Jonathan Shenk, owner of Greenleaf, shared our company’s environmental, or “green,” initiatives at “Creating Sustainable Businesses in New Jersey,” a forum held at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) headquarters in Trenton last Tuesday.

We are proud to share with you these “green” practices and initiatives from his talk.

“From our inception we have educated customers and advocated for the use of ‘green,’ environmentally-sound paint products. This emphasis is noted in our name choice.

Nine years ago, these paints were harder to find, they were more expensive, more difficult to use, and offered lower performance and quality. Now every brand markets green paints and are phasing out their regular paints. The prices are now competitive and the quality is excellent.

Another important sustainable practice for a painting company is the safe disposal of paint products:

+ Paint thinners and oil paints must be disposed through hazardous waste collections. We recycle most of our paint thinner through a step-by-step filtering process.

+ Latex paints need to be mixed with a hardener before disposal.

We have recently started offering a service to customers where we will dispose of their old paint cans piling up in their basements. 

We also can sometimes find alternatives to disposing of unwanted latex paints: we can donate full gallons to Habitat for Humanity’s Re-store and sometimes our own painters are happy to round up excess paints for their side projects.

There are several other things we do which are not unique to a painting company: 

+ We have several paperless practices: we communicate internally through dropbox. Our managers can access work site forms and job calendars on dropbox.

+ We are also beginning to shift our bill payments to be done exclusively online so no hard copies need to be printed out.

+We recycle our paper and plastic. 

+We conserve on energy by keeping office temperatures low during the cold season and opening doors for fresh air during the warm season. Turning out lights in rooms we are not working in.

We were pleased to see NJ take this initiative to support and promote sustainable business practices. We’re happy to be involved in this initiative and to connect and network with other like-minded businesses and people.”

Jonathan was invited to speak at the forum as a member of the New Jersey Sustainable Business Registry, which promotes sustainability planning and practices among New Jersey businesses. The welcome was given by Bob Marshall, Assistant Commissioner, DEP Sustainability and Green Energy (SAGE).