Monday, June 2: Everyone has become aware of the environmental challenges lying ahead of us because of global warming. While there’s scientific disagreement behind the root causes of global warming—and I’m not taking sides on this contentious issue—the fact remains that climate changes are happening right before our eyes. I haven’t forgotten how hot the summer of 2005 was—the hottest year on record—or the buffeting our home took when Hurricane Wilma roared through South Florida. We are all responsible for climate change when we turn on the air conditioning in our homes, drive our cars to work, school, and errands, take an airline flight, and consume goods and services.
Let me tell you about some of things we’re doing at the Garden of Life headquarters in West Palm Beach to be more “green.” Our office building is a fairly typical two-story concrete affair situated in a business park. Early in 2006, our team developed the Garden of Life Green Program that would place our company on a path to produce our products in the “greenest” way possible as well as taking steps to consume less energy to run our business.
We’ve taken some important steps to get there. We now use wind power to run the electricity in our offices and our distribution center, and the light switches in our employee restrooms automatically go off when the motion sensor doesn’t detect anyone inside the bathroom. Our warehouse ships hundreds of boxes each day, but whenever practical and possible, we use recycled or biodegradable packaging in our shipping boxes, marketing materials, product containers, and wrapping. Our catalogs and product boxes are printed with soy-based inks void of toxins. Of course, we like to think that the natural and organic products we produce under the Garden of Life logo are part of lightening the weight of the planet.
What pleases me most is how some of our employees are buying in. Some have traded in their gasoline-powered cars for hybrids. Some started carpooling. The lunchroom recycling is going great guns. Many of our suppliers had the same reaction and made the move to using organic or recycled products.
We feel, corporately speaking, that Garden of Life has a chance to expand its mission from “Empowering Extraordinary Health” to being part of the solution to improve our air, water, food sources, homes, and workplaces. We have even sponsored our top 250 retailers to use wind power to offset their electricity usage in their stores.