Novel Idea Drives Green Initiative for Design Business

During a recent brainstorming meeting at EO Minneapolis-St. Paul member Tom Trutna's company, BIG INK, a summer intern half joked about putting graphics on his hybrid car to launch the company’s Eco-Green campaign. The idea took off and BIG INK partnered with Image Haus of Minneapolis to create green inspired vehicle graphics that would garner customer and industry attention to their green efforts.

The cars feature one of four integrated designs and the simple yet powerful message of, “Little Things Make a BIG Difference.” Aside from being driven around the Twin Cities, cars are being used for client visits, as well as being strategically parked at local business events and the response has been tremendous, people have taken notice.

Although the digital graphics industry is not well know for environmental initiatives, BIG INK decided to start where it could. An internal Green Team was assembled, simple changes were made and the company immediately felt the results.

“Even the small changes we made had impact,” notes Trutna, BIG INK president. “From the onset we started recycling over 2400 pounds of scrap waste each month along with 600 pounds of office paper.”

In order to educate the industry about the initiatives they took, Trutna wrote an article entitled Kermit Was Wrong! It Is Easy Being Green(er) that was published in Digital Graphics magazine, encouraging other printers to adopt the easy practices that make a difference.

With the internal processes in place, BIG INK started wondering how to educate clients about green options as well as how to fulfill the needs of eco-forward clients. With that in mind, they launched more environmental substrate options and a Zero-Waste recycling program to customers.

“Event, trade show, even retail graphics are often used for a short time and then tossed,” says Trutna, “with our Zero-Waste Recycling Program, we’ll take back anything we produce and have it recycled, keeping tons of graphics out of the waste stream.”

Customers have taken note; the Eco-Green page of BIG INK’s web site now gets four times more traffic than the other pages, bloggers are commenting on the program and customers are starting to send items back to be recycled.

Notes Trutna, “the Prius fleet has proven to be a great marketing vehicle that has brought attention to our many green efforts. It drives the ‘Little Things Make a BIG Difference’ message, features graphics we produced, gets people thinking about being green and puts a smile on the face of everyone who sees it.”