This past weekend, I found out it was Earth Week — at Target. Shoppers were greeted by banners calling for bold action: "Celebrate Earth Day with eco-friendly products at very friendly prices." "Red Hot Savings." "Earth Day Deals."

It's funny to me how being environmentally conscious went from granola to trendy to mainstream in just a few years. And now with the economy in a slump, retailers and manufacturers everywhere are touting "buy green" to sell us more stuff — hybrid cars, non-toxic computers, energy saving light bulbs, organic clothing.. when over-consumption is part of the huge reason we got into this mess. The real problem is that we've essentially been participating in an environmental Ponzi scheme.

We recently finished a book here in the office, The Designful Company. The main point: design is everything (Paul Rand also said this many years ago). More than just the typical idea of design as graphic or commercial art, design can, and should, be applied to all aspects of business — operations, management, marketing, etc. As social scientist Herbert Simon put it, "everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."

Here at Matchstic, we've started examining all aspects of what we do to figure out if there can be room for improvement. In particular, I got involved in minimizing the waste we produce at the house. Over the course of a week, we collected our trash into a big pile to see how much actual consumption there was.

We noticed little things – why throw away thirteen stirring sticks a week when they could be replaced by spoons (we run the dishwasher every Friday anyway). Thirteen plastic stirrers or a five-inch-high pile of mixed paper can quickly turn into 104 sticks and a 40-inch mountain in a couple months.

Taking it a step further, we can also be more reponsible when specifying design work. Less ink, sustainably-produced paper and so forth. This kind of restraint not only forces us to flex our design muscle instead of relying on bells and whistles to make a piece shine, it can also save the client money.

So let's celebrate Earth Week not by buying more junk that we don't need, but by taking an extra second to think about our decisions. Let's live and work smarter. Let's go back to basics. To quote Glenn Prickett, Senior VP at Conservation International, "Mother Nature doesn't do bailouts."

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