At the beginning of 2008, Jigsaw Design has been making efforts to make our company as green as possible. It is the responsibility of every person and company to minimize their footprint on the environment. In the current economic climate, it is actually a necessity. As fuel and energy costs rocket, companies have to reduce their power usage in order to survive. Some may decide to just push the extra costs onto their clients. We, however, feel it makes more long term sense to reduce usage ourselves and keep costs to our clients down. We have not had to raise our rates in over three years and we don’t plan on raising them anytime soon.

Below is a list of everything we are doing (and not doing) and how this will effect the environment and our clients. We will also show both economic and environmental effects.

1. As of July 1, 2008, we will no longer be sending paper billing or have checks as a payment option.

   Economic effects are:

   Cost of postage

   Cost of checks

   Cost of ink

   Cost of billing paper and print out paper

   Fuel cost for bank runs

   Cost of power to print

   Environmental effects are:

   CO2 omissions from both delivery vehicles, vehicles used to transport checks to bank for deposit, and foresting equipment;

   The U.S. paper industry is the second largest consumer of energy and uses more water to produce a ton of product than any other industry;

   In the U.S., we have lost 95 percent of our old growth forests and it takes 3 tons of wood to produce 1 ton of paper;

2. All employees of Jigsaw Design telecommute. This system increases productivity and lowers costs to our clients.

   Economic effects are:

   We keep our overhead to a minimum (pretty close to zero), which means the client is only paying for service rather than our rent, energy and any other cost associated with office space.

   Productivity increases by 20% by eliminating commute time for employees. Employees will work longer when they are less stressed when not having to deal with traffic in addition to being in comfortable surroundings.

   We charge per project not by hour. We pay also our employees per project and not by hour, which encourages staff to finish projects sooner and move on to next project.

   Environmental effects are:

   ZERO CO2 omissions from our employees having to commute to work;

   ZERO energy used to power, heat or cool an office space;

   ZERO waste that goes with any office space;

3. All equipment used for the purposes of design and production are energy-efficient products, which includes computers, monitors and any server technology.

   Economic effects are:

   Less energy costs

   Environmental effects are:

   Less energy waste

   The less energy we use, the less air pollution we generate from the burning of fossil fuels at power plants, which contributes to smog, acid rain, and global warming.

4. Any vehicle used for the purpose of business (meetings, project based assignments) will either be a hybrid or other fuel efficient vehicle.

   Economic effects are:

   Cost of fuel is cheaper

   Environmental effects are:

   Less CO2 omissions

Barring point number 1 above, we have been implementing these practices for the last 18 months and, as any of our clients will testify, our service has only got better. Our future plans are to convert all working locations to solar power and move the main business office to a more cost-effective location. Both of these will prolong any increase in rates even longer.