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Eleek's sustainability efforts

"Anything worth doing is worth doing one step at a time."
–Sattie Clark, Co-founder, Eleek, Inc.

Eleek is committed to creating a better world by combining visionary ideals with practical actions: We are committed to understanding and reducing Eleek’s impact on the natural environment, and to creating a workplace that fosters community, creativity and personal growth. Toward that end, we will continually seek out cleaner and greener materials, processes, and paradigms. We will incorporate changes as quickly and thoroughly as we can feasibly do so, with the ultimate goal of a positive environmental and social impact. We will work with our employees, our customers, our vendors and our peers to raise the consciousness and standards of our industry.

Our Processes

• Our silicone molds work for several thousand pours (more uses than are ever likely to be required) and when those pours are finished, the silicone is recycled as filler in new molds.
  
• Eleek patterns are made from a combination of discarded lumber, salvaged wood and new wood, depending on availability (at least 70% discarded and/or salvaged).
  
• Metal products are finished using reusable abrasive media and re-circulated water. The resulting byproduct, a ceramic slurry, is donated to artists or for use in construction.
  
• Shipping pallets are reused.

Our Products

• Eleek products are durable and timelessly beautiful, designed for non-obsolescence from the start.
  
• Eleek castings are made of recycled metals whenever possible, with the highest possible post-consumer content. Our cast aluminum, for instance, is 100% recycled with a post-consumer content between 70-100%, depending on the product line. Pewter, bronze, cast iron and aluminum remnants are utilized in casting. We recycle all other scrap metal.
  
• Eleek uses state-of-the-art energy-saving lamps and electronics such as LEDs and compact fluorescents in all of the light fixtures that it designs and manufactures.
  Eleek’s Masa cabinet hardware line is made of 100% post-consumer scrap sourced from the ReBuilding Center, a building materials reuse center located less than a mile from Eleek’s shop. For more information about the benefits of manufacturing with local scrap, see our sister site ProjectScrap.Org.
  
• Eleek will take back any product it makes in order to dismantle, reuse and/or recycle its materials.

Our Organization

• Eleek, Inc. is a member of The Oregon Natural Step Network and as such is working to understand and improve its environmental footprint.
  
• Eleek's shop and office operate on 100% Blue Sky wind power from Pacific Power.
  Eleek is a NW Natural Smart Energy Circle Member, purchasing offsets for 100% of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with our natural gas use.
  
• 80% of our supplies come from within 50 miles of our shop. Buying locally allows us to support the regional economy and reduces the environmental impact of trucking our supplies from far away.
  
• Eleek prints on environmentally preferable paper (high post-consumer content) using the most environmentally preferable printing methods. We use 100% recycled stock with at least 30% post-consumer content for all in-house printing and copying and print two-sided whenever possible. Eleek’s catalog is now available in a digital format only in order to conserve resources.
  
• Eleek is located in an Urban Renewal/Enterprise Zone. This allows the company to contribute jobs and other community resources to an economically challenged area of Portland, while enjoying its diversity, vitality and old neighborhood feel.
  
• Eleek offers living wages as well as medical and dental benefits to all its employees.
  Eleek's delivery truck runs on biodiesel, and we work to minimize the number of miles it is driven by carefully consolidating trips and planning routes.
  
• Most Eleek employees commute sustainably. Eleek has an incentive program to encourage biking and the use of public transit.
  
• Eleek strives to minimize our garbage output and divert waste from the landfill.
  Our ambitious recycling program includes recycling all paper, metal, glass, wood and plastics. We even let our employees bring from home the recyclables that they can’t recycle curbside or elsewhere.
  Our shipping department reuses shipping containers and packaging.
  Eleek utilizes a sustainable purchase policy that favors and enforces the purchase of products that have the highest-possible post-consumer recycled content, minimize or reduce greenhouse gas emissions, lowest toxicity (zero VOC whenever possible), reduce waste by way of being durable & reusable, and are made and sold within 50 miles of our shop.

Awards & Selections

• Lighting for Tomorrow Competition, 2007
  Eleek Takashima Sconce Wins Honorable Mention for Sustainability.
• Eleek was presented with the BEST Award for Outstanding Sustainable Practices by the Portland Office of Sustainable Development in April 2006.
• Sustainable Industries Journal, July 2007
  Eleek Waterbox Sink Wins Top Ten Green Building Products 2007

UNDERSTANDING SUSTAINABILITY

• Understanding how our choices affect the world is the first and most important step we can take on the path to sustainability. We highly recommend the following video link which takes about 20 minutes to watch. We encourage you to forward it to other people too."The Story of Stuff"

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