When my wife Eden and I started Buffalo Games in 1986, we made a commitment to being environmentally friendly – to minimize the amount of non-renewable resources our business consumed and to recycle the waste from our plant operations. This has long been a strong personal value of ours, and wasn’t built on public relations spin or the buzzword of the day – it is a direct result of caring about the kinds of products Buffalo Games makes.
With an 85,000 square foot manufacturing facility and millions of units in annual production, our environmental initiatives must demonstrate real improvement. At Buffalo Games, we use 100% recycled, 90% post-consumer graphicboard for all puzzles, game boards and packages, and soy-based inks for printing. In 2008, we recycled five hundred tons of materials through our production processes.
Our overall design challenge is to remove unnecessary materials and reduce overall packaging, all while maintaining or even increasing consumer demand. We took an ambitious and aggressive approach recently on the new 10th Anniversary Edition of iMAgiNiff:
• Reduced the package size by 38% and package thickness by 10%
• Sealed using a PLA band, made from corn starch, removing plastic shrink film
• Removed metallic foils (package and sticker) to enable better recycling
• Converted black dyed inner package to natural
• Printed product warranty directly on package, eliminating extra paper sheet
For our puzzle line, we reduced package thickness by 11%, saving 38 tons annually, and saved 3,500 miles of transit for our puzzle board by switching from a European to a U.S. supplier.
By combining environmental awareness with a measure of creativity, you can help make your organization’s headquarters – and products - greener. Thank you to all our partners who work with us to keep our Earth clean and help us feel good about ourselves and our products. Every step counts.
Paul Dedrick
