Celebrating Earth Day, Every Day.
Earth Day is here again and as we pondered what it is that we wanted to do this year, we decided to do what we do every day. This is no different than what we did last year and probably will do next year. It’s keeping a hard line on focusing our efforts on making products available to you that can help eliminate unnecessary car trips and enable you to do more with less.
Earth Day takes on its own personal meaning for each of us. For one, it might conjure memories of neighborhood springtime clean-ups. For others, it might mean sacrificing consumption habits for the benefit of the environment. The best thing it does is cause us to pause and think about what our impact is on the world.
A lot has changed since last year. For the U.S., there’s new leadership that could mean a renewed focus on the environment. Auto companies around the world are refocusing their efforts to serve the needs of increasingly congested urban environments.
All that change aside, what has never been more clear is the pay-off for consistency. Being able to alter a course as early as possible to encourage a savings of some sort can have a sizable long-term pay-off. At home, it can mean reminding kids about the importance of recycling, turning off lights when not in use, and keeping thermostats moderate during the extreme months. It adds up and it all makes a difference.
For our customers, such as security personnel, it could mean eliminating idling SUVs and replacing with a Segway PT that’s zero emissions during operation. Sure, it takes some greenhouse gases to get a Segway PT’s batteries the electrons it needs to propel that security officer around, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the SUV that for every two minutes of idling consumes about the same amount of fuel as it would take to go one mile.*
For our individual consumer customers, it can mean abandoning combustion car trips that might normally be taken as a single passenger (the aggregate of which result in significant greenhouse gas production).
If you didn’t know (this is especially important if you’re one of our customers), Segway Inc. has a renewable energy credits (REC) program that’s designed to encourage the proliferation and use of clean energy. If you haven’t signed up yet, please do so at www.segway.com/green. By our purchasing these credits, it requires the use of clean energy for the equivalent of a year’s worth of heavily charging a Segway PT for each customer who has signed up.
Our most recent purchase of RECs, which is though the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, resulted in support for wind and solar projects in North Dakota, California, and Washington. Even if you’re not from the United States, you’re still able to participate and support these programs. We’ve also worked with some of our larger customers such as Target to understand their specific usage patterns and purchase the equivalent credits on their behalf.
Our efforts don’t stop there, however. The physical version of our product catalogue is printed on mixed sources, a paper product group from well-managed forests, controlled sources and recycled wood or fiber. It’s 50% recycled, 25% post consumer fiber FSC certified.
Something a little out of the ordinary we do is keep our Web site green. With the help of www.co2stats.com, we help off-set the energy required to serve up the very page you’re viewing right now. It’s relatively small, but think about all the refrigeration required to keep servers cool enough – even during surges of traffic like what we experienced on the 7th with the Project P.U.M.A. announcement.
Over on Segway Social, active users who have reported a purchase date of a Segway PT and average weekly miles have logged a whopping 1.17 million miles! Extrapolate the averages to the total number of owners on Segway Social and that number quickly climbs to 2.3 million miles. If they had taken that in the average American car, that would have been about 1,311 tons of carbon equivalent gas emitted into the atmosphere.
And yes, Project P.U.M.A. continues to progress along. We thank you for the nearly half million video views and all the feedback that it has generated. Just today, in fact, we were pleased to have a visit from Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter at our facility to be one of the few to get a test ride.
Between what we’re saying above and all the other messages you’re likely getting from other companies this week to be green, we’ll just end by kindly reminding you to take it all in stride. Being green this Earth Day is more about establishing a mentality than it is about using a travel mug. We’re not stopping with the Segway PT as the end-all-be-all of alternative transportation and we hope that you continue to join us for the ride right here on The Last Mile.
We’ll be hosting some fun little Earth Day polls on Twitter over the next day or so. Please participate if you can.
*California Energy Commission
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One Response to “Celebrating Earth Day, Every Day.”
I think we all can applaude the effort of the car companies trying to improve on the going gree situation but for some of them it is too little to late, and the fact that gm just produced something called the peapod at a cost of 12,000.00 is just ridculous people going green dont want to pay that much money for a golf cart. we can go to toyota and buy a prius for 16,000.00.
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