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Archive for the ‘Educational’ Category

Q19 and Vestas: Paving the way to a Sustainable Future

The recent partnership of Q19 and Vestas can be considered a mutually sustainable relationship on every level. With triple-bottom-line values on both ends, Q19 and Vestas are supporting a new global trend in the way businesses are run, proving that it is indeed possible and profitable to respect employees and the environment. There may be a world of difference between scrubbing floors and building turbines, but both companies are paving the way to a sustainable future in a currently unsustainable business world.

Starting as a blacksmith shop in Denmark in 1898, Vestas is now the world-leader in modern wind energy, producing, transporting and installing wind turbines across the globe. This century-old company strives to ensure that wind energy will be perceived as a viable energy source for the future. This is no easy task in a world-economy reliant on oil and gas. However, where oil and gas are expensive to obtain, non-renewable, and the culprits of CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases, wind is free, renewable and clean. Vestas can get a wind power-plant up and running in under a year, providing a quick return on investments while creating plenty of local jobs. The turbines are 80% recyclable and the company is constantly striving to improve the efficiency of production, transportation and function.

At Q19 we are also striving to ensure the success of environmentally sound practices. Our preferred method of transportation is bike, our cleaning products are non-toxic and plant-based, and while we aim to be as waste-free as possible, those products we do use are either recyclable or biodegradable. Likewise, we are actively involved in the local community and support local businesses.

So, though we may be scrubbing bathrooms while they are engineering turbines, our core values are one in the same. By supporting one another we are ensuring the success of sustainable practices on a local and global scale. By employing our services, Vestas helps sustain our local green-cleaning company and we in turn provide them with a clean, environmentally-friendly work environment in which to power the future with wind energy.  - Rachel Klucewicz

The Politics of Bottled Water

The greatest marketing/advertising trick of all time.

(Re)cycling is sooo pre-Artic Ice Shelf melt…

Bottom Up Economics: The Role Small Employers Play

In a time of economic uncertainty, it only seems commonsensical to treat our assets, especially the liquid kind, like priceless relics of a lost civilation. Spend less, cut back, wait it out; and in most cases this is the safest response to the unknown. Instead of acting like of bunch of frightened hoarders, boarding up our windows, and heading for our canned food lined bomb shelters, I suggest that we turn to face the music, head on, and just be more selective with our expenditures with an eye towards a brighter future. (more…)

Not Simply Green but Just

At Q19, we do not stop at green products or carbon neutral transport; in fact, these measures are simply the foundation of our sustainably built firm.  Despite all the media attention and marketing schemes that tout the nobility of ‘going green,’ which make no mistake is a necessary step forward, to tell you the truth, is pretty easy and, shhhh, doesn’t cost all that much.

The real challenge for janitorial firms, the true barrier to revolutionizing this field, is paying living wages my friends.  You see, going green is cool, paying living wages…yeah… not quite there yet.

We have often commented that the janitorial work is very much a disenfranchised and stigmatized industry.  I would even go as far to say that there are some definite similarities between janitorial work and migrant farm worker labor in regards to the demographic of the work force and how it is valued.

We hope to change that, client by client, project by project.  We aim to advance wages and bring back a sense of dignity and value to this labor intensive and, most often, thank-less profession and we need your help.  We actively seek out community partners to stand with us and  to lift up this marginalized, race to the bottom economics, industry.

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