Give your office the green light
Adopting a green lifestyle at home is a good first step towards living a carbon-lighter life, but you can extend your influence even more by being green at work too. Small changes to office behaviour can have a large impact on the company's bottom line as well as the environment. Whether you work from home or in a large corporate tower with thousands of employees, these 10 tips will reduce your business's impact on the environment.
- Start a bring-your-own coffee mug policy and ditch the foam or paper cups, which will reduce waste and save money
- Bring real plants into the office. Fake greenery might be low-maintenance, but the real thing adds beauty and oxygen to your surroundings
- Re-programme the air-conditioner and remember to turn it off when you leave the office. Each degree colder adds to energy consumption and leaving the a/c on overnight unnecessarily consumes a large amount of energy
- Look into "telecommuting" and hold more conference calls. Every commute or face-to-face meeting not taken saves money, time and fossil fuel
- Switch to fair-trade, shade-grown coffee and a reusable coffee filter for the office coffee pot. Reusable filters reduce waste, while shade-grown coffee protects biodiversity in coffee-growing countries
- Use recycled office stationery, including note pads and Post-it Notes
- Bring back the delivery person. Rather than having lots of employees running in and out of the office for various reasons throughout the day, designate one person to handle most or all of the out-of-office tasks in one trip, whether it's picking up lunch, dropping mail at the post office, or making deliveries, etc
- Watch the paper and ink. Avoid printing documents that could just as easily be e-mailed, and print necessary documents on both sides of the paper. It also helps to implement a recycling programme and switch to water-based inks
- Consider replacing ageing desktop computers with laptops instead, which can use up to 70 per cent less electricity and generate less heat waste
- Turn off any equipment that doesn't need to be on when you're not in the office, and – if possible – unplug them too. Every computer left on overnight and every coffee pot left plugged in eats up electricity, costs your company money and wastes natural resources
- Pankaj Sharma is the Marketing Head of 3M Consumer and Office Division
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