The Practical Environmentalist

I keep a photo close to me. Its an image of me and my three-year-old son sitting in a field talking baseball (actually, talking Ken Griffey Jr.) I can recall that conversation as though it were yesterday, although today my son is a twenty-three-year old Marine Corps 2^nd Lieutenant.

Life goes by pretty fast. In the end this wonderful planet we call home is simply on loan. And as my parents always told us about borrowing tools: Return those tools in better condition than when they were loaned.

This is not complicated stuff. We may have trouble understanding heady stuff like carbon footprints, carbon offsets and the latest on fracturing. But we cant in good conscience say we dont have time to do those many little things each and every day that reduce our impact on the earth.

My old man used to pick up trash on his two mile walk home from work every day because. Somebody has to do it, he would say. My father left this world a better place than he found it. And we can do the same. We just have to do that extra little bit of workeveryday.

At Watson, where we manufacture furniture, we call this Practical Environmentalism. There are two facets to this approach:

The first is payback. Im a recovering CPA, so I tend to view things through the lens of long-term financial sustainability. Its easier to get people to rally around things that have a positive financial impact. So we prioritize our efforts from shortest payback to longest payback.

The second is to understand the order of priority: Reduce, reuse, and recycle. Focus first on reducing your need for resources, then on reusing excess resources and finally on recycling that which cant be re-used. And then scream like hell when resources end up in our landfills.

Like most companies, we earn a little money by recycling our scrap metal. Recently we considered the acquisition of a laser machining center that would result in quality and throughput improvements. Unfortunately, it didnt meet our fairly rigid payback standards (2-3 years). But then, on closer look, we realized that the new equipment was 46 percent more efficient in its use of sheet steel. We figured out that this would reduce our sheet metal consumption by almost 200,000 pounds annually. That was more than enough to tip the scale in favor of the purchase.

There are times, however, when the payback doesnt work. Our storage components are generally edged in PVC, a product that is not very green. Polypropylene is now available as an alternative from Europe, but it is very costly.

But sometimes, even if the payback is not obvious, you have to have faith. We have decided that clients would be willing to pay a little more for an environmentally preferable alternative to PVC, so were converting to Polypropylene.

If turns out our clients are not quite ready to help us pay for that conversion, so well eat the extra cost. But we feel better knowing we have sent a message to our team, our parents, our children and ourselves. Its part of our commitment to returning this world in better condition than we found it.

Watson Furniture was winner in the manufacturing category of the 2011 Green Washington Awards.