I like sneakers—especially those that are unique, interesting, or just plain look good. One brand that (in my opinion) makes some pretty fly kicks is Puma. I’m not writing about fashion though. I want to talk about money—money and the environment.

Many contend that institutions—in their ongoing efforts to make/save some green—often must take on practices that are—quite frankly—not very green. Some might argue that, for corporations, doing what is environmentally conscious goes against their primary objective: making money for their investors and primary stakeholders. Recently Puma, in collaboration with Yves Béhar, proved that assumption wrong.

The partnership has produced an innovative, new take on shoe packaging called the “Clever Little Bag.” The packaging is composed of a reusable, recyclable plastic bag and a single cardboard insert that combines a shoebox and a shopping bag into a single unit. When the system rolls out next year it will not only replace Puma’s shoeboxes, but also the plastic and paper bags currently given to customers at checkout. The result is a 60 percent reduction in materials, energy, water and fuel consumption. Puma says this will save 8,500 tons of paper, 20,000,000 mega joules of electricity, nearly 400,000 gallons of fuel, and 275 tons of plastic.

Beyond being good for the environment and good for Puma’s image, all those numbers amount to enormous financial savings for the savvy footwear manufacturer/retailer.

The “Clever Little Bag” is new and interesting, but it’s also part of a bigger trend gaining traction over the last decade. In fact, Siegel+Gale clients who have engaged with our Simplification practice have often seen environmental benefits alongside monetary savings and improved customer experience. By simply transforming complex and lengthy legal jargon into plain English, clients are often able to eliminate multiple pages from a document. While the principal business benefits include improved customer service and retention, the environmental benefits and cost savings of paper reduction really add up.

Here’s a hypothetical example: Let’s say you work for a small bank with 500,000 customers that sends a three-page statement to each of your customers every month. If you were to persuade your customers to receive all those statements electronically, you would save 18,000,000 sheets of paper—about 90 tons. That would create a stack of paper more than twice the size of the Burj Khalifa (the world’s tallest building)! If you were to then calculate the cost of printing and postage for each of those statements, it becomes even easier to see how a good change for the environment can also be a good change for the bottom line.

So let’s review. Simple is smart, and saving money is smart business. One can save a lot of money by being environmentally friendly, so by the transitive property, simple is environmentally conscious.

How else do you see simple as environmentally conscious?

Image Sources:
www.Puma.com
www.gizmodo.com

Matt Siegel is an interactive designer for the Siegel+Gale New York office.