Making Your Office a Greener Place: A Primer
by Bonnie Alter, London 
on 04.11.06
Making your place of work more environmentally-friendly can be a challenge. Here are some small steps that everyone can take, even when faced with a stubborn boss or backwards company policies. Be an eco-worker, as the Times calls it, and offers tips on how employees can begin making offices greener. (note: these are pretty obvious to TreeHugger readers but it doesn't hurt to remind ourselves)
Start by doing simple things such as printing out less of those unnecessary documents from your computer and thus saving paper.
Wear a sweater-and turn the heat down. For every degree in reduced building temperature , cost is reduced and less carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere.
Turning off the computer at night saves energy. Some argue that turning it off and on wears out the components, but many companies buy new technology every few years in any case-before the computers can ever wear out.
Urge your company to buy recycled paper. The typical office worker goes through 10,000 sheets a year-that's an eighth of a tree.
Check and see if your office uses fair trade coffees and teas.
Conference calls save time and fuel and energy, when appropriate.
See if your company has social responsibility as part of its corporate policy and in its annual report. Does it include measurable targets for improving green business practices.
And don't forget the little things: according to Friends of the Earth charity " if we each used one less staple a day, it could save 120 tons of steel a year. The stapleless stapler (previously covered on TreeHugger) from www. naturalcollections.com binds up to 4 sheets of paper. via ::Times Online
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Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Surf Green with Eco-Friendly Surf Gear
- Reduce Your Carbon Footprint by Half in Three Steps
- Zero Waste—The Newest Eco-Fashion Innovation?
- 7 Ways to Create a Bike-Friendly Atmosphere at Work
- Green Your Bikini Waxing Routine with Soy, Pine Sap and Organic Bikini Wax
- 5 Reuses for: Watermelon
One more thing: Find out if any printers in your office support duplexing (printing on both the front and back of the paper). It uses, as you would expect, 50% less paper than printing on one side of the paper.
Use printer-friendly versions of web pages if you must print them out. This way you save paper by not printing out columns and ads, etc.
Unfortunately, another way of saving energy is not to open windows since that screws with the internal temperature controls and wastes the ever-pervasive central air systems in nearly all buildings.
I re-use any one sided print outs by making them into note pads. I just aligator clamp a few hundread pages onto an old note pad backing.
Also, if you do need to print something out that's not all that important, use the Toner saver option. This option uses about 50% of the toner that normal print-outs use.
just to stay with printing.
you can duplex print as it was mentioned below.
and also, under properties in your print window (PC) or layout (mac) you can set that 2 real pages prints on one page. this means that the font will be smaller, but many documents on the web use big font size anyways. it is kind of like shrinking the pages you want to copy to fit a letter size paper on a xerox machine.
Watch design e2 on PBS in June narrated by YES. "Brad Pitt" Go to design-e2.com for a preview.
We save paper by turning them into note cards for messages.
We have started to save all the paper in little buckets in my office and then deposit it in a Paper Retriever across the street. I'm very fortunate because that cuts down costs. When I started this program I looked into Business recycling and all of them have a fee. If you want to recycle but want to conserve funds go to: http://www.paperretriever.com/default.asp?ID=1&c=us
There might be a paper retriever near you. The inconvenience of having to drive to a paper retriever once a week is well worth it [or if your lucky like me you can just walk :) ]
Nicolas J Cuenca
“You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
Mahatma Gahndi