7 ways to make your office greener

Forget being green at work. Whatever my coworkers and I save on gas will be negated by the Gulfstream jet that the execs fly on. I just worry about getting my paycheck on time. Some scientists will solve the world’s problems. I don’t get paid to think you know!!

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Don’t just be green, be healthy. Bike to work. No showers/lockers? Request some, but in the meantime, do a sponge bath in the handicapped stall/washroom.

tOM

About office greening: I WISH I could do more. The upper eschelons are suprisingly good about it, asking for ideas on reducing energy costs, having recycling bins everywhere, upgrading facilities to greener setups, and so on. The problem lies in convincing my coworkers to follow through! I’m constantly finding recycle bins being used for general trash, and soda cans in the garbage! We gave everyone and their brother coffee mugs when they came to the new building, yet maybe 10% of use actually use them! It’s like they deliberately ignore any pleas to recycle, use fewer disposable coffee cups, turn off their computers when they leave…. And we live in California’s “green buckle”, the SF Bay Area! Aaarrgggh!!

Some useful things for a green office! However, re: computers, you said sleep mode reduced energy by 95%; so it sounds like it would be a small incremental improvement to go from sleep to actually turned off. So I’m comparing that small energy cost vs lost productivity waiting for the system to power up the next day (or the ability to connect into my machine remotely) So I have a compromise – I power off on the weekends and holidays vs nightly.

Would that turning computers off was as simple as this article makes it sound. Computers aren’t left on at night to save energy — they’re left on at night so network administrators have at least some chance of pushing out the incessant updates Microsoft foists on its customers; so that the auditing software a company’s risk managers insist on can run without robbing employees of all their productivity; so that desktop-level backups can be performed; etc. In other words: DO NOT TURN OFF THE MACHINES. Manufacturers and software developers (read: HP, Dell, Intel and Microsoft) need to work harder at building reliable “wake on demand” functionality into each machine that sits on corporate America’s desktops. Then, at least, power can be saved while work is still getting done.

If I could make one change in our office, it would be paper towels. I guess that the average person uses 6 towels to dry their hands int he restroom. 2 will do the job. 4 towels times 100 employees times 4 trips to the restroom is 1600 towels per day wasted in my little office. And then there are those who clean up their breakroom spills using another 6 towels. I’m sure this office wastes 2000 towels every single day, half a million unnecessary towels a year tossed away after barely any use at all.

Between taking all that water and locking it in landfills, and chopping down trees, paper towels are the enemies of green thinking.