Eco-friendly Web site powered by the sun
By Furniture Today Staff -- Furniture Today, May 14, 2007
Bend, Ore. — Rising Star owner Leslie Blok sends an eco-friendly message to her clientele in ways that go well beyond futons and furniture. The store, for example, generates some of its own electricity with an array of solar panels.
The latest development is an inverter hooked up to a computer monitor, which will soon be posted as an icon on its Web site, www.risingstarfurniture.com. That means that visitors will be able to see how much energy is being generated, used and sent back to the power company.
It also means that it will be one of the few Web sites on the Internet that is powered, in part, by the sun.
The equipment gives a readout that shows how many kilowatt hours the store has generated, along with the volume of greenhouse gases that has been eliminated by not using energy generated by coal-burning power plants.
Employees, meanwhile, are offered incentives to carpool, ride their bicycles or walk to work.
Blok said that being environmentally conscious can make business sense. Five or six years ago, for example, the store retrofitted each light fixture to use more efficient lighting, which saved electricity. The lights also generated less heat, which meant additional energy savings in air conditioning.
"You can do simple things, like change your bulbs," she said. "We had grants from the State of Oregon, incentives that made it less of an investment and that makes it easier to digest."
