A Greener Office?

I work full-time outside the home while Kev stays at home with Solas apart from a few hours at the bead store. It’s a nice partnership for us, and we’re both thankful that Solas isn’t in daycare.

I see a lot of waste in the office. A lot. I’m ashamed to admit that, until recently, I hadn’t given much more than a perfunctory thought to greening up the office. Honestly, I doubt we’ll be doing much more than green-washing. Yet, even a little bit counts, doesn’t it? And from little steps, we can make bigger leaps.

Sure, we reuse paper and recycle it. We recycle cans, glass and #1 and #2 plastics, and printer consumables but that’s about it. We keep an eye on heating and cooling.

One of the biggest areas for improvement is reducing consumption, particularly consumption of paper products. Like many offices, we use far too much paper. Our files are busting through with paper: handouts, copied advertisements, forms, contracts. Slowly, I’m moving us away from excess copies in the physical files to PDFs on the company server. Perhaps, eventually we’ll just have a master harcopy in the physical file and the remaining relevant documents and materials can be stored on the server. I’m alway quick to encourage coworkers to email their clients–which their clients often prefer–over faxing them since this cuts waste on both ends; now I’m considering looking into internal faxing so that if we must waste paper on the receiving in we can at least eliminate it on the origination. I think that reducing consumption will be the biggest step we make to creating a less wasteful workplace.

Beyond this, I think the next step would be to institute a policy of using recycled and “green” goods in place of regular office paper, regular toilet paper, energy-efficient lighting etc.

I’d also like to bring more live plants into the office which will help cut the off-gassing from office equipment.

Can you think of some additional ways I can green up the office?

October 26th, 2006