly and ensures we have a healthy budget for all the other things that will ensure our studio sits lightly on the earth.

The studio renovations will continue throughout the year as time and budget allow including meeting rooms spaces and more and we’ll continue to blog about our research and sustainable solutions as it happens …

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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).

Related posts:

1. Digital Eskimo in Sunday Life Magazine ….
2. Nett magazine April 2008
3. Cleaning up our mess

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.

Related posts:

1. Take your waste with ya… (part 2)
2. Take your waste with ya…

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.

Big guns making waves

Over the past few months I’ve seen a dramatic increase in reportage of IT departments “going green”. In most cases this is a reference to energy efficiency, which is estimated to cost business billions of dollars.

Google is definitely stealing a lot of headlines – not only looking at how to conserve energy, but also seeking ways to green their operations more generally.

(Google are yet to turn black as some suggest. Mind you, the energy efficiency claims made around the “Blackle” concept have been shown to be somewhat overstated.)

Sun Microsystems is also winning customers with their energy efficient processor, the UltraSPARC T1. They are also part of the WWF supported Climate Savers initiative which includes IT heavyweights Microsoft, HP, and chip manufacturers AMD and Intel to name just a few (Google also appear on the Climate Savers list, holding a spot on the board of the initiative).

The initiative “brings together industry, consumers and conservation organizations to significantly increase the energy efficiency of computers and servers.” It’s focusing on the source of the problem – the computers themselves – which provides benefits to all customers, which is great to see.

The Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) is also helping institutional buyers making greener choices. The industry-initiated voluntary standard includes “23 required criteria covering hazardous materials, recycling, and power consumption”.

Business Week reports that consumers’ fixation on initial purchase cost prompts manufacturers to include cheaper and less efficient components that increase the cost of the systems over their lifetime.

Thankfully it seems that a shift in focus on total cost of ownership is underway in IT departments around the world, which will reap significant benefits in time.

Enlightened self interest

What’s driving all this activity? It appears “enlightened self interest” is the key. Saving energy saves money – even more so as electricity prices rise and the cost of the carbon economy begins to weigh on businesses. According to Greener Computing [via Joel Makower]:

“Simply activating the power-save features on a fleet of corporate desktops — which in Google’s case could be as high as 12,000 computers for its employees worldwide — can save 50 or 60 percent of the energy wasted when computers are left on, and idle, for 16 hours a day.”

Employee retention is another. A Sun study, published by Inc.com [via Smart Company] found that “73% of workers want to work for businesses that are environmentally-friendly”. The trend extends to Australia. The same Smart Company round up mentions a newspoll that found:

“84% of employees want to work in an environmentally friendly office. And it is not just the Gen-Ys who want the change. While 81% of 18-24 year olds want to work in a green office, so do 86% of 35-49s.”

The Sun study also showed what many a building manager knows – that the bad habits of employees also cause a lot of wasted energy, with “only 52% say they turn lights off when they leave a room at the office, and 34% report they turn off their computers at the end of the day”. This is in stark contrast to their habits at home, where individuals tend to take more responsibility.

(To be fair, the persistent myth that a computer uses more energy to startup than being left on and previous reliability problems with turning computers – often propogated by ill-informed IT department staff – may have something to do with this.

Hosting

Much of Digital Eskimo’s business is building websites for our clients, hosted on servers that, of course, also consume electricity. We’ve long wanted to provide a “green” option for our clients – offsetting the emissions from the servers we use. We’ve been in discussions with two hosting companies we use to try to make this a reality, so far without success. But green options are increasingly coming to market.

The recent Web Directions South (WDS) conference pointed out that Pair Networks offsets their energy use – though you wouldn’t know this from their website.

The WDS post also points us to W3Green which provides additional information on how you can calculate the amount of electricity used by your website so that you can offset it. We’ll certainly be looking into that further and mentioning it to our preferred hosting companies.

Treehugger reports that Ilisys, a Western Australia-based hosting provider, is now carbon neutral. (Treehugger have also done a roundup of how different hosts are going green.) And California-based AISO claims to be a “100% solar energy host” – probably a good thing given California’s history of rolling blackouts and high electricity costs.

An energy efficient future

All of this activity is very promising, providing IT departments and individuals with more and more options for reducing their carbon footprint. Whilst there is still much to be done, these initiatives combined with European Union legislation such as RoHS Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), are having far reaching effects on the global market for IT and electronics benefiting us all.

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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).

They were:

• Is it made of recycled materials?
• Does the manufacturer take responsibility of the machine at the end of its life? Is it then recycled? Can it be recycled?
• Energy use – how much does it use when printing or when on standby?
• Cartridges – can they be refilled? can they be recycled?
• Can it print double sided?
• Can it print on recycled paper?
• Can it print on reused paper? (we want to be able to reuse our scrap paper)

Sadly, it is very hard to get answers to most of these questions and even several phone conversations with the tech teams at various printer companies yielded little information that could help us choose our printer.

We also became aware of the pollution caused by some printers in offices – a team at the Queensland University of Technology recently found that a third of printer emit dangerous levels of toner into the air, causing significant health problems for office workers.

Fortunately most companies offer cartridge recycling through a program run by Planet Ark, in conjunction with Close the Loop, a fantastic example of a business that exists to solve an environmental problem.

After comparing the relative performance of various printers and their manufacturers one easily stood out from the rest. Where some printer companies produce sustainability reports and belong to Planet Ark’s program, Fuji Xerox have embedded care for the environment deeply into their product development. They have formal processes to design for the environment and their Eco Manufacturing Centre in Zetland is a great demonstration of their commitment to this.

Better still, Fuji Xerox have also eliminated the problems caused by toner and toner cartridges cartridges by removing them completely from several of their models (incl. the one we use) – replacing them with solid ink that is not in a powdered form and does not require a casing.

We have also found this system prints easily onto scrap paper without jamming, enabling us to significantly reduce the amount we use, plus it has a fax which means we can unplug our old one – by using less appliances we reduce our energy use too.

So, after all that, we now have a new printer. And it works great.

Related posts:

1. Printing on a sustainable shoestring
2. Printing on a sustainable shoestring (part 2)