Green Choices
By choosing Elastek roof coatings, you are making a Green Choice. Our environmentally friendly products reflect UV rays and keep roofs cooler. This reduces the utility cost of cooling a home. Our coatings are long lasting and, when applied with a PolyTek fabric, can sustain your roof indefinitely, thus saving it from cluttering the landfill. Cooler, reflective roofs also reduce the heat island affect in urban areas. Three of our coatings are ENERGY STAR® qualified — Solar Tek Extreme, Solar Magic, and Solar Mastic.
Elastek is a proud partner and sponsor of Mrs. Green’s World. Mrs. Green Goes Mainstream can be heard every Saturday on KNST 790AM radio at noon, where Mrs. Green (Gina Murphy-Darling) interviews people who talk about products, services, and practices that are ecologically wise and talk about what’s environmentally cool … like Elastek roof coatings, of course. Tune into what’s green!
At Elastek and in some of our homes we —
- Reuse the production waste water using the ALAR Recovery System — Elastek has no industrial drain attached to the county sewer system as it produces no industrial waste water!
- Recover and reuse the dust particles that become airborne when we pour powders into our products
- Use real dishes and silverware in our lunchroom
- Bundle rubber bands that come on our mail and put them back in the mailbox for carriers to reuse
- Use energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs throughout the facility
- Use cost-effective, paper-saving networked printers/fax/scanners
- Print on both sides of paper when possible
- Use the good side of used paper for notes, scratch paper, and internal reports
- Use energy-saving flat screen monitors
- Distribute green reusable bags made of recycled pop bottles at trade shows and other events
- Adjust facility heating and AC settings on evenings and weekends to conserve energy
- Some of our employees ride bikes to work and classes
- Take extra packing materials to businesses that reuse them
- Reuse plastic bags from the newspaper for pet waste collection
- Receive and pay bills electronically
- Dry laundry on a clothesline—sheets dry in 15 minutes in Tucson
- Take action to get our name deleted from mailing lists
- Recycle batteries that shouldn’t be thrown in landfills
- Reuse paycheck envelopes
- Keep information filed on computers and print emails and reports only when necessary
- Donate items no longer needed on Freecycle and to the HabiStore
- Donate miscellaneous coatings to the HabiStore
- Work in natural light when possible
- Participate in the One Laptop Per Child program
- Co-sponsor the Tucson Sustainability & Energy Expo 2009 and the Tucson Alternative Energy Expo 2007
Employees recycle all clean cardboard, junk mail, office paper, newspaper, toilet paper and paper towel rollers, and plastic bottles that are part Elastek daily operations. There are several drop-off points located throughout the company for employees to deposit items as soon as they are identified as recyclable.
Convenience is one of the first hurdles in getting members of a business to cooperate, but our company is proud of its nearly 100% participation. Employees are even encouraged to bring recycling from home and use the company dumpster if they don’t have curbside recycling.
By being diligent, we’ve reduced our garbage pickups and have exchanged our recycling dumpster for a larger one!
