Wes Chyrchel

Do you know those people who print out emails? Drives me crazy. There will always be those people, but we don’t have to do it at work! The paperless office has been talked about for decades. Critics have slammed it for years and the paper manufacturers are freaking out, lobbying heavily that they have taken it upon themselves to sustainably manage many forests. If they go, so do all of these beautiful forests! Hmm, I don’t know about that. Sure, some say electronic documents harm the environment just as much with the devices carbon impact, but to that end, the paper industry is just as much at fault, because we need printers to print on paper.

The new computer tablets offer a little more flexibility and are very handy document machines. In fact, we exclusively use the iPad for client contracts. They read, sign and get emailed a copy immediately. It’s a great solution.

The one problem is that we can refrain from printing as much as we want, but that doesn’t mean someone else wont print. There are grandmas and grandpas all over the country printing out emails right now and there is nothing we can do. Or is there? What if we could prevent people from printing the stuff we send them? I’m not talking about the, “save a tree, please don’t print this email.” in your signature. I’m talking about removing the Print button altogether.

Introducing WWF! “A new green file format that can’t be printed out.” The WWF format was created by the World Wildlife Fund and it’s partners to save habitats for wild animals by eliminating the possibility of printing. The WWF file format uses the same technology as a PDF and can be opened by most PDF software readers. It’s a brilliant solution that just locks the PDF down. Technically you could always do this with PDF’s, but now you can send a message. We are taking action to preserve the environment and you should too!

To learn more about the WWF file format and how to convert your documents to WWF, visit Save As WWF. Also, watch the great video below.

I thought this was really cool.  We are already “greening” our site in different ways, but this is a great article about 10 Easy Ways to Green Your Web Site.  Here is what we have done in response to each one of those 10 items.

1.  Environmentally Friendly Web Hosting

We use Dreamhost.  They offset their carbon they use in their building and even the gas they use to get to their office by purchasing carbon credits from Green-e,   For many businesses, depending on the kind of building they are in, carbon credits are one of the few options.  Dreamhost has been offseting their carbon long before it was popular.

2.  Offset Your Carbon Usage

Carbon credits are controversial and everyone is still trying to figure out if they work and how they are tracked.  There are some great organizations out their offering this service, Green-e, TerraPass and Carbonfund are the most popular.  Right now most of these efforts by us are community based.  We have something brewing that is going to help this process along greatly.  Stay tuned!

3.  The 350 lbs. Project

I like this.  I think this is a great way to get companies to commit and sponsor green projects and be green at the same time.  We are going to see a lot more of this in 2010.  A new business model is emerging surrounding this called, “Donation by Action” and we posted a story about it called, Great story about cancer, follow Drew Carey on Twitter and he will donate 1 Million to LIVESTRONG! By the way, we joined and you should too!

4.  Join 1% For the Planet

I have seen this floating around out there for awhile.  One of our clients, Thinkwear is a member and really explained how and why they are using this organization.  What came through loud and clear is commitment.  Literally, you are putting your money where your mouth is.  You are committing to donating 1% of your sales to any of the environmental organizations listed on their website.  This ensures a clean and honest transaction with your business and the benefitting environmental organization.  Because we believe in this idea so much and we know that no one can do it alone, we currently are in the process of becoming a member.

5.  Offer Eco-Incentives to Subscribers

I think this idea is essential.  We believe this should come in the form of tangibles and intangibles.  Get people to come to an event or give them discounts or free stuff.  At the very essence though, there should be a significant amount of education to go along with it.  Currently we are doing this in the form of contest giveaway’s, We will be doing this more consistently and interactively in 2010.

6.  Encourage Green Lifestyle Changes

Green starts at home.  I really think that you have to immerse yourself in it.  It has to become part of your home life choices if you want to adopt it in other areas of your life, such as work and recreation.  There are so many ways to make your life a lot more interesting and get you and your family to participate in being green.  I definitely think visiting sites like, Treehugger and Mother Nature Network are really good at staying up to date, but I think there are some really good books too.  The Urban Homestead (Amazon Link) is a new favorite of mine that actually gives you step by step instructions on how to become more sustainable at home.  Also, No Impact Man (Amazon Link) is a great book about how a family in New York went extreme and went uber green for one whole year.  Both of these books are entertaining and give insight into how fun and exciting sustainability can be.

7. Simplify Your Design

I am a big advocate of this.  My background is in Web Development and at my company 3GC Interactive one of the big lessons we try to teach is to be obvious.  When presenting information on your website, be short and to the point.  This is not only for your writing, but your graphics.  If you want someone to click somewhere, say “Click Here” if you want someone to buy something, say “Buy Now.”  Eliminating obstacles is really half of what web design is all about.  We are always striving to do this, with our design, information and goals.  We are always striving to be more efficient, refine our goals and improve our site, you should too.

8. Speed Up Your Site

This is true.  Slow loading times take up more energy.  There are many reasons why and a few are indicated in the original article, but for all purposes, it just does.  We use WordPress for WesChyrchel.com, so we use the WP Super Cache plugin.   This reformats how portions of the website our accessed and makes that pathway more efficient.  For example, if a particular page that you are requesting has not changed recently, it will keep it stored in an area that is easier and faster to get to than going the traditional route.  By using this plugin it has increased the speed or our website significantly.

9.  Use Printer-Friendly Versions of Content

Well, I don’t know about this one.  On WesChyrchel.com we don’t like people printing anything.  I mean really, these days you shouldn’t have to print anything unless you need to sign it.  Hopefully, digital signatures will get more commonplace too.  If you really think printing is essential for your site, then, yes please employ the recommendations in the original article, but if you can help it, please use alternatives, like a mobile version of your website!

10.  Consider Your Colors

Yes, black was the new white, back in the big monitor days.  Now almost everyone uses LCD monitors which use 200% less power than older big monitors.  That in and of itself is a huge savings.  Now it appears that LCD’s use more power producing darker colored sites.  At WesChyrchel.com we have a light colored site and that is good, but the more impressive power aspect is that people are almost exclusively using LCD’s instead of CRT’s these days and that power savings is huge.

We think that all business need to go green and become more sustainable.  2010 is the year to do this and making your website green is a great first step in the process.

Saying that you want to “go green” is a lot easier than doing it. You have to make new choices every day. There is a big learning curve, what is green, what isn’t green and so on. It could get so frustrating that you may just want to walk away from it all together. Don’t. Let me show you the right way to go green.

Why would you want to go green?

First you have to go green in ways that it makes sense for you and your family. For me I started to realize how much we were throwing away and it just blew my mind. Also, I wanted to save money and eat better. We have achieved those goals and now I am onto new goals. Earlier this year the water company literally doubled our rates.  There really was nothing we could do.  You end up just paying the extra charges.  Our bill went from $75 to $150 per month.  That’s a pretty big jump! It forced me to look at our biggest water wasters.  Here is what the biggest water wasters our and what I have started to do to save money,

• Garden – Uses up to 50% of a households water – I now water every other day. I am adding more rain barrels around my house to catch rain water and I am in the process of changing all the planters around my house to drip systems.
• Showers – After laundry, the biggest water user inside the home – Most fairly new and 10 year old homes have shower heads that put out about 3.5 to 2.5 gallons per minute.  That’s a lot of water.  I am in the process of switching all of my shower heads out to .5 gallons per minute, to possibly the Bricor B100 Ultra Max .55GPM Showerhead
• Removing parts of my lawn – Lawns use 30% of the 50% of garden water usage – I live in California and lets face it, we may have a lot of sun to enable things to grow, but we are a desert and lawns just don’t make it out here without an incredible amount of water. There is a great book that I am reading titled, “food not lawns,” that talks about replacing much of your yard plants with edibles and stop wasting water on your lawn.

I am pretty confident that with some changes and a small investment, I can reduce my water bill back to where it was and recoup my investment, within 6 months.  Saving water is being green and if you can save yourself some money in the process, then why not?

Soon you will realize there are other areas where you can save money. Your gas bill, electric bill, food bill, transportation, entertainment, etc. The trick is to not just go out and buy a bunch of trendy green gadgets.  You hear this often, but there is a reason, first reduce your consumption or use then implement a solution.  The reason you do this first is to figure out how much you really use. For example, the biggest waste of money right now is people putting in massive solar systems on their house. The reason is that until the price comes down, it just isn’t a good investment.  People are thinking they are saving the environment by adding these systems to their homes, but they are not reducing the amount of energy they use. So they are buying larger solar systems than they actually need and that is waste. If they just conserved, changed out lighting, turned off electricity when not in use, etc., they would find that their electricity demand was not that high. That saving right there, might just be enough to wait out the purchase of a solar system altogether.

At the very least “green” is about conserving and that translates into cash.  It’s inevitable, when you take less from the planet, you put out less too.

How to understand your environmental impact: take a breath

When I was young growing up in Southern California we would have days that you couldn’t play outside.  I didn’t understand. The problem was that when you looked out the window, it looked fine.  It wasn’t raining.  The sun was shining. It wasn’t windy. It wasn’t too hot.  What was it?  Those days were called “Smog Alert” days. The air quality was so poor from the pollution that we generated, that it was dangerous to breath.

Schools kept students inside, sports activities were suspended and the elderly were to be watched. It was crazy.  As I got older, it didn’t get much better. When I taught swimming lessons, we had to keep children out of the pool.  Can you imagine dozens of children show up for a swimming lesson, suits and goggles in hand, only to be told to turnaround and go home, because the air has been poisoned? Wikipedia has this to say about smog alerts in Los Angeles, “The number of Stage 1 smog alerts has declined from over 100 per year in the 1970s to almost zero in the new millennium.” Much of this “improvement” has only occurred within the last 10 years or so and we have only begun to understand the impact of those years on the population.

Believing in “green” is not siding politically with one group or another. You don’t have to change what you wear, what you eat or who you are. What it means is understanding that everything you do has an impact and every little bit makes a difference. Down the road it will become essential that every person and every business implement green practices. At first these will start out as recommendations. Currently they are being drafted into more strict laws. Then the penalties and fines will start for those that don’t conform. You can start now by just thinking about what you do every day and making a choice to conserve. Please don’t wait until the last possible minute.

There are many carbon calculators out there that will track everything.  The only problem is that you have to put all of the information in, to get anything out.  Unless you keep up to date numbers, it’s hard to stay on top of it.  That’s why I like EcoBot, because it tracks everything for you.  All you have to do is just install it.  Right now, it only works on Mac’s, but it’s a great tool for personal and business use.

What is a carbon calculator?

Most of everything we do throughout the day has an impact on the environment by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide that gets released into the atmosphere.  The more carbon dioxide that gets released, the warmer our planet gets.  By being mindful of what we do throughout the day we can limit the amount of carbon dioxide that we are responsible for.  Carbon calculators help us figure out our impact by doing the math for us.  They usually tally up our fuel and power consumption to give us our “Carbon Footprint” which is the total number of ounces of carbon we are releasing.

Why EcoBot makes it easier

With EcoBot it asks you simple questions in the begining and will keep track of your fuel connection via wifi connections or locations you visit.  It will figure out what kind of computer you are using and track your power consumption.  If you print any paper, it will track how many times you print, how many copies you print and what the carbon impact of that was.  Beyond the automatic calculations you can manually add more of your own.  Modify your trips or locations, add vacuum cleaners, dryers or TVs and any newspapers or magazines you read.  You can really dial it in to get the most accurate footprint possible.

Okay, I know my carbon footprint, now what?

Now that you know how much carbon you are releasing into the atmosphere, try to lower it.  This is where we get into “reduce, reuse, recycle,” because all of those things lower your impact.  So, riding your bike to the store instead of driving, would be a way to reduce.  Opening a window or turning on a fan, instead of running the air conditioner would be another way to reduce.  One of the ways I think of reusing is fixing things that are broken or repainting or refurbishing them for continued use.  We have gotten use to just throwing things away and many things can be repaired or given away to a friend for another life.  Recycling is actually pretty fun.  Think of composting, rainwater harvesting and zero waste.  It’s an incredible feeling taking the trash out and it’s significantly less than it used to be.

Today I am launching, WesChyrchel.com.  This blog is a long time coming where I will be sharing my stories, news, opinions and events on green issues.  I selected Earth Day for the launch of this site, because it is a great celebration of our planet.  To kick off the launch of WesChyrchel.com I took a video of the grand San Diego Earch Day Festival.  It was the 20th anniversary of the event and it truly was the largest event I have ever been to.

Earth Day means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.  I think that’s what I liked best about the San Diego Earth Day Festival.  To some people Earth Day is a very spiritual day of music and dancing, others it is about environmental protection, some used it as a political platform and companies used it as a commercial opportunity.  I think all of that is fine.

The gems of SD Earth Day were found off the beaten path, the hula hoop dancers, the drum circle groups and the Free Speach Tent.  I think I really liked that one.  There was so much to see there, you just couldn’t see it all in one day.  It was truly a spectacular event to pull off.  My hat comes off to the organizers, very well done.  Of course the day of the San Diego Earth Day Festival was one of the hottest days yet this year for San Diego.  Oh the irony!