SalvaEco

With many of us making changes at home to lead a more environmentally conscious lifestyle, many of us still work in offices that are anything but green. With a little effort and convincing, you can green your office and help the company save money, earning you some brownie points along the way.

Use technology to cut back on paper
Most medium to large companies rely on email for official communication, yet many employees needlessly print out thousands of memos and company newsletters a month. Convince your boss or project manager to commit to email communication for any and all memos — not does this save ink and paper costs, it’s also faster to distribute.
Cut down on your personnel paper use by using your email program’s file folders to save important documents. Use these for your records instead of printing everything. If you regularly backup your email, which your company most likely does automatically every night, there is little risk you will lose those emails.

Recycled paper
Obviously, some documents just have to be printed and photocopied. Talk with your office manager and ask him or her to look into purchasing recycled paper. The best kind is 100 percent recycled with little or no chlorine bleach used. Most recycled paper is less expensive than virgin paper and easy to find. Office Depot, for example, offers a line of recycled paper called Envirocopy — which at 35 percent post consumer recycled content is a good start.

You can also save on paper by encouraging your colleagues to do double-sided printing and photocopying.

Turn off
You can save plenty of electricity by turning off your computer when you leave for lunch, long meetings or for the night. Are you so busy you can’t wait that extra five minutes it takes to boot your machine? Encourage your coworkers to turn off their computers as well. Doing so can save reduce the energy used by computers up to 50 percent.
Let there be light — naturally
Too many offices opt to close their blinds and switch on the unnatural fluorescent lights. There is no reason for this! If you can, roll up those blinds and offer your office as much natural, feel-good light as you can. Natural sunlight has been seen to decrease stress and depression, which translates to happier workers. In areas you can’t use natural sunlight, turn off the lights when no one is in the room or office space. If no one is there, who is using the light? Switch to enviro-friendly light bulbs and encourage your office to recycle their fluorescents.

Greener coffee breaks
Talk to your office manager and stop using non-recyclable Styrofoam coffee cups that pose a threat to the environment as well as animals that often swallow the foam. Save money by getting your company to invest in several dozen coffee mugs (or bring your own). After you’re done with yours, wash them off in the office kitchen and let someone else use it. Imagine the waste you are preventing by simply using these mugs. Invest in some green dish detergent for washing up those mugs.

Not just for home
Arrange for recycle canisters to be placed in the office kitchen, or common area where employees eat lunch and snacks. Many of us like to read newspapers and magazines with our meals and when we’re done we can simply toss them in the recycling containers. When we’re done with the diet Coke or Snapple, we can easily recycle those as well.

No more brown paper bags
Speaking of office lunches, if you bring your own meals, consider using a reusable shopping bag to carry your lunch to the office. ReusableBags and GreenBag.info offer a wide variety of affordable, eco-friendly lunch bags for you to choose and you can usually find a nice variety of bags at natural grocery stores like Wild Oats or Whole Foods.

www.greenlivingonline.com