Real Life News environment

"These come from trees" stickers

Posted by DavidM in Reduce, re-use, recycle | 4 March 2007

The These come from trees blog claims to be 'the world's first guerrilla public service announcement'.

The main aim of the site is to promote their 'These come from trees' stickers.

The idea is that these stickers are stuck onto things like paper towel dispensers to discourage people from using them and thereby save paper.

Not a bad idea.

Hat tip: Seth Godin and David Hughes.

Comments

1. At March 5, 2007 4:24 AM Pete Kazanjy wrote:

Hi David,

Thanks for the commentary on our project.

Just a quick point or two of clarification:

1. The promotion of the stickers we've created is just one of the goals of the website. The big goal, of course, is what we're calling "costless resource conservation." The sticker is just one means to that end.

Also, the slogan and image is released under a creative commons license, so people can do whatever they want with it, provided it's non-commercial, and there's attribution.

2. Saying that the purpose of the stickers is to "discourage" people from using paper towels is maybe a bit of an overstatement. It's not that all paper consumption is a bad thing, just like driving a car is a necessity for a lot of people.

It's mindless, unintentional overuse of resources that's bad. That's where this project came from: watching people at fast food restaurants take a hunk of napkins from a dispenser, use one or two, and toss the rest.

We noticed that a similar thing takes place in bathrooms with paper towel dispensers: people who aren't really paying attention to how many towels they "need" to dry their hands end up taking, three, four, or more towels, absentmindedly, when one or two would do.

The goal is to helpfully bring that user back into the moment to consider how many they really "need" to get the job done, whether that's getting ketchup off their mouth, or hand-washing water off their hands.

Thanks again for the shout out, and I hope this comment was helpful!

2. At March 5, 2007 9:29 PM DavidM wrote:

Thanks for the clarification Pete. I think it was getting late and I rushed the post a bit.

It'll teach me to take a bit more care.

Good luck with the site.