Green Business Tips: Choose an Eco-Friendly Printing Company

Individuals are increasingly aware of the environmental practices of companies, and those practices can influence buying decisions for your key customers and clients. One of the simplest and economical ways to improve your environmental practices is to use green printing for all your marketing and sales materials.

PSPrint is one printing company that has taken action to offer environmentally-friendly services. Below are some of the benefits they offer with their services:

Printing on Recycled Paper
PsPrint offers 100% recycled paper stocks for most of their printed products. Your business should consider using high-quality recycled papers for everyday office printing and faxing, along with promotion of your services via brochures, business cards, and catalog printing . Show your green efforts to your clients by printing a line on your sales materials – “Printed on 100 percent recycled paper”.

Printing with Soy-Based Inks
PSPrint uses soy-based inks which are much safer for the environment than traditional petroleum-based inks. Soy inks emit fewer VOCs (volatile organic compounds) than traditional inks, and they help save the environment by making paper easier to recycle.

Recycling Paper Waste
Consider the life-cycle of the production of your printed materials, not just the quality of the finished product. PSPrint recycles all of their paper waste, while the printing industry on a whole produces tons of paper waste every year.

At Green Nation Today, we encourage you to go green with your business’s printing. The price will be similar to your current processes, and you’ll have the added benefits of reducing environmental impact and having one more sales point for your environmentally-sound clients.

Green Apartment Trends: Coming to a Community Near You!

As the green movement marches on, apartment buildings are starting taking notice. Green building has been largely focused on houses and remodeling, leaving the renter out of options for greening up their home. In fact, living in an apartment or shared housing situation decreases your carbon footprint greatly versus having a house.

As a renter of a house, I’m continually frustrated at the helplessness I feel at not being able to remodel my house to be more energy efficient. Yes, we recycle, limit water use, and use green products, but the house still has a long way to go before it is environmentally-friendly. The fact is that I don’t have the money to remodel a place I will move out of in a year or two. Most people don’t want to invest the time and money into making a place sustainable when they’ll leave eventually.

The Green Apartment Trend
Green apartment complexes are springing up to meet new demands for a sustainable place to live for renters. These complexes vary in their execution of what they consider to be green, but generally they are more energy efficient through building materials or alternative energy. They also will tend to encourage environmental practices, like having safe bike storage or offering free electronics recycling. Some places will even donate a percentage of their property management fees to an environmental cause.

The Boutique Apartments in Denver, Colo., is one such green apartment company that is trying to change the face of renting. They own eleven buildings throughout the city—each with a different theme, all with the same commitment to green living. They install energy efficient kitchen appliances, water heaters, and boilers. They use white roofs instead of black ones to keep the buildings cooler in the summer, thus using less air conditioning. Bamboo floors were installed instead of oak floors, as bamboo is a more sustainable resource.

Green AND Beautiful
The aesthetics of green, sustainable apartments in general are also unique and beautiful. I’ve always been depressed by the uniformity of giant apartment complexes: white walls, identical floor plans—boring. It seems as though the leaders in the green apartment business are interested in making beautiful spaces for their tenants with recycled art, funky appliances, beautiful low-VOC paint on the wall in an actual color. It’s these little touches that will make the green apartment trend blow up.

Some states are starting to give incentives to those that build apartments in a sustainable fashion. Even without the incentive, these buildings will eventually pay for themselves through energy savings. Renters are looking for the X factor when scouring complex after complex, and this is it.