IBM's Go Green ad

We’ve all seen the TV campaigns, news stories and general buzz about reducing your carbon footprint at home. Millions of ordinary people are going around fitting energy saving lightbulbs, switching off their TVs properly and recycling their garbage.  That’s all well and good, but carbon emissions from individuals is just a tiny piece of the pie.The truth is that the largest part of the global enviornmental burden comes from businesses and organisations.What this means is that even a small change in a large organisation can have a massive impact.

Yes, I hear you say. Nothing to do with me though. Its down to the management to take care of the company’s environmental policy. Not in the least. If you have a job, you can affect your company’s carbon emissions.  And it can make a much bigger difference than the things you do at home.

Here are some pointers, small and large, on achieving a greener workplace:

1. Recycle office waste. The amount of paper, cans and plastic used at work is many times more than what you throw away at home. Bring in some recycling collection bins, ideally one set on every floor. Speak to your local council about this as there are often free schemes to do this for you.
2. Drive less to work. Get some car sharing going on and the suddenly your CO2 emissions are slashed. Alternatively, how about leaving the car at home and walking or cycling to work.
3. Change to energy saving bulbs. Switching a few bulbs in the house conserves only a small amount of energy. But think of how much more energy is used in lighting up your office and you begin to see how powerful a simple thing like switching to energy saving bulbs could be.
4. Green Computing. No business today is without a large number of computers and IT, and the energy usage of these is massive. You can make a big difference simply by making sure your monitor isn’t left on standby when you finish work. The next step is to get onto the IT department where you work and tell them to review their “green baseline”. Get them to perform some proper asset tracking on all office IT equipment, using professional asset management software, a business can dramatically reduce its carbon footprint and help meet increasingly stringent government environmental requirements.
5. Campaigning. From small acorns mighty oak trees grow. There’s serious power in numbers, and if you can get even a few eco-minded colleagues to campaign together you can achieve real results.By putting pressure on our bosses to take seriously their green duties we little guys can make a real difference. Very often going green also saves a lot of money, as the TV ad above shows.  For example, companies involved in transporting goods and supplies often generate millions of tons of CO2. Pushing them to properly review their transport and logistics management and make the smallest of improvements can save them big money and dramatically reduce their carbon footprint in the process.

This is just my opinion on the matter. My main aim with this article was to get people thinking about how powerful being green at work can be. Feel free to suggest some more ideas!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 1:37 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.