Yellow and Blue makes…

Posted by Brian on Jul 23, 2011 in Blog | 3 comments

Color mixing is an everyday conversation at Noah’s Art.  Everyone knows yellow and blue makes green, but not everyone knows what makes Noah’s Art green.  Over the past few years we’ve made some conscious and some not-so conscious changes to make our business more eco-friendly.

One of the most prevalent ways our business is eco-friendly is by the use of recycled materials.  In almost every class we use one or more of the following materials to create wonderful works of art: cardboard, newspaper, paper towel tubes, bottles, magazine pages, jars, pieces of wood, and even old toys.  We even have an entire course designed around this concept.  “Earth Art” is a class where children ages 3&4 use natural and recycled materials to create art.  Noah’s Art has made it known to our business neighbors to save any interesting window displays or containers that would otherwise end up in the trash.  We also have a “Fun Bin” filled with random recycled treasures that we pull out to let the children enhance their class time creations.

You can imagine how many times each day we are washing messy hands… somewhere between 25-68 times.  Think about how many paper towels we’d go through.  If each child only used one sheet of paper towel we’d go through roughly 300 rolls of paper towels per year.  Not at Noah’s Art, we only use paper towels upon request and in the restroom.  For years we’ve been using fabric hand towels as an alternative for drying hands after hand washing in class and bringing them home each night to wash and then reuse.

I mentioned above that some of our efforts were “not-so conscious” towards going green.  This one is more of an evolutionary result.  Like most businesses email and the internet have helped reduce our use of paper.  When we first opened our doors, email and the internet were not used as commonly by businesses as they are today.  Noah’s Art used to send our customers confirmation cards for classes and parties, give each parent a printed policy sheet, and have new students fill out registration forms, all of which are replaced by email and online support.

Most recently we’ve started using a recycling service for all of our unusable scrap paper and recyclable materials.  (They are wonderful and deserve a little plug… if you are in the Charlotte area and need a recycling service provider look up Pickett Up Recycling.)  I honestly was astonished at the amount of waste we were able to place in our recycling bin and how much our disposable trash was reduced.

I’m sure as we continue to grow and mature I will be able to add to this list, but for now we are happy that these efforts have been put into place at Noah’s Art.

How does your family or workplace reduce, reuse, and recycle?  Do your children share a role in your contributions?

- Brian
7/23/11

 *note: All Noah’s Art studios are individually owned/operated and may or may not have all of the above concepts in place.