TreeHugging Guerrillas in Our Midst?
by Kenny Luna, North Babylon, NY 
on 02.28.07
That’s at least what you might expect to be the case if you’ve already come across the first so-called experiment in guerrilla tactics at environmentalism through viral marketing with stickers; stickers that simply read “These Come From Trees.” But stickers? “We don’t need no stinkin’ stickers,” you say… Well, how about the fact that testing shows paper towel dispensers with one of these stickers placed on them guerrilla style actually reduce the amount of paper towels used by roughly 15%, or the equivalent of one tree’s worth of paper for every year of its existence? Now think about the last time you saw a sticker on a bathroom wall, and how long it had probably been there… So combine this germ of knowledge with the fact that there are currently about 50,000 fast food restaurants, 200,000 gas stations, and 10,000 Starbucks in the US and it’s easy to see how we could be saving a whole lot of trees by implementing just one type of sticker in bathrooms across America. And I can say one thing for sure; if I were the CEO of one of the companies footing the bill for all of these paper goods each year I’d go out and buy these stickers by the caseload, mandate they be put in every bathroom in the company, and then add the savings to the bottom line. Let's face reality, wasting paper towels is wasting green in more ways than one…
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Man, this would have been wonderful for a recent visit to Whole Foods.
I saw a woman wash her hands and then take two entire sheets of paper to dry them. The drying took less than two seconds since she just crumpled them and threw them away. Wow, and I thought using even one FULL sheet was kind of wasteful. It made me wince.
If the bathroom has a door, I use the paper towel to touch the handle (in case someone didn't wash their hands). If there is no door, then I'll just use my pants.