Photograph by Paul Myers

Old license plates gain a new lease on life as photo albums and notebooks at Green Earth Office Supply, where all the merchandise is environmentally friendly.

A new office supply store aims to keep Earth green

By Shari Kaplan

It's hard to imagine someone better suited to her career than Andrea Wilson. She's vegan--won't touch meat, eggs or dairy--she drives an ultra-low-emission hybrid car powered by electricity as well as gasoline; and she either recycles or composts everything she possibly can.

Wilson, who lives just above Los Gatos in Redwood Estates, has taken the slogan "make every day Earth Day" and made it her modus operandi. This December, she took it a step further by opening Green Earth Office Supply at 59 N. Santa Cruz Ave.

The store, which carries hundreds of environmentally friendly supplies and accessories for the classroom and home as well as the office, had its grand opening Dec. 8 and 9. Wilson has been adding new merchandise every week since then, and expects she will be for some time. Much of it is the same merchandise that formerly was only available from her online catalog.

"I have a great interest in educating people. When you get a lot of information on a topic, you can start changing your habits," says Wilson, who is also an active member of several environmental organizations.

Green Earth had its genesis in 1994, when it was just a small catalog of the paper type. Wilson ran the mail-order business from her Redwood Estates home for several years, then moved it online when e-commerce began booming on the Internet.

Based on the warm reception she received online and at her booths at Earth Day festivals and other events, she decided it was time to open a store. She was also able to tap her family's background in the office supply industry and her own business acumen as a certified public accountant.

"It's something I always had in the back of my mind, but a store is a big commitment," says Wilson, who still maintains her "virtual storefront" at www.greenearthofficesupply.com.

"The Internet is kind of impersonal, though. You can't touch or feel the items," she adds.

That's not a problem at Green Earth, where customers can see and handle everything. This includes backpacks, totes and wallets made of hemp fibers; biodegradable trash bags made of a cornstarch-based polymer; plates and cups that look like Styrofoam but are actually a compostable potato starch-limestone blend; pencils made from wood scraps and recycled cardboard; pens made from recycled automobile tires; water-based correction fluid in recyclable bottles; clocks, mousepads and business card holders crafted from old circuit boards; and even bubble wrap made from recycled plastic.

"Part of the problem is that a lot of people don't even know half of this stuff exists," she says of why many "mainstream" stores don't yet carry a large array of this merchandise. Another example she cites is paper products.

Post-consumer recycled paper, with the familiar green-arrow triangle symbol, is just the beginning when it comes to what Wilson stocks for printers, copiers, fax machines and stationery sets.

By hunting around, she's come up with suppliers of much more unusual blends, including part hemp fiber and part cotton rag; part old money and part cotton rag; part post-consumer recycled paper and part banana peel; 100 percent recovered denim; and 100 percent kenaf--a plant in the hibiscus genus that, like hemp, is fibrous, versatile and easy to grow just about anywhere.

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Green Earth Office Supplies is at 59 N. Santa Cruz Ave. For more information, call 408.395.3975 or visit www.greenearthofficesupply.com on the Internet.

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