There’s been a lot of chatter lately about office greening. My company has had a “Green Team” for several years now. Each office (and we have hundreds) has a Green Team volunteer committee, supported by a small overhead budget, which has done such things as:
- purchase plates, mugs, and silverware for office-wide use
- organize and sponsor creek local clean-ups
- institute drop boxes and pickups for e-waste and battery recycling
- send out an office-wide call for the bottle pledge (and raffle off a SIGG for those signing up), etc.
One of the things that has made the non-disposable kitchenware project a success is the commitment by green team members to take ownership of the emptying the dishwasher before meetings (and we have a lot of catered meetings!).
The company has a program this year encouraging each employee to reduce our paper use by at least a ream per person. At each copy machine is a poster showing a forlorn employee sitting atop the 29 reams of paper that each of us used on average. That’s a big stack, a lotta trees, and a lotta carbon. In addition, there are big posters showing examples of sources of carbon in our carbon footprints. “How big is your carbon footprint?”, they ask.
We are fortunate enough to have editors for our big client reports. They guilt trip you big time if you want to go single-sided (and who would do that?). They encourage you to deliver big spreadsheet appendices as electronic files only, rather than creating mega-binders that will never be cracked open.
I, personally, try to print especially large documents that must be printed for my personal reading both double sided and two pages per page; that’s 1/2 as much paper as your standard double-sided print job. Yes, sometimes this makes graphics and such a little hard to read, but in that case I can print the single page regular sized. And of course, I try to print only what I truly need to print (including just printing select pages), and to be really good about filing large printed documents so that I don’t have to reprint them. My e-filing system has evolved over the years to be pretty robust and much more effective than hard-copies, especially since I frequently travel among our many local offices and would have to carry a small Canadian forest with me if I needed access to my hard files.
Paper recycling is a given. Who hasn’t been doing this for, like, the past decade?
Coworkers have little footers on their emails “Think about the environment before you print this email…” No one is shy about being a little righteous in their paper reduction: “no, I don’t need a copy, I’ll just take electronic notes”.
Another thing to do is to just be dedicated to bringing my own water bottle and coffee mug. No brainer, right? It becomes habit pretty quick. At business lunches, rather than picking up a bottle of water from the cater’s offerings, I just bring my stylee little sigg. The cool factor is legit. When I walk a visitor to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, I open the cupboard door to the ceramic mugs before they can reach for paper. (Who wants to drink out of paper anyhow?!) At one of our offices, instead of ordering bottled waters from the caterer, they fill up a big pitcher and provide mugs.
I flip off the lights when I leave the restroom. Usually, by the next time I go back, someone has left them on. But oh well. They were off for awhile.
Some days I telecommute and other days I take BART. BART is awesome: a perfect time to rock out to that Siouxsie and the Banshees song Passenger or goddess Miss Imogen, or take in a book.
All of these things are definitely on the EASY scale of greening up.
More than 20 cities around the world will participate in the climate change awareness event, Earth Hour, March 29th 8-9 PM local time.
