Sustainability

We are devoted to human development and supporting that goes hand-in-hand with caring for our environment. Here are some of the many things we do to honor and protect the environment while maintaining a small footprint.

Green Building

In 2021, we purchased a building made of straw! Really, our strawbale office was originally built by the farmer who lives next door so that his wife could make and sell pancakes on the weekends. (We still get occasional visitors looking for breakfast!) The walls in the main room are straw bales stacked on top of each other and covered in adobe (with pine siding on top of that outside).

We love this handmade "window" that looks inside one of our strawbale walls. If you stop by for a tour, we'll let you see for yourself the strawbales that create our walls. That along with the amazing pegged beams that support the structure. Those beams were reclaimed from an old mill building and put to use here. 

And the original pine flooring in the main room wasn't purchased; it was milled from the woods outback.

 

We added a bunch of insulation beneath the main floor and added an addition so we could all fit.

We also completely redid the kitchen and bathroom to make them cheerful and functional.

And we made sure there was room for the little things that help us create less waste like a hand towel for everyone in the bathroom.

 

And now, it's a great home for us! Stop by anytime and we'll be happy to give you a tour.

Raw Materials Sourcing

We think about everything that we bring into the office, whether its to make our learning materials or clean our space. For our raw materials, we check the manufacturing safety data sheets (MSDS's) before we buy anything. We want to make sure it doesn't contain anything that is questionable. The process of asking for this information has been very helpful in guiding us towards suppliers who also value sustainability. This is one of the key reasons we make everything ourselves, in-house; we want to have confidence that we are not going to inadvertently cause harm. 

All of products are made in the USA with careful attention to the environmental impact of our work. We mean it when we say we care about the environment...that is our future.

Laminate Recycling

As part of our production process, we end up with scraps from our food-grade laminate (nothing nasty in there to start with). But we've found two ways to recycle this. First, we scour the scraps to find usable strips that we sew into our alphabet pocket charts. Then, we take the rest to a recycling center that can handle this type of material (not common at all; it took a lot of effort for us to get this worked out).

Textile Recycling

We cut our aprons, mats, and cloth pouches from large bolts of fabric in the most efficient way possible. But, we are still left with small scraps of leftover fabric. So, we found a facility that will recycle our fabric scraps. No waste here!

Packaging Recycling

We get lots of deliveries for our raw materials and those often come with packaging materials. Rather than dispose of these, we save them and reuse them in the packages we ship right back out to you. We can't stop others from using plastic packaging materials, but we can at least extend their life!

We also recycle a lot of cardboard but not just at the recycling center: we use it as a weed-suppressing mulch beneath the flower beds outside our building.

Green Cleaning

We don't like to create waste so we do a lot of little things to help with this. For example, we each have our own cloth towel to use for drying our hands in the bathroom. This means we don't have to use paper towels every time we wash our hands or the dishes.

We also have a lot of inventory shelves we need to keep dust free. Instead of using disposable dusting materials, we found ones made from fleece that we can use and launder to cut down on waste. Basically, we run it like a home and use things we can launder rather than discard.