I am at the Proforma national convention this week, a gathering of our sales folks in Orlando, Florida. It is a once a year chance to meet one-on-one with most of the top manufacturers in the promotional items and print industry. While here I hope to give short daily updates on what is going on from an Ecopreneurist perspective.
Jute Thunder Tote from Bag Makers
Green is certainly a strong theme at this year’s meeting with many vendors bringing new green items to the event. The Proforma event bag this year was even green – each member of the convention was given a Recycled Owl Deluxe Backpack made from 100% post-consumer recycled material– to hold our event training materials. These bags are made by Leed’s and are part of their Owl line of bags made from recycled water bottles and yogurt containers.
However, on a more practical note, at the first seminar I attended all presentation materials for the seminar were handed out on USB flash drives with the event name printed on the outside of the drive.
The drive held 18 chapters of information of up to 29 pages per chapter, plus an extensive glossary. By delivering the seminar information on flash drives Proforma saved a lot of pounds of paper, but also saved the impact of printing and shipping all that paper. The flash drives were manufactured by All-in-One, although they were not part of their GreenLine line of drives.
The eco friendly bag is very nice and I suspect I will use it as a sample with clients, but I would guess, in this example, the flash drive did more to lessen the footprint of the convention. The irony is that the seminar itself was on printing for the health care industry.
Will report again tomorrow.
Adventures in Green Marketing 
I like green