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How do you cost-effectively go green and or save energy?
Move to 4-day work weeks.
How do you cost-effectively go green and or save energy?
Allow your employees to work from a home office if viable. While doing that, you get lots of green points in the process. You have the to and from travel that is reduced dramatically. You have all sorts of indirect green outcomes due to this one decision alone.
Next, reduce the amount of office space you require. Lots of paperwork? That would be the first project, reduce the amount of paperwork and the space/cabinets required to store it. Move it to digital libraries on an intranet or secure web based application?
There are many ways that you can contribute to being green. Anything involving the reduction of emissions into the environment is of top priority. Allowing a work at home program starts the ball rolling. :)
Apart from avoiding the commute...
Probably the most advantageous of them all with a trickle down that is far reaching. :)
Is there any real advantage in working from a home office?
I've worked from a home office now since late 1999. In 2005 I made it a 100% deal. There was no need for me to commute based on my career objectives and the environment I've set up for performing my daily routines. I'm in sales, or used to be anyway before making the transition to a career on the Internet. I can fill a variety of in-house positions sitting here in me Nike Dri-Fit. :)
You're still using lots of electricity, maybe even more cause I know working at home I usually have the TV or stereo on in the background.
Ummm, all that changes. You don't have the TV on nor do you have any other distractions that would prevent you from performing. If they are present, you're probably not suited to a 100% work from home environment. Many people are not. It does take a special discipline to be somewhat solitary and focused throughout the day while working from your personal space.
Your impact on the environment working from home is typically a fraction of that if you were to commute to an office. You have to consider the real estate your body occupies throughout the day and the number of resources you are using during those time frames. If you look at it in a micro fashion, the numbers add up fairly quickly. I've been watching too many green shows on The History Channel. :)
There are some pros. There are some cons. How you cope with both of those will determine your success working from home. And, for the employer, the savings in overhead is something to give serious consideration to. Your home employees make a bit more due to their expenses but when you consider your internal employee expenses, there should probably be a large enough spread to convince you to make the change.
The air conditioning is usually a few degrees cooler than if I weren't at home.
You wear casual clothing working from home therefore requiring less cooler temperatures cutting back on your energy usage. Purchasing a home or renting a space where breezes are plentiful would probably be to your advantage if temperatures and a reduction in energy costs are a concern.
Nah, your footprint working from home is a percentile of the traditional corporate employee. I'm in Southern California. I know people who spend 3-5 hours each day traveling to and from work just so they could save on their mortgage payments. Many of those people are prime candidates for a work at home option. Of course this does not apply to hands on labor type positions. Unless of course there is something to be made that can be done from the craftsman's home workshop. ;)
Going green at the office? Just 1 degree up or down on the thermostat makes a huge difference. :)
In fact, it would be best to move everyone to work from home and shrink your office just to a couple of conference rooms where people could come to co-work when they really need to visit the office. Dreams oh dreams
Do you think you could put this in writing to my boss!
We've just decided that we're going to move to a 5 day workweek, down from 6. Does that count :).
But yes, cutting the number of work days would certainly help.
UPDATE: Greenpeace just issued a Recycled Tissue and Toilet Paper Guide, which claims that if each U.S. family bought a roll of recycled toilet paper, just once, the effort could save more than 400,000 trees.
Extreme Green: Reusable Toilet Wipes
[livescience.com...]
^ Please do tell us how things work out. Every little bit helps and we all know how some people can consume toilet paper like there is no tomorrow. :)
Each U.S. resident goes through about 24 rolls a year.
Depends on your diet I guess.
Perhaps I should hand out the toilet paper in the morning, every employee gets 2 meters or so.
I bought 3 kilometers of toilet paper only 6 month ago. All gone. Thats 100m per person and month. If you calculate 22 working days/month, thats more than 4.5 meters a day per person.
OMG! LMAO! And all those other initialisms! I'm pissin' me pants over here. I have never heard anyone refer to toilet paper usage in kilometers, ever.
100m per person? HAHAHA!
4.5 meters a day per person? HAHAHA!
That is way too much TP if you ask me.
Now, is that single ply or double ply? If double, that would mean 9.0 meters per day per person.
OMG! LMAO!
wheel, we're sorry for hijacking you, really. But this was a golden opportunity to go extreme green. There be a lot of color in this post. And, the conserving of toilet paper is a serious topic. :)
this thread should be retitled "going brown: the new paperless office".
I am not sure if my document scanner can handle toilet paper.
Or buy a bucket of green paint and go to town.
Otherwise: USE LESS and DO MORE WITH LESS.
And that's not going to happen.
The offices in Oregon have progressed much quicker than our California offices in the conversion. That is because the person responsible for directing it resides in Oregon so those offices get special treatment. We use job jackets similar to the medical industry. Those jackets take up quite a bit of physical space in their filing systems. I'd guess about 500 s.f. in one office. They are 6 rows high I believe and 4 feet wide sitting side by side. They go from A-Z/0-9.
She has managed to cut their paper document storage to 1/50th of what it was previously by eliminating the filing systems, we don't need them anymore as the system has everything we need. There are just way too many people used to doing it the old way, including the principles of the company.
We use a variety of electronic forms, dynamic PDFs, etc. Almost everything these days is handled via email and corporate intranet. We send out invoicing via email. Anything accounting related is usually handled via email. We will no longer print out statements, invoices, etc. and mail those. What a waste that is!
Many of our electronic forms have security measures in place to prevent them from being saved, printed, copied, etc. Some only allow certain interaction by the recipient at which time they fill in the blanks and send it back via email. It is a neat little system they have going and it has saved them thousands upon thousands of dollars in storage space, filing cabinets, handling, etc.
You know, I never knew that TP was made from virgin pulp. I had no idea that the softness came from the fact that TP is made from trees and not recycled products. Makes me want to go less now. Or at least flip the paper over and use it twice or thrice. :)
Just because you are in an office does not mean you need climate control - humans are very adaptable!
My company try this experiment at least once a week, to begin with it was that the heating wasn't turned on until Monday morning, in a huge open plan office. Away from the doors this was fine, buy my dept sit in front of an external door, which is used every few minutes.
Eventually they got the heating sorted out at the beginning of the week, but now the seem to turn it off Wednesday afternoon, so we all spend Thursday and Friday freezing. Interestingly, none of us have yet adapted, and wrapping up warm is quite difficult in a suit!
Oh and Essex-Boy, wash your mouth out, I am neither a hippy or a communist, but could talk your head off about recycling (in a free market economy, saving money through conserving energy and recycling makes perfect fiscal sense...don't you think)
[edited by: Yoshimi at 11:11 am (utc) on Mar. 5, 2009]
(in a free market economy, saving money through conserving energy and recycling makes perfect fiscal sense...don't you think)
Not to mention the conservation of (finite) resources. Supply and demand... as supply dwindles and demand grows, you get exponential price inflation (hyperinflation), which is bad for free markets. Recycling allows demand to increase without a corresponding depletion of resources.
I'm interested in this for a few reasons, all standard conservative/business reasons:
- save money. It's got to be cost effective and or save money. I won't be putting in solar for example.
- conservation. An overused term perhaps, but the idea that my business consumes stuff permanently, well, I think it's starting to be improper that my business affects anything other than it's locale and then only temporarily. I don't need the effects of what I'm doing to last past my death.
- marketing and promotion. If I can get my energy bills down and reduce useage and waste, that's got to be good for some exposure :).
Many of our older computers that we haven't replaced to save money are actually costing us more in electricity each year than it would cost to replace them.
We are in the midst of a big ebay run cleaning out our older computers and have replaced almost every computer possible with a newer more energy efficient model.
After selling the old used machines, we'll *almost* break even and we'll start saving about $6,000 a year in electricity.
I honestly think its just another way to fine and raise revenue over being green. Cynical maybe.....
what I despise is having to empty my bins into certain containers based on content.
Right in front of the house where I live are containers for bottles. There is a container for green bottles, for brown bottles and for transparent bottles. And all the people obediently sort their bottles into the different containers. And once a week a big truck arrives, lifts the containers - and empties them all into the same trailer.
I once asked the driver why they did that: He told me they have a machine that sorts the colors of the glass automatically now.
Given that our energy costs at the office are mostly just computers and lights, I wonder how close to 0 I can bring our power costs.
