Kitsap County’s Green Works program recently honored three local firms, Professional Options, Kitsap E-Z Earth and The Enviroprint Shop as Distinguished Businesses in the Green.

Professional Options is a Bremerton company uses strategy development and change management to help clients establish or refine their companies. It uses a full range of technologies to provide outreach to the community and position its clients as environmentally responsible companies.

The company also publishes The Guardian Newsletter, an international environmental publication as well as offering data entry, web hosting and design, marketing and advertising, and a distributor service for books.

In its office practices, Professional Options employs twenty-seven waste prevention strategies, including using rechageable batteries and requesting suppliers to reduce their packaging. The company routinely recycles office paper, newspaper, glass, aluminum, tin, and plastics.

To close the loop, it uses recycled-content copier paper, letterhead, trash bags, and other office supplies. Printing the company’s brochures and business cards on recycled paper is another way it demonstrates its commitment to serve as an example for other businesses to use resource-efficient strategies in their operations.

Owner Dona Keating is best known locally as the driving force behind the Earth Day event Earth Aware 2000 and Kid’s Day America, an environmental event that provided free chiropractic exams for children.

Kitsap E-Z Earth is a new business that is a collaboration between Holly Ridge Center and Peninsula Services to create jobs for people with disabilities while using red worms to make a high-nutrient compost the worm castings.

Cardboard is the only real waste product generated, and it is recycled at the West Sound Skills Center in Bremerton. However, the entire operation is based on recycling. Employees collect approximately 600 pounds of pre-consumer food waste from local grocers each week, as well as manure from local farms and shredded office paper and newspaper. The collections are mixed into an organic compound which is all fed to the worms in a commercial-size worm bin located at the Skills Center. The worm castings form what is called vermicompost, which is then bagged and sold as fertilizer.

The firm uses natural recycled paper for all its business cards and other presentation materials.

The Enviroprint Shop, formerly known as The Print Shop Inc., qualified at the highest possible level. The firm’s new brochure, naturally printed on recycled paper, even gives information on its Green Works membership as well as including tips on recycling and buying recycled materials.

The shop routinely encourages clients to use recycled paper for their printed materials and tells them how to recycle used office paper into note pads. It recycles all its office paper, paper scraps from printing, newsprint, cardboard and aluminum plates from the printing presses.

Any business in Kitsap County is eligible to apply for Green Works membership or receive free technical assistance in implementing waste prevention programs. For more information, call the Green Works Coordinator at (360) 337-4678.