We all leave a carbon footprint of some kind on our little blue and green planet, and while many people do all they can to make their steps a little smaller, there are some things that we have little control over. Part of the problem is that the average person may not even be aware that there is an environmentally problematic issue with something that they do on a fairly regular basis. This is where Sam Komeha, an entrepreneur and inventor comes into the occasion. It is his job to find these issue and come up with ways to solve them. His latest idea is all about auto service tags, and you may be surprised to find just how big an impact those little pieces of paper can make.
Whenever you take your vehicle in to be serviced, you probably notice that there is a slip of paper on your rear view mirror and one attached to your car keys. Those are service tags designed to make you aware of exactly what sort of maintenance was performed on your vehicle. It’s the sort of transparency that we want as a customer, but do we really need to go through that much paper just to let you know that your oil filter was changed? Let’s not forget that besides your two auto service tags, another one still exists at the place where the vehicle was serviced. The one thing that these tags have in common is that they usually end up in the trash.
With his latest innovation, the re-usable service tag, Mr. Komeha is not suggesting that those tags are a bad idea, but rather that there is an eco-friendly alternative that saves time and money whilst also maintaining the transparency that needs to exist between a service station and the customers whose vehicles they maintain.
The Re-usable New Generation Service Tag is the solution to a problem that costs dealerships a small fortune every year. Let’s do the math, shall we. For each customer that gets their vehicle worked on, 3 paper tags are created. As we mentioned earlier, they end up in the trash or under the seat of your vehicle once you take them off your keys and mirror. A dealership with 5 service bays will go through 18,000 of those tags in an average year at a cost of $3,000 to the service department. Multiply that by the number of dealerships and service departments in the country and you get an idea of the waste, both financial and environmental.
The new invention by Mr. Komeha comes with 5 work tabs and a plastic key tag that is also re-usable. The product is known as the Re-usable New Generation Service Tag, and it is believed that dealerships will be able to lower their service tag expenses by as much as 75% per year, which is a significant savings. Perhaps more importantly, though, less paper will be used, with less garbage piling up in our landfills, not to mention the floor of your otherwise pristine vehicle. That is an idea we can all get behind.