Really Really Big Industries, Inc.

Spring in Chicago is always a bit of a crap shoot… warm one day then blizzard the next. Right now if I look outside our living room window it feels like we are on the inside of a big snowglobe that some enormous child has shaken.

The last five weeks of travel (9 if you count the Super-Bowl and Pro-Bowl trips that took place right before the multi country trip) took us to some really amazing places, but mostly it was about the incredible people we met along the way.

I haven’t finished adding up all the miles we traveled this time, both by train and by plane. I do know that the combined totals of Mark and Ryan in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, my travel in the UK, Mark and my travels in Egypt, and France and then Mark going off to Eastern Europe while I trained it down to Spain really adds up.

We recently engaged in an audit of the entire Really Really Big Industries, Inc. impact on the environment. This included a tally of everything, from the bottles of water we drink to the distance our Really Really Big Team travels to and from the studio for work and certainly takes into account all of the travel for clients, hotels, electricity for all of our computers and the server rack that is humming away on the third floor, etc.

We have in the past purchased carbon credits directly from the airlines we fly with, but that system is pretty impersonal, and left us unsure about where the money was going or if it was really making any difference. The Really Really Big Team has also grown a lot in the past year or two.

So, we thought we’d share with all of you our plan to offset the Really Really Big impact we are having while we work to make changes to the studio and our work processes to reduce the impact in the first place:

Once our audit is complete and we have a finally tally of tons of carbon that can be directly or indirectly attributed to Really Really Big, we will be identifying a community project sponsored by Native Energy as an organization NativeEnergy has been coordinating projects to help bring farmers off the grid with wind energy, Hydro projects and Solar as well. The key for us when we choose them was the fact that the projects they target funds towards are all community based. It’s about sustainable economic benefits for Native Americans, Alaska Native Villages, family farmers and rural communities.

We’ll keep you posted about the project we choose to fund, and the changes we are making at the studio and in our every day lives to do at least our little part to make a difference.

We’d love to hear what you and your companies are doing, post your comments here or email us and well add them to the blog.

best wishes to you all!

Bobbi and Mark and the Really Really Big Team