Ruth E. Callard, CPA, MBA
608 NE 63rd St.
Seattle, WA 98115
tel: 206-284-4163
fax: 206-632-7445
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Sustainability: Mending is Better than Ending

In the past couple hundred years our economy has been resource-based rather than labor-based. Part of the reason we could 'afford' this culture was because the health, pollution and other costs were born by the general public. Now it might be appropriate to switch back to a labor-based economy so I have had to rethink what it means for me to be professional in an office setting. Professionalism now includes consideration beyond my clients and myself.

Being sustainable is natural for an accountant and it really can be fun. My more challenging goal is to reduce my footprint each year. Please share your tips and ideas with me and feel free to let me know what else I might try.

Examples of some choices I made are below. Thank you all for your excellent cooperation in all of this!

Battery Backup - When my battery backup machine quit working, just outside of warranty of course, I was determined not to buy a new one. I researched the web and it looked like the problem could be a bad battery. On the Belkin website, there were no clear instructions about how to replace the battery! However, I looked further and there was a nice set of instructions by one of those web people who love to share information. I found a store in south Seattle, Allied Battery, that sold the battery and recycled the old one. It now works and I saved a trip to the dump.

Shredder - When I was sharing office space, there was a shredder that didn't work very well, partly because people put more than three pages through at a time. I started reading about shredders and I began to take it apart. The Zen thing didn't work for me and so I searched for hours trying to find a solid hand crank shredder that would last forever; I only found very cheap ones made overseas. I knew Larry Michelson, a person who fixes old copiers, and I called him. Larry suggested that I squirt oil back and forth on a piece of paper and run it through the shredder. After the oiling it ran much better and didn't make such a terrible noise.

Incentives - My tax prep time is less for clients who submit and receive files electronically.

Website - Bus lines are clearly indicated on my directions page and I have a link for instructions and tips on going paperless.

Recycling - I use the paper cutter and chop off any personal information to make small note pads out of the rest of the sheet. Paper with non-personal information is recycled. I recycle dvds into coasters by adding circles of wool felt.

Office and equipment - The new office uses mostly natural light and has windows that have a U-factor of .30 and Solar Heat Gain Coefficient of .20. The light bulbs is use are compact fluorescent. The office is within 1/4 mile of many buses and I have an indoor bike stand for clients. The thermostat in the house is set at 68° and I always wear a sweater. My computer and monitors are set to save energy when not in use; a great feature when one has an office in home. I drink only tap water. (Now wouldn't we be in a world of hurt if we couldn't drink the City water!)

Carbon offsets - I buy carbon offsets and retire them, through the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, to offset my business and personal direct energy use.

Below is an article that I wrote for the ASWA professional newsletter. It outlines my efforts to green a 2007 continuing education conference that I co-organized.

ASWA Seattle Hosts Green CPE Seminar

by Ruth Callard, CPA, Seattle
Co-coordinator - Fall Tax Seminar, ASWA Seattle

What elements of a typical CPE seminar have the worst effect on the environment? The tax seminar committee of ASWA Seattle pondered this question and our answers were: participant transportation, printed handouts, and trash from the food service.

Could we provide quality continuing education using fewer resources? Could we have a goal, for our annual seminar, to reduce our environmental footprint by at least 10% per year? Can the idea of professionalism expand to include our value of nature and our commitment to our children and grandchildren?

Single-occupant vehicles stem from our interest in being able to come and go exactly when we want to, and to make, or not to make, any stops along the way. Our ability to drive alone in our car is also a result of pollution and other costs being externalized (absorbed) by the public. It has not been our intention to use more resources than will go around in the world! Yet, how do we invite a different way to travel that is more consistent with our value of fairness to future generations?

First, we, as a planning committee, did not make the assumption that everyone would drive. Lucky for us, our choice of host, Seattle University (S.U.), has a strong sustainability commitment. They are an urban campus, on four different bus lines, and centrally located in Seattle.

We asked people to let us know if they needed parking, so we didn't reserve more parking spots than we needed. In our directions instructions, directions for bikes and buses were equally prominent. We also entered those who arrived by means other than a single-occupant vehicle in a drawing for a prize. Indeed, we did have fewer cars per participant than the previous year! One participant scurried up to me at the morning break to tell me that three of them had carpooled that day. What a simple change in expectation can do.

Next up? Paper reduction. In past seminars, we issued printed copies of all of the handouts and presentation materials, and tucked them in a heavy bond folder. Following this standard, the current seminar would consume 3,500 sheets of paper. Not just paper of course, but wear and tear on the copy machine plus the labor for copying and accurate assembly.

In the end, we placed one piece of paper on each desk, the day's agenda. Again, it's not that we have a burning desire to use scarce resources; it's our cultural history that suggests it is professional to print, even on high quality bond, and then enclose the product in more material. How do we set a different cultural expectation of what is professional? Can it be professional to conserve resources?

Here's how we did it. We asked the speakers to email to us electronic copies of their written handouts one week before the seminar. We let them know up front that we were attempting to green our meeting. All handouts were submitted at least five days prior to the seminar!

One instructor was concerned that her materials might be distributed more widely than she was comfortable with. Over a few days, she realized that anyone could also copy her printed handout. We also made specific restrictions when we converted speaker handouts to PDF: the security was such that participants could view and print the handouts, add comments, but they could not change the document nor extract pages. If speakers emailed their presentations in a word processing or spreadsheet document, then the PDF created was image over text and the resulting document was conveniently searchable.

Participants were emailed the materials two days before the seminar. The benefit? Any participant could now review the materials and, in case the material reminded them of client issues, they had the ability to be prepared with questions relevant to their clients. Also, if a participant felt the need to print out the outlines, they had time to do that. We also asked speakers to indicate, while they were presenting, when their presentation drifted from their written materials, so participants knew when to take notes, since most people just left their reference materials back at the office on their hard drive.

For those with laptops, if they had PDF software, such as Acrobat, they could pull up the speaker handout and make notes electronically right on the file, during presentations. We watched several active laptops! (Not that we were monitoring what the laptops were active with.)

Now participants have electronic searchable handouts. No more wondering what is in those notebooks on your shelves! We are now able to respect participant's technology abilities and their environmental demands. As an added benefit, ASWA Seattle is now easily able to electronically meet the State requirement of storing CPE speaker outlines, rather than by physical paper storage.

O.K. You have patiently waited long enough to hear about the food. Our goal? Good local food with no waste.

You won't be surprised to know that we can't grow coffee in Seattle. Oh well, can't be perfect. The earth may sizzle but we will still be trying to find coffee. So, what's the best that we can do at this point? Seattle University (S.U.), as part of their sustainability commitment, uses only fair trade, shade grown organic coffee. They also have an extensive recycling program, although we didn't really need to use it!

We asked for no plastic bottles, buffet-style wraps, condiments in jars rather than individually packaged and we asked for fresh local fruit for the morning break and we got it all. We bought everyone an S.U. mug that they could use for their beverages. Packaging was minimized to basically nothing. How clearly we remembered prior years when the trashcans overflowed with trash left over from lunch.

On a smaller note, but every bit helps, nametags were made of recycled manila folders with reusable elastic 'string'. No plastic to deal with and no holes poked in your blouse!

Speaker gifts were gift cards for purchases at local companies plus an S.U. mug for needed water at the podium.

How can we improve next year? We could buy carbon offsets for the estimated energy use of the utilities plus the average transportation cost. Other creative ways to invite fewer cars: mail out bus tickets prior to the seminar, use a parking lot on the opposite side of the campus from the meeting space, or offer a discount to those using public transportation, car pooling or biking/walking. Also, online registration was not quite set up at Seattle University but this method uses fewer resources.

The seminar evaluations were great in all respects. By the way, all of our speakers were women and we previously knew only one! We felt that we should make every effort to support women in leadership positions so we did some extra research to find new faces. As a byproduct, we made a new connection to a regional CPA firm. We also expanded our audience to financial planners and attorneys and did the work to ensure they would easily receive their CPE via their respective authoritative organizations.