Eco Displayware

This year, our suppliers and manufacturers have switched to water based stains and colors. We are very excited about this change as it further enables us to be green in a very real sense. We know that this process is continuous and it is not going to happen over night but we are very pleased with the progress so far. These water based items will be phased into our product line over the rest of this year. Any product that has a dark stain or color will water based.

We are also looking at using recyclable, re-usable, returnable corrugated plastic shipping boxes rather than 1 time use cardboard boxes.  Cardboard boxes can be made with recycled content but it is still 1 time use and causes significant more energy use and much of that still ends up in the landfill. This is significantly more challenging. One of the biggest challenges is to ensure getting the boxes back to us from various customer locations in a cost effective and environmentally way. There is shipping cost involved so we have to find a way to collect sufficient quantities before it can be returned back from our customer locations. This  is one reason that we will probably want to work with our largest accounts in a closed loop environment to test this first. This will be a long process and we are still in the early stages of checking the viability of making this work. It is definitely or goal to make this happen as long as it is cost effective AND environmentally friendly. Both objectives need to be met. However, in the long run this is another way to move towards being genuinely green.

Similarly, we encourage our customers, many of whom are green retailers, to not only increase their green and eco-friendly products but also merchandise using eco-friendly products.