A Billion Acts of Green - Earth Day 2011

For over 40 years, April 22 has marked the celebration of Earth Day.

This year, Earth Day's theme is "A Billion Acts of Green" - A people powered campaign to generate a billion acts of environmental service and advocacy.

There are several ways for you to become involved this year:

Pledge an Act of Green
Start Your Own Earth Day Event
Attend a Local Event

In the early 1960's, most Americans were oblivious to the concept of "concern for the environment". One of the early watershed moments for the modern environmental movement came with the release of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. Public awareness was raised after this New York Times bestseller sold over half a million copies. The 'official' Earth Day movement started, however, in 1969, after Gaylord Nelson (Earth Day founder and then US Senator from Wisconsin) witnessed the horrible repercussions of the massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Rallying together 85 people from across the country, they organized the first series of coast-to-coast demonstrations on April 22, 1970. On that day, an estimated 20 million people joined together to protest the degradation of the environment.

Much has changed in the past forty years; substances we once thought benign are now considered toxic and climate change has come to the forefront of all environmental concerns. There have also been advances in curtailing pollution such as increased rates of recycling and the trading of pollution credits to control acid rain. But we still have a long way to go.

Currently, the average person produces around 1,460 pounds of garbage each year. Additionally, the World Health Organization reported that developed nations generate, on average, over twenty-five pounds of medical waste per person each year. That is a lot of waste, considering the US has a population of over three million people!

Now on to the hard part: how do we reduce this huge amount of waste?

Reducing waste in general seems far easier than reducing medical waste. Hospitals dispose of miles of IV tubing and nasal cannulas, tons of contaminated sharps, and all kinds of toxic and radioactive material. With all of the public health concerns, is there any good way to reduce or recycle these materials without increasing exposure to infectious disease?

Sassy Scrubs would love to hear your ideas for reducing medical waste. Do you work in a medical setting and already practice ways to reduce waste, or have ideas on how waste can be reduced? Share your ideas, and maybe in another forty years we can boast reduced amounts of medical waste and a healthier environment.

Your Social and Ecological Footprint in Our World

I recently wondered to myself, “What kind of a charitable impact do companies who make Nursing Scrubs have in this world?” What made me so nosy is that we do a fair amount of charitable works here at Sassy Scrubs, and I wanted to see what other scrub companies were doing to help their communities and the world abroad.

That question sent me on an interesting search. Over the next few days, I spent a considerable amount of time poking around on the websites of other Scrub companies. What I found was puzzling, and somewhat disconcerting. Sadly, I found that not only was there no information about the charitable works of other scrub manufacturers or uniform retailers, but there was barely any information available about their companies, period. These discoveries made me sincerely think about the responsibility each and every one of us has to contribute - as a business or as an individual - in some way to make our world a better place.

As a Company, Sassy Scrubs currently champions several social and medical movements; such as Breast Cancer Awareness, Autism Awareness, and the American Cancer Society. We support our injured military members through the frequent donations of scrubs and other needed items to the Landstuhl Hospital Care Project. We help to keep orphans in China warm through our own Blankets for Babies Project, where we send baby and kid sized blankets and quilts directly to orphans in need. Most recently, we’ve launched an orphan vocational assistance & training program through our Orphan Hope Market, giving orphaned and abandoned children hope for their futures.

On the ecological front, we donate our fabric scraps to local organizations, who in turn make colorful and needed quilts and blankets for Veterans, shelter animals, displaced children, hospice residents, and newborns. We recycle our office paper, cardboard, plastic and cans. Paper which cannot be recycled due to containing propriety or sensitive information is shredded for use at our local Humane Society as bedding. In this age of advanced technology, we trust our customers to appreciate that we have chosen not to produce a print catalog, saving tons of paper waste, ink, dyes and chemicals, from polluting our world. We make a very marked and conscious effort to keep our footprint in our local landfills as small as possible, while at the same time, keeping our commitment to our community as large as possible.

Here at Sassy Scrubs, we think these issues are important enough to address with you, our customers. We have often wondered why other scrubs companies don’t talk to their customers about these subjects. Is it because they don’t care? Or do they presume to think their customers don’t care about these very important issues? Well, we think you do care.

We hope you’ll think about your own impact on our world when you next order new scrubs. We want you to knowthat we’ll be responsible - just like we know you are - in helping to take care of our world. We care about taking care of our planet, just like we care about taking care of you, our customer, with the best custom scrubs, made just for you. It’s part of who we are here at Sassy Scrubs. And we just wanted to let you know.

We hope you’ll think about your own impact on our world when you next order new scrubs. We want you to know that we’ll be responsible - just like we know you are - in helping to take care of our world. We care about taking care of our planet, just like we care about taking care of you, our customer, with the best custom scrubs, made just for you. It’s part of who we are here at Sassy Scrubs. And we just wanted to let you know.