Green products---protect our environment and increase company profits

After I finish my blue ocean simulation, I deeply believe that being a boss is not a easy job. Boss has to consider how to make the strategy? How to cut costs? How to price the products? How to promote products? Every company wants to find white space and catch customers’ eyes and heart. However, not everyone like Steve Jobs can always invent new products and new trend. Moreover, the blue ocean strategy is providing good-quality products and service with low price. How can we achieve The goal? Old products with new functions or design or new knowledge still will create new market. Green products are good example. Green products can protect our environment and decrease the costs of company. We can edit the life cycle of products and analyze it. Let’s take marker pens for example.

Why did we choose markers? From the kindergartens to graduate schools, most of schools in United states use markers and white boards to illustrate lectures. As a result, there are more than 500 million marker pens manufactured in the world. Unfortunately, even though many people already recognized the importance of protecting our environment nowadays, we still don't have any specific institutions to collect our used marker pens and recycle them. Moreover, the companies selling marker pens in united states such as Crayola, Pilot, Sharpie don't have recycled plans and don't care about how their customers deal with the used marker pens. 98 percent of the marker pens will be thrown as a waste and bury into our landfill. However, 45 percent of a marker pens are made of plastic. If companies only care about reducing the costs and utilize undegradable materials to produce marker pens, those marker pens will stay in our land for thousands of years.

Before we analyze the LCA of marker pens ,we have to know how to make a marker and what are the components of marker pens.

Step 1 : First, heating the plastic resin then inject the molten resin into molding machines so marker barrels, caps and end plugs will be formed. Second, print the logo and other markings on the barrels before assembling the marker pens.

Step 2: The Hoppers will hold the empty barrels on the assembly line. One machine will build the whole process of assembling a entire marker.

Step 3: The reservoirs store the ink in the markers.

Step 4: Put the back plug into the barrels then seal with one end of the barrels.

Step 5: Pour Ink into the reservoir and fill it.

Step 6: Plug a nib, or marker tip into the other end of the barrels.

Step 7: The cap can protect the nib and prevent the ink from drying up. Then put different colors marker pens into a carton. Put 12 or 24 cartons into a box then ship them to the retailers by trucks, freighters or cargo aircrafts.

The components of markers includes

1.      Body including barrels, caps and end plugs accounts for 45 percent of a marker pen. The material made of body is plastic resin.

2.      Marker reservoir is made of polyester fiber.

3.      Marker felt tip is a fabric made from wool

4.      Markers require ink, and the pigments and synthetic substances used to make it. Toluol and xylol used to be common synthetics used as solvents in dye.

Increase the life of marker pens

As the ink in the marker pens does not contain toxic substances, we recommend that marker pen manufacturer could produce refillable marker pens and sell ink for refill at the same time. Producing refillable marker pens could reduce the use of plastics, wool where the most global warming potential came from in this LCA.

Recycle the used marker pens

Although all of the companies manufacturing marker pens don't have any plans to recycle the used markers, we still can find some group who care about our environment and they have some recycle plans. For example, Terracycle.com. People can send their reused marker pens to the company and gave 2 cents back. The company will collect all used marker pens, reuse the plastic resin and produce other plastic goods. Another non-profit company such as The Pen Guy also gathers the used marker pens too.