Your Green Review

Global warming; over-consumption; poisoned lakes; smog; endangered species; e-waste.

Green-Overload.

What’s the problem with raising awareness about significant environmental crises?  There is none.  However, it’s easy to become paralyzed by the constant barrage of commercials, articles, tv specials and speeches portending global disaster if we don’t facilitate sweeping global changes immediately.   As Patrick Metzger of The Green Daily puts it,  “I haven’t been inundated with guilt and fear like this since I was at Catholic school.”

Just being alive requires that we consume some natural resources and relocating to the woods to forever live on fruits and twigs isn’t the only way to significantly reduce environmental impacts.  Simple steps are good-now just let everyone else in the office know by posting a few best practices and…voila!  You’ll be saving the world at work in no time (without pulling a muscle).

10 GREEN BEST PRACTICES:

1.) Enable Power Management: Leaving a computer on 24/7 creates enough CO2 to fill a double-decker bus. Enabling Power Management on desktop PCs can save $50 per computer and another $12 to $90 per monitor per year.

2.) Don’t over heat…or over cool: For every degree increase in the cooling months and degree decrease in heating months the average office can save approximately 1% on overall heating/cooling bills.

3.) Water Use: Pollution and overuse threaten the 1% of usable water on the planet’s surface.  If every office cut it’s water consumption by just 10% with water efficient appliances and conservation techniques, we could collectively save over 2 trillion gallons per year.

4.) Ditch the plastic: Every year Americans consume 30 billion single-serving containers of bottled water, 380 billion plastic bags and enough plastic film to shrink wrap Texas. A bottled water ban in the office is a good starting place in the move towards a Green office.

5.) Healthy air, healthy employees: The US EPA has identified indoor air pollution as one of the top five public health threats in America. Reducing the amount of VOC’s from biological/chemical substances and changing air filters regularly may help cut indoor pollution and office sick days by up to 40% .

6.) Lights Out: Lighting an office overnight wastes enough energy to heat water for 1,000 cups of coffee. Lighting an office overnight for one year uses enough energy to heat a home for almost 5 months straight.  A lights out policy saves money and valuable .

7.) Preventing pollution: The average American produces 4.39 lbs of garbage per day, much of which is recyclable, reusable, compostable or even able to be donated to local charities.  Identify waste reduction and revaluation opportunities through a waste audit…and save on waste hauling fees while you’re at it.

8.) Telecommute to save a buck: If employees telecommuted just once per week it would reduce energy and operational costs by approximately 20%, cutting roughly the same amount in Greenhouse Gas emissions.

9.) Cleaning, Naturally: One in three commercial cleaning products contain potentially harmful ingredients leading to increased risk to worker health and environment. Switching to less hazardous commercial cleaners has been found to increase office productivity by 0.5 to 5 percent

10.) Greenscaping for Green businesses: Using native flowers and trees, Integrated Pest Management and smart irrigation techniques can cut total outdoor water consumption by up to 30% and prevent harmful chemicals from contaminating groundwater supplies.

Resources:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/156282/green_tech_saves_money.html

http://www.carbontrust.co.uk/News/presscentre/2008/180308_Employee_research.htm

http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/consumer/your_home/space_heating_cooling/index.cfm/mytopic=12720

http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=business.bus_water

http://yourgreenreview.com/2008/07/the-plastics-wasteland/

http://www.greenyour.com/office/office-space/office-air-quality

http://www.greenyour.com/office/office-operations/janitorial-and-cleaning

http://www.responsiblepurchasing.org/purchasing_guides/cleaners/facts/

http://www.snwa.com/html/land_irrig_smartclocks.html