From a Guest Blogger: Tips for Making your Office more Environmentally Friendly
The office is an environment that uses a lot of energy, and that produces a lot of waste, in the form of things like paper and endless coffee cups after all those long meetings.
Therefore most offices could really benefit from some steps to make it more environmentally friendly to help reduce the company’s carbon footprint without compromising on the productivity levels. If you want your office to be greener, we’ve come up with some tips to help you on your eco friendly mission.
Do as much as you can online
The world we live in is highly reliant on technology and physical letters are becoming a little less common, with things like email taking their place. This is great for the environment, so aim to use less paper/letters where possible. Not only will it help the planet but it will also help your company as emails are free to send!
Upgrade your recycling system
Recycling in your office can feel like another job on top of about a million other things that you all have to do, but if you aim to make it fairly simple for all employees to do so; it won’t be so much of a chore. There’s an article here about improving recycling in an office which you may find useful.
Improve the energy efficiency of your electrical appliances
Standard offices use so much electricity thanks to all employees needing a computer/laptop, and then there are other necessities like printers, photo copiers, fax machines etc, and that’s without even thinking about other aspects of office life such as air conditioning machines and coffee makers. It might be a good time to recycle some of your existing appliances and upgrade them to more energy efficient ones – there’s more info on that from Service Force – or at least look into energy saving options on the devices.
Turn everything off at the end of the day
An easy and obvious way to preserve energy from your electrical devices is to switch them off at the end of the day. This is pretty standard when it comes to things like computers and lights, but don’t forget the other things in the office that usually don’t get turned off at night; such as the printers and copying machines.
Invest in some plants
Plants are a great way to inject some life into an office environment, and they’re actually really useful as well as they are living air filters. There’s a great article here regarding the best plants to choose for the office due to their positive impact on the environment and how to care for them, too.
Encourage car shares
It might be an idea to think about the way in which your employees or colleagues actually get into the office when it comes to helping the planet. Encourage environmentally friendly ways for them to get there, such as by helping them to arrange car shares, researching bus schedules and having somewhere for them to put their bikes if they want to ride in.
