‘Greening up' at work

Lots of us are ‘going green' at home but have we carried this over into our place of work?

This isn't always easy as the premises are often rented so there will be limits on what can be done on a large scale, and if the company is not your own you may feel that it's not your responsibility, or that you are unable to approach your boss with green ideas for whatever reason.

All is not lost, however, as there are things we can do personally to help and I am sure any employer would listen to a reasoned suggestion, especially if it saved the company money! One large company I worked for actually gave rewards (up to £25,000!) for useful ideas. Does yours have a scheme you could utilise to bring about change?

The way to go is to follow the same principles as at home, Reduce - Reuse - Recycle.

Reduce can cover actions as well as cutting back physically on amounts of consumables. How about changing habits as this requires almost no effort? Do you turn the light off when you walk out of a room (including the toilet)? Do you keep doors and windows shut when the air-conditioning is on? Can you turn your computers off? How full is the kettle when you make a brew at tea break? Can you compost organic waste such as your tea bags? Do you need to print off that email? Can you print it on the back of a sheet of paper you have already used? Can you turn the print quality down to use less ink? Do your printer and/or photocopier print on both sides of the paper?

I realise that these all sound very minor: how can that little bit of energy saved actually make a difference? The answer is all to do with economies of scale. If you and all your co-workers make these little efforts, suddenly the savings become quite noticeable.

A nice illustration is found on www.biggreenswitch.co.uk If 20 employees turned off their PC during a lunch hour, your company would save over 3700 watts of electricity in just 60 minutes; that's enough power to keep an energy efficient lightbulb burning for over eight and a half solid days! ... So, if you could cut the 3700 watts mentioned above, your workplace would be saving 37p per day. Although this may not seem like much on first inspection, it actually means that you could save an astonishing £130 per year; all from making one tiny change.

These are all examples of reducing by action and many of them will reduce the amount of consumables you get through in the process. A few thoughtful purchases can also help. An eco-stapler (which doesn't use staples) is a good start.

According to Wasteonline ‘If everyone in UK offices saved just one staple a day, we'd save 72 tonnes of metal a year!'

If you are unsure how to start, there are now companies such as ‘First Impressions Last Longer', who are Europe's first carbon neutral office supplies company, who not only supply the products but have experts who can offer personalised research support that will look at your spend and find ways of reducing your costs - not just your financial costs but your environmental costs too.

With a little more effort other reductions might be identified. Is there a ‘Hippo' in the cistern in the toilet? Are there dripping taps? What setting and timing is the heating on? Are you using energy efficient lighting where practical? How about switching your energy supplier? I'm sure you can think of plenty more.

Reuse overlaps with Reduce, such as printing on the back of a scrap sheet of paper, but can be as simple as keeping and reusing the elastic bands that come on the post each day. Don't forget to reuse the envelopes that the post came in, and could today's letter be tomorrow's scrap piece of paper mentioned earlier? Depending on your industry there are bound to be plenty of resources that can be reused. If you supply goods, can you reuse the packaging that items arrive in? If you are in catering, can your waste oil be reused for bio-diesel (companies are now paying for waste oil in many areas: www.envirogroup.co.uk is an example used by schools in Kent)? When items come to the end of their useful life with you but are still functional, opportunities exist for others to reuse them. There is truth in the old adage ‘One man's trash is another man's treasure,' so check out any companies that might buy up or at least redistribute your item. There is also increasing use by companies of their local freecycle community. You might be amazed at how seemingly useless items can be re-engineered for a variety of other uses.

Recycling is better than landfill, but is not the cure-all that government would have everyone believe, with many processes using lots of energy and still creating waste. It should only be used after all other reuse options have been exhausted. I like to think of recycling items such as printer cartridges technically as reuse as they are not being drastically altered, just refilled. If you cannot benefit from recycling your cartridges you might consider donating them to a charity that can earn a small commission from recycling them.

A fourth R that is worth considering is Replace. The replacement of any item has to be a balance of its features and benefits against budget. All I would ask is that the choice is not driven by initial cost alone, as it has been proven time and again that a quality item backed up by a reputable supplier will be more cost effective in the long run. Check out the green credentials too, as a recent photocopier purchase at a local school brought to light the fact that for all the flannel in its publicity about being ‘environmentally friendly', the manufacturers and their agents do not recycle the cartridges and no facility has been found thus far to help with this.

In this short article I hope I might have ignited a spark of interest and that it might lead to something bigger at your place of work. I realise that I have not touched on vital areas such as commuting and work related travel and I'm sure you can think of others equally valid but these are deserving of articles of their own (editor's note: see next month for an article on green commuting). A quick browse of the internet will bring all sorts of useful resources but here are a few sites I found interesting, informative or both:

www.hmrc.gov.uk/green-transport/travel-plans.htm (HM Revenue and Customs) with details of tax and NI breaks relating to greening up your employee travel arrangements.

www.thegreenworkplace.com This is a very interesting blog from the USA by Leigh Stringer who is an expert in greening up your workplace. There are hundreds of articles/posts which are easily navigated and well worth a look. She also has a book ‘The Green Workplace: Sustainable Strategies that Benefit Employees, the Environment and the Bottom Line'.

www.greenitup.e-frank.com A database of common items and how to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle them.

http://dev.cdh.ucla.edu/odyssey/2008/01/green-computing-and-baby-otters  A fascinating article from the USA that is thought provoking and informative.

www.biggreenswitch.co.uk/workplace a large site with many resources, this links specifically to the workplace section.

Gary Barlow

Photo 'Endless cubicles' (c) a_kartha 2006 - www.everystockphoto.com

Photo 'Don't add to the landfill' (c) D'Arcy Norman 2006 - www.everystockphoto.com

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