Commercial buildings account for a good amount of greenhouse gas emissions from our society. They are generally large users of power, equipment and consumable items. This article will go over some key ideas to help reduce your offices environmental footprint.

Recycle paper

Paper and other recyclable items in offices should be recycled. A common practice in offices is to recycle printer paper. Printing on the other side of wasted or unwanted documents is a good way to reduce paper use. On top of this, paper should be disposed of in proper recycling bins and not in the general use bin that most people seem to have at their desks.

Recycle all cans and bottles

Cans and bottles are also recyclable items that should not be thrown in general waste. Aluminium cans for example are highly viable candidates for recycling, it requires about 5% of the energy to create a new aluminium can from recycled material than it does from virgin material. Bottles are also extremely good to recycle.

Recycle everything

Companies that recycle items for a long time have offered money for recyclable materials. They don’t do this because they are the beneficent Oskar Schindlers of the planet, trying to protect it from unnecessary harm. No, companies do this because it makes money so not only is all recycling good for the planet but it’s good for the economy as well, resulting in a combination of cheaper goods or more profitable companies. All of this is good.

Assess transportation methods

Car use and transport in general has a large environmental impact. Provide shower and bike locker facilities to allow staff to cycle to work if they desire. Encourage communication between staff with respect to car pooling. Don’t provide as much parking space for staff, its wasted land and concrete. It has also been demonstrated that employees who are not given free parking spaces are more likely to seek alternative transport methods.

Try to be paperless

With the improvements of monitors in both size, resolution and comfort to the eye there is no reason to print out documents to ‘read easily’.  Technology exists for e-signing in the present day, so forms that required signatures previously can now be made electronic. Remember that paper is made from trees.

Virtual Servers

In larger offices, server rooms are significant users of power. Typically offices have an IT infrastructure consisting of a separate file server, email server, maintenance server and domain controller. On top of this often business applications such as CRM and ERP are on separate servers. Using software such as VMWare it is possible to split one physical server into multiple virtual ones. This saves power, used by the servers themselves as well as less work from the air conditioning to keep the server room cool.

Conclusion and Final Suggestion

So there are some tips on how to make your office space more eco-friendly. There are many more ideas to make your office greener but they will depend specifically on your workplace. This brings us to our final idea which is to establish a committee for ‘green office improvement’ in your office. Have all employees submit suggestions on how to make the office cleaner and greener. Remember that environmentally friendly ideas are often economically friendly as well, so saving the planet can also help save your company’s bottom line.

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