Reduce Your Office Carbon Footprint

The mark you leave on the environment is now commonly known as your Carbon Footprint. Making minor changes in your everyday office life can make a massive difference to the environment.

Consider this, it only takes a single individual modifying habitual practices, to lessen their Carbon Footprint and bring about a beneficial improvement on the office-environment. Consider therefore, the improvement an entire workplace may create. The activities we perform in our day to day lives have, in effect, a substantial end-result on our own environment.

Regardless of whether we are aware of it or not, day to day, we have been contributing to the issue of climate change - if we dismiss a number of relatively easy guidelines that will help you to reduce your office carbon footprint.

By minimizing the quantity of paper you work with for printing, you're not simply lowering costs, you are also creating a constructive effect for the environment, since the less pieces of paper we go through, the reduced amount of forest necessary to be logged and therefore, extra oxygen made available thanks to those trees still standing.

So, what can we do about saving paper in the office?

For starters, you can re-use a lot of sheets, if they are only printed on one side. Often, that which is actually printed only takes up a small portion of the paper, the remaining blank portion can be re-printed on. And YES, this means "thinking" before you print - how much paper is actually necessary for what you want to print? Can a number of pieces of information be combined on the one sheet?

What happens to all the printed sheets, when the information on them is old news, or no longer relevant? Just thrown in the bin, I suspect, not your problem really, is it?

Well how about this then: most offices no matter how small, have a shredder. Why not take home a garbage bag of the stuff, on a regular basis - and use it as mulch on your garden. You could use it to re-stuff the dog's bed. Works pretty well as kitty litter, too, then into the compost heap.

What happens at the time the printer needs a refill?

What happens to the used ink container? Contemplate this, hundreds of thousands of used print-ink cartridges that have wound up in rubbish sites - it would need a millenia for a single cartridge to commence to decay.

These days, there is no justification for anyone to toss a used ink-container in the rubbish bin. Usually, as soon as you open the container of a new refill, there's a pouch packed ready to enable you to recycle the used cartridge. The only requirement you need to perform, is to place the empty re-fill in the pouch and send it out to be recycled.

Leaving your desktop pc turned on, lights switched on, not closing windows, and leaving office related equipment on standby, unnecessarily wastes power. Computers today, come with an energy saving device as a standard, therefore there is no good reason to have your laptop, or desktop in standby-mode, the moment you finish your working day. By altering your office machines to energy-down designs, you will be creating a considerable reduction to the power already squandered daily.

Also, replace the light globes to energy-efficient globes. Changing over to compact fluorescent lights will significantly diminish the over-all power usage in your workplace, day by day. Also remember, most of the energy use by incandescent light globes, is wasted in heat. So, not only is this an inefficient and expensive way to light your office, it also adds to the overall office temperature.

Having a window remain open overnight, squanders the equivalent energy to power a modest-sized vehicle for more than 30 miles? A window remaining open, both allows the heat out in winter, or lets it back in during summer. Or, visa-versa. There is no need for windows to remain open, nor lights to remain on, in an office environment overnight. So make certain the lights are out, the equipment is shut-down, and no windows remain open, whenever you finish for the day.

These days, there is a broad choice of merchandise that can be purchased, where the majority of it is made from recycled materials, therefore, investing in brand new products is really because you want something shiny, as opposed to necessary. When you are reading the stationary-supply magazine, look out for materials where a majority of it is from recycled products.

Choosing recycled stationary items and equipment in general, is helping to reduce the weight of waste we would need to toss out, therefore a smaller amount of junk adds to the rubbish dumps.

By providing a few plants in your workplace, you're doing your office environment and the people working in it, a big favour. Consider for a moment, every single one of those machines going flat-out, all day, in your workplace; printers, faxes, photocopiers, scanners, computers, etc, each of these contributes to the air being drier than normal.

By including plants in your office environment, you will be upping the humidity to your surroundings. It is a fact that there is an over-abundance of formaldehyde and other toxins floating about in most offices, generated by all the plastics and constantly running machinery. Plants help to filter all these nasties out.

Let us not forget, also, that plants make a difference psychologically, in an office environment. Many experiments have been conducted over the years, that show plants have a calming effect on office-workers, therefore, helping to reduce stress and ultimately illness. This then reduces a lot of wastage, by not being short-handed and having things done in a rush - such as not caring how much paper is used, etc.

It is to be hoped, that these few tips will help you to implement some simple measures, that can help to reduce your office carbon footprint, help your environment and also give you a more environmentally friendly workplace.