Creative cardboard recycling: printing flyers for B Green Services and the Silver Comet Half-Marathon
For the Silver Comet Half-Marathon, we printed flyers on recycled cardboard. Up top is the cutting process, second is the printing and trimming process, and third is the final product (showing a couple printed sides and couple original cardboard sides)
This past week has been a busy one at B Green Services preparing for race recycling this coming Saturday, October 31st, at the Silver Comet Half-Marathon! In addition to gathering the cardboard recycling containers, coordinating volunteers, and getting silkscreens made for printing t-shirts, we’ve been working on creating unique flyers to go in 2,000 racer’s goodie bags. In the spirit of recycling, we decided to send out a call for cardboard boxes to friends, family, and co-workers asking for thin pieces, like cereal boxes, frozen pizza boxes, granola bar boxes, etc.with the intention of opening them all up and printing on the blank side. Which is exactly what we did.
After a few loose calculations, we figured we would need roughly 300+ boxes to accomplish our mission of printing 2,000 flyers on the blank insides. As the cardboard started pouring in, we started cutting it down to printable sizes. It was amazing to have so many people pitch in their recyclables to help us out – and even better that we could skip the steps of recycling the cardboard to make new paper and simply print on existing materials! The cutting and smoothing of our printing surfaces did entail an intense night of beer, pizza, cutting boards, rulers, and paper-folders, which we accomplished with the help of Angela, Erin, Rod, and Jenny.
Once the cardboard was all cut down to size, we utilized the printing services of Avis, the owner of the stationary company Avie Designs. Turns out, she has a fancy printer that could print on cardboard (something FedEx Office wasn’t even able to do). It took two more nights of feeding each piece of cardboard in by hand into two different printers, followed by the final step of cutting them down into individual flyers. Thanks to Avis, her husband Vince, and Heather for helping with that stage of the process!
We’re excited with the end result! And got them all to the race director on time to have them stuffed into 2,000 goodie bags tomorrow night. So, if you’re running in the 2009 Silver Comet Half-Marathon, please take a quick second to check out our recycled cardboard flyers before recycling it with the rest of the race flyers you got. We put some love into those!
And if you’re interested in volunteering with us, please email recycling@bgreenservices.com. Here’s to many more races to come!
Oh yes, and this is what it says:
Did you know that a runner uses an average of 4 plastic water bottles during one half-marathon?
and that it takes one plastic bottle 1,000 years to decompose?
that’s about 8 million years for today’s race alone.
thank you for recycling!
B Green Services, proud sponsor of the Silver Comet Races’ recycling
Categories Events, Recycling | Tags: Atlanta recycling, Atlanta road races, Atlanta volunteer opportunities, B Green Services, cardboard recycling, printing on recycled materials, race flyers, race recycling, Silver Comet Half-Marathon, unique flyers
Social Networks: Facebook, Twitter, Share on Facebook
You can follow any follow up comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Leave a Reply
By submitting a comment here you grant B Green Services a perpetual license to reproduce your words and name/web site in attribution. Inappropriate or irrelevant comments will be removed at an admin's discretion.
2 Comments to Creative cardboard recycling: printing flyers for B Green Services and the Silver Comet Half-Marathon
by Angela
On October 27, 2009 at 11:11 pm
I have to admit – the flattening was a painful process, but well worth the effort after I saw how well everything printed.
Trackbacks