Earth Day is a great day to evaluate how we’re using the planet’s natural resources. Sometimes we get so swept away in the convenience of consumerism that we don’t even realize how cavalier we’re being with old Mother Earth. There’s always room for improvement, and in the past few years we’ve made some significant changes at Tiny Little Monster in an effort to reduce our carbon footprint and be good little Earthling monsters. Read on to discover 4 ways that TLM is doing its part to protect our planet.

Recycled Business Cards

This year, we rolled out new business cards for some of our staff members here at Tiny Little Monster. Instead of using crisp, white paper from murdered trees (yipes!) for these business cards, we went a little extra and found cards made out of recycled T-SHIRTS. How perfect is that? Not only are we reducing paper usage, but our business cards have a little story we can share with customers that jives perfectly with our business.

Brand New Water Machine

No plastic water bottles here! This year, we swapped our jug water out for a direct-line water purification system. Everyone at Tiny Little Monster has a reusable water bottle that they use for regular hydration. It may seem like a small change, but we estimate that we save about 32 plastic water bottles a day with this change. That’s nearly 12,000 water bottles each year!

Say “Hi” to Travis, who you can see geeking out over our water machine below:

Soy-Based Chemicals

If you’re familiar with screen printing, you probably know that we fill mesh screens with goopy ink for each job, and when that job is over we have to reclaim those screens for use on the next project. Many screen printing companies use harsh chemical reducers to lift the ink out of the mesh screen and prepare it for reuse. These chemicals are harsh and terrible for the environment, so Tiny Little Monster went searching for something different.

We found a screen print reducer that is soy-based. It’s called Bean-E-Doo, and we love it. It gets our screens squeaky clean (say “screens squeaky clean” 5 times fast!) without dumping harsh pollutants down our drains. This is just a small adaptation that we made, but with thousands of print jobs each year it really adds up to a big environmental change!

T-Shirt Rags

In the screen printing industry, it’s inevitable: accidents are going to happen. Blobs of ink, rips and holes in t-shirts, prints with the wrong color or the wrong graphic size, etc. are just a normal part of the process. While we always replace these mistakes so that our customers get exactly what they’ve ordered, there is a question of what to do with the t-shirts that are damaged or misprinted.

Instead of donating shirts that are unlikely to ever be worn, we’ve turned t-shirts into rags that we use in the shop just like paper towels. Did you know that the United States uses — brace yourself — 13 BILLION pounds of paper towels each year. That is the equivalent of over 100,000 trees!

At Tiny Little Monster we’ve replaced our paper towels with recycled t-shirt rags for cleanup purposes, and we’ve swapped out hand towel dispensers in the bathrooms with automatic hand dryers. It’s a not-so-tiny-little commitment to preserving our natural resources.

Here’s a shot of one of our t-shirt rag boxes. Part of your past order might be keeping our shop clean, and you didn’t even know it!

Earth Hugs

This planet has been pretty dang good to us folks here at Tiny Little Monster, so we’re trying our best to be good right back to it. We strongly believe that if everyone made just a FEW small, easy changes to their regular habits, we could potentially make life-changing improvements to the environment and overall health of this round rock we call home. Give the earth a hug today; it’s the only one we’ve got!