Sustainability: business, life, environment

In my personal consulting practice, I work with my clients in ways to easily bring eco awareness and sustainability concepts into their lives.  With all of the holiday mailings, a hot topic has been around ways to reduce mail and junk mail. 

A great service that I have used personally for over a year now is GreenDimes .  Their service stops junk mail and plants trees on your behalf.  Not only has it helped me personally follow my own sustainability plan, but it has greatly reduced our junk mail. As of today, their site posts:

• 337,326
people helped
• 1,332,632
trees planted
• 2,700,840
catalogs stopped
• 16,406,606
pounds of junk mail stopped

For your regular mail, switch to online bill pay for your bill payments.  Most banks offer an online payment and it's easy to use. 

For the magazines and junk mail that you have already received, you can put it in the recycle bin or use it for creative expressions. In our personal consulting, part of creating a sustainability plan is identifying what would look like to that individual.  So, by cutting out pictures, words, images and descriptions that have meaning and capture what a sustainable lifestyle looks to you in a collage is one way to use those old papers up in a creative and environmentally friendly way and also use it as inspiration for your sustainable lifestyle.