Boulder Valley Credit Union.

• Author: Ringo, Kyle
• Position: Sustainability SPOTLIGHT - Company overview

SUSTAINABLE PRACTICES:

Some companies say they're green, but you walk into their offices and see aluminum cans in the trash and employees drinking their morning coffee from Styrofoam cups. None of that happens at Boulder Valley Credit Union.

When the credit union's management decided to go green a few years back, it committed to doing it fully and not making it a bogus piece of marketing that would be abandoned six months or a year later. It went well beyond the standard environmental practices in use these days by many financial institutions such as offering checks on recycled paper, e-statements and online bill pay.

Boulder Valley initially invested more than $90,000 in its green makeover. Those costs included employee training, building improvements such as solar panels for its branches, new windows and window shades, new eco-friendly lighting and building the website wecarecolorado.com.

"Basically we sat back and said it's the right thing to do," said Jason Bauer, vice president of marketing and e-commerce. "We wanted to set an example. There is no financial institution that has really set the example. We were all out there greenwashing, you know? We were lying to the public just to get the business. So that's what we decided to do, do the right thing."

Every employee's work station at the credit union is equipped with a trash can for recyclables and a smaller trash can connected to it for trash. The company does everything from eliminating the use of Styrofoam cups and other environmentally unfriendly products to starting a compost pile outside and hanging notes in the bathrooms asking that the lights be shut off when the room is empty.

"We wanted to make sure that when somebody walked into our branch they said, 'Wow, they are committed to this,'" Bauer said.

GREEN FROM GREEN

In tough economic times, many companies might balk at the sizable initial investment required to go completely green like the credit union, especially when the savings from those investments won't be fully realized for a decade or more.

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Bauer estimates it will be 15 to 20 years before the credit union's solar panels and new windows and energy-efficient light bulbs have paid for themselves in energy savings, but other changes are saving relatively small amounts here and there.

Bauer estimates the credit union saves a few...