Meet BruceBruce is the CEO and founder of BKM Marketing a Boston-based integrated marketing agency focused on helping clients grow their businesses. BKM marketing creates about 100 campaigns a year for clients, typically producing millions of direct mail pieces, online display ads, emails, social, social media posts, and more. But he's not here to talk about that today. Two years ago, Bruce became interested in understanding how his firm contributed to global warming. So he engaged a class of MBA students to measure his firm's carbon footprint and examine the marketing industry's carbon impact as a whole.

What prompted you to spend so much of your time and energy on climate change?Well, you know, it's really interesting. First and foremost, I live in the Washington area, and we have an ocean nearby. And everyone's concerned about how you know how high those oceans going to get. And, you know, when you start looking inwardly, it's, why is there so much concern about climate change right now, and it's because of human activity. So I own a small business, and we do a lot of stuff that might be part of the problem. So I wanted to take a good close look at what it is my company does, how what kind of impact that has, and also the industry. And it was enlightening to see how much damage we are doing as and not just our industry, lots of industries are like this. And so we wanted to measure it and see what we could do to offset what we're doing and reduce what we're doing. And believe it or not, that helps me make sleep a little bit better at night. And we were very lucky to find out that we can offset not only our impact but all the client work that we do. And so far, it's been very well received. And one of the things that we get asked some follow-up to is that all the time is okay, do business customers care about whether or not the companies that are doing business with actually really care if the company cares about the environment? And the answer is overwhelming. Lots of different studies on this. Probably the most interesting fact is that 92% of customers are more likely to trust a company that supports any kind of social or environmental issue. That's nine out of 10. When you look at millennials 68% of millennials buy a product with a social environmental benefit. More often than not, they seek it out It's whole, it's really good business, in addition to good for the environment.
 
So how can our listeners go about making their businesses net zero now?Well, there are several ways to go about it, the first thing you have to do is learn what is your carbon footprint, and it varies from business to business, of course, and industry to industry. So one of the things we ended up learning is how little knowledge there is about US-based businesses, and what the impact they make on the environment is to do a whole lot of research. And most of that research will point you to a bunch of resources coming out of Europe, Europe is certainly I don't know how many years but a half a decade, decade ahead of the United States in terms of really trying to combat sources of global warming. So I can, you know, walk you through an example of what we ended up doing, or how we went about it. Yeah. And, but I do want to make sure that this isn't about, you know, us looking great. Doing, this is something that we think every business can do. So we didn't know the first thing about it two years ago. And so we found an MBA class at Suffolk University in Boston, that was looking for a partner to become the topic for the course. And so we had about 29 Students take a look at, our business and our industry. And we asked them to figure out how can we actually calculate the carbon impact our business has on the environment, and not just us. But certainly, you know, all the work we do for the clients. And with Greek, we do a lot of direct mail work, as you mentioned in my bio, outside looking in, boy, that means you're cutting down trees. And...