Our governments are slow to act. Politicians are too afraid to act. But most people know that the clock is ticking ever more loudly.
It makes sense to follow through on personal initiatives for a clean planet. What can you do, personally?
This is what we are doing as a small family business. You can do it, too:
The basic principle: All our products are made with environmental sustainability in mind.
1. Our website and email are 100% solar energy powered. Our website is hosted at AISO. Their solar-panel powered data center is ideal for blogs and website hosting from simple to advanced needs. If you use this link to > create an AISO account, we may earn a small royalty. Mention JEDI/Supa sent you!
2. We make most local deliveries and pickups of materials with an electric powered pickup trike. We charge our pickup trike (nickname Elmo) by connecting to the standard electric grid at our workshop. Work in process: charging the pickup trike with our 24 volt, 315 watt solar panel.
3. Our warm water comes from a solar thermal panel and tank. We mapped our energy use. As a result we have installed LED lights and make sure the PCs are completely off when not in use - both factors alone have cut our energy use by one third - a significant power savings.
4. In July 2022 we installed 8 solar panels generating a net of about 2500 kW throughout the day for our workshop, office and home. This is expected to cover our daytime energy needs. If it doesn't, our current setup is ready for a 50% increase in solar panels.
5. In the absence of affordable electric vehicles (aside from our trike), we have purchased a second-hand hybrid vehicle. For another existing vehicle we are looking into an electric conversion. When available, our next vehicle will be fully electric. Note that electric vehicles cost less to operate and are cheaper to service.
6. To soften the transportation footprint of our wedding fans and other bamboo hand fans, we have started to plant trees, mostly our very own trees.
Our first planting began in 2006 with currently 500+ mixed tropical forest and fruit trees in the farm area surrounding our workshop and office. Most of these trees are now very tall and provide cool shade in searing sunshine. Our second planting in 2016 was 1,000 mixed tropical trees on a dedicated private lot, which on its own quickly added another 500 trees. With that second lot, our give-away to fellow villagers resulted in 800 trees on their own an on public property. In 2019 we saw a third planting effort of 2,000 trees on own property fail; some trees did make it ok, but we're not including them here.
A tree absorbs about 10-40 kg of CO₂ per year, depending many factors. That's a wide range; we simply use an average of about 16 kg of CO₂ per year. With this figure, it's safe to say that our own 2,800+ trees have a CO₂ absorption of roughly 45 tons per year. With this amount, our very own tree planting more than compensates the shipping footprint of all our products, with a lot positive impact to spare.
7. Make sure you vote for people who have the environment, and the fight against climate change in mind.
All of the above is economically feasible, and is even likely to provide a positive return!
We do what we can. You can do it too!