As the effects of humanity on this planet show themselves more and more, we have to think about what we do and how we can lessen our negative impact. The art we create is what we love to make, but we want to minimize the impact of our business and so we have done a few things to hopefully help.
We are enrolled in the Blue Sky program which means we pay a small extra fee on our electricity bill to help fund green and alternative energy developement so that the energy we use (power tools, lighting, music, computers, etc.) has less of an impact on the environment. We also purchased a small solar generator to help with a few things like booth lighting and maybe being able to power or recharge some power tools. We do not have the money or the sunshine at our location to make a full solar commitment worth while financially or environmentally.
We joined Ridwell, the recycling service. While we try to be concious of what we get and what we send out into the world, it is hard to not end up with some waste. By using Ridwell we get to recycle a bit of stuff that is not easy to recycle, including shipping packaging (plastic bags, multi-layer plastic, and styrofoam) along with a few other items that seem to change throughout the year. They are very informative about where the stuff goes, how it is recycled, and they are a B Corp certified company.
Avoiding using A.I. type stuff and trying to avoid using data centers. As technology gets more advanced and computer related things push more towards automation and "in the cloud", all these new data centers are popping up everywhere. They suck up huge amounts of water, energy that is usually not clean energy, put a strain on surrounding areas resources, are noisy, and in the end, not really benefitting anyone but the richest people. I have been deleting unnecessary online data, unsubscribing from irrelevant e-mail lists, and avoiding using any A.I. type stuff as much as possible. I realize that because the term is applied across such a broad spectrum of applications that there are some rare instances where it is truly useful to science, most of it is just more tech garbage that seems to suck people's time and brains into the void while wasting resources or creating new ways to remove humans and/or humanity from jobs and automate them at again, a cost to society that only benefits the richest people.
Keep loving art, nature, and each other and maybe we can start to heal the earth. Thank you for reading.
-Brent