It seems that everywhere you turn, products and businesses are going (or claiming to go) “green.” Among the ambiguous buzz words is “zero waste,” which implies that your product or service creates no waste from its infancy to death… it is created from renewable materials and is able to be reused or recycled, avoiding landfill.

But how realistic is it for an office (or art studio!) to create zero waste? The GreenBiz article, The Zero Waste Office : Is it possible?, addresses that question, and gives some great achievable goals that we designers & illustrators can adopt into running our own green creative studios :

“At this time zero waste is more of a journey than something that can be achieved,” said Larry Chalfan of the Zero Waste Alliance, a non-profit consortium of educational, government, business and other groups. “Too much of the things we need simply aren’t ready for us to truly be zero waste. That said, a lot can be done, and many organizations make the goal ‘zero waste to landfill’ and then further define it to mean over 90 percent of waste being diverted into reuse or recycling.”

For more info on how to be a greener designer, check out these other tips & posts on my blog!