Better Business Challenge: Tea Bazaar
This semester, we partnered with the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar in hopes of aiding with the business’s sustainability efforts. Our primary goal in this project is to increase the Tea Bazaar’s awareness of the opportunities and resources offered by the Better Business Challenge. The purpose of the Concierge Program is to take the weight off of the business owner’s shoulders. The concierge is able to devote more time and knowledge to the effort than the business owner. As the concierges, we met with Gwendolyn, the owner of the Tea Bazaar to discuss the opportunities and were pleased to find out that Gwendolyn already had a fairly sustainable business and implemented many environmentally friendly practices in the work place. During the initial meeting, we came up with some great ideas from lighting possibilities and ways to solve the ventilation issues, to composting food and switching to low flow toilets.
Better Business Challenge, Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, sustainable business, concierge, energy bill, rebates, low flow toilets, water usage, Ellen Buckley, Gwen Buckley
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Better Business Challenge: Tea Bazaar

TeaBazaar (click PDF)

Fall 2011

Team members: Ellen Buckley, Gwen Buckley

Concierges to Gwendolyn Hall of the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar

This semester, we partnered with the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar in hopes of aiding with the business’s sustainability efforts. Our primary goal in this project is to increase the Tea Bazaar’s awareness of the opportunities and resources offered by the Better Business Challenge. The purpose of the Concierge Program is to take the weight off of the business owner’s shoulders. The concierge is able to devote more time and knowledge to the effort than the business owner. As the concierges, we met with Gwendolyn, the owner of the Tea Bazaar to discuss the opportunities and were pleased to find out that Gwendolyn already had a fairly sustainable business and implemented many environmentally friendly practices in the work place. During the initial meeting, we came up with some great ideas from lighting possibilities and ways to solve the ventilation issues, to composting food and switching to low flow toilets.

After the meeting we did research to follow up on our ideas. We were able to find rebates for the toilets, composting companies and more. We found some ideas to be outside of the budget for Gwendolyn’s sustainability efforts. There we obstacles that we encountered when trying to solve the lighting issues due to the unusually humid environment of the Tea Bazaar; and a follow-up lighting assessment would cost money that Gwendolyn was not willing to spend. However our research did lead us to viable opportunities for the Tea Bazaar to reduce water usage and consequently, reduce water bill expenses.

We presented Gwendolyn with our research conclusions. We requested to obtain her electrical bills so that we could look for patterns in energy usage that could give us more ideas when she could save energy. Unfortunately, this proved to be difficult due to a lack of communication. We hope that she has and will continue to consider our ideas and contact us if she has any problems. Although we ran into some obstacles, the Act Locally project was a great way to introduce sustainability in the businesses in our area.

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