Greenfield Community College

Green initiatives at the College Store

An excellent source for recycled products!

The College Store is concerned about the environment and that is why we've been striving for recycled, reusable and earth friendly products for nearly a decade now. In the beginning there weren't too many choices as many manufacturers didn't offer recycled products. Prices were often higher than virgin products and paper quality was not uniform. If you remember these early days, you may have been turned off to recycled materials and products. So much has changed since then and there really are some innovative products on the market. We encourage you to look again. You'll be surprised at the variety and quality of choices. We are committed to the campus wide effort to reduce, reuse and conserve natural resources whenever possible by buying locally or by purchasing from earth friendly manufacturers. This past year our buyers made it clear to manufacturers and sales representatives that we would only consider new merchandise if it contained some recycled content or if their company has made eco friendly choices.

For the fall 2008 term we wrote to our textbook publishers telling them of our commitment to work towards environmental sustainability and asking them to use recycled content, soy or vegetable inks, and to reduce the shrink wrap whenever possible. We can report that more and more publishers are active members of the Green Press Initiative, use post consumer paper in textbook manufacturing, have reduced the use of shrink wrap, pack their shipments using eco-friendly materials and do use soy or vegetable inks to print when possible. We encourage our faculty to get their textbook adoptions in before the end of the semester buyback so we can maximize the number of textbooks we buy back through the used book wholesaler, saving freight in and out by keeping GCC books on campus, giving a better return to our students and increasing the number of used copies available for sale in future semesters. We fill our online textbook reserves in a reusable GCC shopping bag and we reuse cardboard boxes to fill online textbook shipments as much as possible using earth friendly packing materials.

In an effort to reduce the amount of plastic bags used on campus we encourage you to bring your own reusable bags, use backpacks or tote bags to carry your textbooks and other purchases. We offer an inexpensive reusable shopping bag that we'd love to see you use semester after semester. The College Store offers a plastic bag recycling program, bring your clean plastic shopping bags back to the store and we will reuse them or send these bags to be recycled by our bag manufacturer, that will in turn recycle this plastic for other products instead of creating more plastic.

New to our product mix are organic cotton, fair trade T-shirts, fair trade papers and journals, knit caps made from bamboo, clothing made from recycled water bottles, custom GCC recycled notebooks and a wide variety of recycled school and office supplies. The following recycled product can be purchased from the College Store and we strive to offer more:

• Academic calendars
• Art paper
• Calendars
• Class record planners
• Clear view binders
• Comp books
• Desk blotters
• Envelopes
• Filler paper
  
• Folders
• Greetings cards
• Index cards
  
• Journals
• Notebooks
• Pencils
  
• Pens
• Pocket portfolios
• Portfolios
  
• Pressboard binders
• Quad ruled comp books
• Scratch pads
  
• Self stick notes
• Sketch books
• Three ring binders
  
• Writing tablets
• Recycled batteries and chargers