From Guest Blogger Leslie Kramer: Five Ways To Turn Your Office Into A Green Haven To Aid The Environment

Some people are becoming more aware of the effect their lifestyle is having on the environment and they decide to become a little more green at home, but there is still more we can all do. If you run your own business you could easily make your office building environmentally-friendly too, but since it’s a big building you might need a few tips and we’re going to look at some ways you can get started right now.

Start turning off equipment.

If you’re smart you’ll turn off all your equipment at night before everyone goes home because you’ll be able to save a lot of money each month, but there is a way to go even further. Don’t have any equipment switched on during the day if you’re not using it because it can reduce your total energy consumption by around 25 percent. I obviously don’t mean you should shut down your computer when you go to the coffee machine, but switch off the equipment you don’t use regularly if it doesn’t need to be on.

Create toilet dams

Your toilet at home will only be flushed a certain amount of times per day even if you have a large family, but if you have a lot of employees your toilets might be flushing hundreds of times per day. That will waste a huge amount of water because toilets use far too much of it in the first place. You can create your own personal dams by putting bottles filled with stones into the toilet tanks and when your employees flush from now on they won’t waste as much water.

Choose your suppliers carefully

When you buy things from a supplier you don’t just get the products or supplies you ordered. You’re also left with a huge amount of packaging you don’t know what to do with. A good green supplier will be able to take back those packages so they can reuse them at a later date. When you buy things from a certain supplier you’ll know they reuse old packaging, so don’t be frightened when the boxes your supplies come in don’t look brand new.

Keeping the office clean

You might do everything within your power to keep the office as green as possible during the day, but when you go home at night the cleaners might come in and ruin everything by using harmful cleaning products to scrub your office window. If your cleaners are part of your company you can tell them to start using green cleaning products from now on, but if you hire an outside company you’ll have to ask them nicely to change. If they refuse you can always look for a more environmentally-friendly company.

Buy some new plants

Buying new plants for the office won’t just make the place look more green. It will also help to clean the air by pumping out fresh oxygen and they’ll also absorb a lot of the air pollution you don’t actually know is there. You might call this a double bonus because you’ll be cleaning the air inside your office, but there is also less chance of your employees getting sick. You can buy a few small plants or you can buy some extravagant ones, but just make sure you get some because it will be worth it.

Don’t sit around doing nothing

Nothing we’ve talked about today should cause you great difficulty and you might actually save a lot of money in the process, so why don’t you do something now instead of just talking about it? Even if you don’t save the world you’ll feel a lot better knowing you tried your best.

Leslie Kramer, the author of this post, is a freelance blogger, who is currently writing for Australian Solar Block, specializes in supplying and installing quality window tinting. Leslie is an interior designer and uses blogging as platform to share home improvement tips.