Ways That Donnelly's Tries To Go Green:
SAVING PAPER
We've amended the store receipt system so we consume significantly less paper by cutting the amount of sales orders we need to print. Before, any order placed as a Store Pickup would create 2 copies of the sales order sheet. Now we only print one, cutting the amount of paper we use for those orders by 50%!
The Spring Grove™ sanitary paper products we use for our offices are composed of 100% recycled fiber and meet or exceed the EPA minimum recommendations for Recovered Fiber (20-100%) and Postconsumer Fiber (20-60%) content levels.
All our cardboard is collected and brought to a recycling center on a regular basis. If a Donnelly's Order Box is not in bad shape, we strip the labels off and reuse the box instead of just breaking it down and throwing it into the recycling bin (even recycling requires time and energy!). This saves wasting another box and also typically saves us wasting more mailing tape. We like to reuse our clothing bins in a similar way, repairing and reusing them instead of constantly replacing them and overloading the recycling bin.
After certain 1-sided documents have served their function, they're put into a "Scrap Paper" bin so we can use the reverse sides for a variety of other functions such as printing incoming faxes, writing memos, printing school lists, making signs and labels, producing miscellaneous lists and plans, and anything else you can think of!
USING LESS FUEL
For the majority of the year, we deliver all our school orders using fuel efficient company vehicles as opposed to large commercial vehicles.
Whenever we can, we group and ship family orders together so our friends at UPS don't have to make unnecessary trips to the same address. Why use 3 or 4 boxes when you can use just 1 or 2?
We always carpool when driving to retail events!
TAKING ADVANTAGE OF TECHNOLOGY
We email notifications whenever possible rather than printing and posting thousands of letters, which saves tons of stationary. We will continue to expand on this method.
We produce item labels, box labels, and receipts by way of thermal printing, a process that does not require ink but rather the heating of thermochromic paper, which in turn does not require the natural resources necessary to produce ink.
