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January 30, 2006
Times of India Chandigarh carries a story about us
The Times of India's Chandigarh edition recently carried a story about our efforts to reduce plastic bag usage. Unfortunately they focused a little more on me and how I created the Flying Machine brand of jeans than they did on our present activities, but what the hell - it's nice to be noticed.
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January 28, 2006
Good for you Thames 21
I just read about a wonderful group called Thames21 that is calling for volunteers to join them in a foreshore litter blitz on Saturday, February 4.
This patch of the Thames, called the Greenwich Bend, has a particular problem with a build of plastic bags, which pose a real threat to wildlife.
Although the river is today one of the cleanest city rivers in Europe, at least 1,000 tonnes of rubbish is removed from the tidal Thames every year, and we are warning that much more litter is washed out to sea with devastating effects on marine life. Sea turtles are regularly killed by swallowing plastic bags which they mistake for jellyfish.
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January 10, 2006
Taxation works.
2002: €7.2m
2003: €12.75m
2004: €13.5m
2005: €14m +
That much more money is available to be spent on improving Ireland’s environment and plastic bag usage is down by more than 90%.
Is the government of India listening? This is the solution. Bans on bags less than so many microns don’t work. Just look around the streets. If plastic bags are banned where is all that daily junk coming from?
Tax plastic bags. All plastic bags. Encourage people to switch to reusable fabric bags instead.
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You use, you throw. Then?
Ever wondered what happens to that free plastic bag after you throw it away? If you live in a rich economy, it gets buried into landfill. It takes serious resources to collect them, palette them, transport them and bury them into a landfill.
You think the bags are free but your tax dollars are spent to do all these elaborate things. Then, your landfill has to be “managed”. This illustration from LJWorld.com shows how:
It may all look very pretty, like a lady with cosmetics on her face can, but underneath all this that land is dead. The surface will grow a façade to please you but it’s just that, a façade.
Switch to reusable bags instead. That buck or two you spend on buying a cloth bag is less than what this charade costs, because it is repeated every day.
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January 09, 2006
We just love FedEx
As I look back at the success we’ve enjoyed in the couple of years since we started this company it strikes me that we must acknowledge the role that FedEx has played in helping us get there.
FedEx is a great company. Their attitude is that once they’ve taken on a task, they are completely responsible to complete it. There is no other courier company that comes close to this attitude. 
I remember a time when a British customer’s shipment was held up at US customs in Anchorage because they didn’t have a US tax ID number (they were attending a convention in Orlando and should have been issued a temporary number by the convention organizers).
Though it wasn’t any mistake on their part, the folks at FedEx here in Ahmedabad (Gaurav Sheth and Vipul Shukla), and in Mumbai (Caroline Pinto) stayed up all night helping me find a solution.
As a company we’ve learnt to admire FedEx’s commitment and we’ve made up our minds that in our work we will attempt to match the kind of commitment, customer service and responsibility they demonstrate. We've used them for thousands of international express shipments and they've never let us down.
Thank you FedEx for being such a great organization, for facilitating our business and being such great logistics partners, and for setting such a fine example for us.
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January 02, 2006
Have a wonderful 2006! A how-to...
To all the folks who read my weblog: Have a wonderful 2006!
Maybe this little statistic will help make it more productive for you.
The Australian Promotional Products Association put out these numbers.
71% of business travelers surveyed at an international airport recently reported having received a promotional product in the last 12 months. Moreover, 33.7% of this group had the item on their person.
76.1% of the respondents could recall the advertisers name on the product they have received in the last 12 months
In comparison, 80% of participants answered yes to reading a newspaper or magazine in the last week but only 53.5% of them could recall the name of a single advertiser.
Sure looks like promo products give you far better recall than mass media does, doesn’t it?
As for promo products being carried on their person, I know that the products we make and sell get carried around all the time. See our line of bags at http://www.badlani.com/bags
So, have a great year ahead! I hope our repertoire of products can contribute to making that happen for you.
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